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Capitalists Who Fear Change
bill_mcgonigle writes "In his essay 'Capitalists Who Fear Change,' author Jeffrey Tucker takes on 'wimps who don't want to improve.' From DMCA take-downs on 3D printing files to the constant refrain that every new form of music recording will 'kill music,' Mr. Tucker observes, 'Through our long history of improvement, every upgrade and every shift from old to new inspired panic. The biggest panic typically comes from the producers themselves who resent the way the market process destabilizes their business model.' He analyzes how the markets move the march of technology ever forward. He takes on patents, copyrights, tariffs, and protectionism of entrenched interests in general, with guarded optimism: 'The promise of the future is nothing short of spectacular — provided that those who lack the imagination to see the potential here don't get their way.'"
Home farming is killing the hunting and gathering industries.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
fearing change is contrary to the genuine intent of capitalism. So it is in error to say capitalist are fearful of change. But control freaks... that's different.
Luckily for the free market, innovation is what sabotages the Iron Law of Oligarchy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy Or at least it attempts to.
Once the average home can contain everything needed to produce consumer items, there will be no more reason for big business.
Imagine a set of 3d printers, automated chemical labs, vapor-deposited chip fab in your garage. Maybe even a programmable genetic engineering machine and a computer controlled hydroponic garden to produce your food. You'd never go to the store again.
It's generally not the people who create things, make things, or provide useful services who fear change. They can adapt. But if you've spent your life's effort working your way into control of a particular set of cash registers, change is very threatening indeed.
Meh, fallacy of equivocation here.
Call me a Luddite on some occasions.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
The larger the government is, the more is can be used as a cudgel to take down smaller competitors by big business.
Reduce regulation, reduce the power the federal government wields and inherently big business only has the power of whatever intellect they have multiplied by the money they have on hand.
The smaller government is the more small businesses will thrive.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Oh yeah, I can see mega-corporations just lining up for that future... trust me, if it come down to that, somebody will charge you the national debt for your data and your atomic feedstock. Just like they ream you now for oil. In fact the 3D printers will probably have some kind of draconian DRM ensuring you can only buy IP through the manufacturer so they get their slice every time you print. That or we put an end to corporate rule. Of course its a little late in the game for that move, and the corporations have already proven they're not above strangling us if we get nasty.
What a stupid article/essay/book excerpt. When things are going well for people, they don't want things to change. Really? Wow. Color me shocked by such deep insight.
I don't respond to AC's.
What regulations would you reduce? I hear that all the time but little to nothing in specifics except ways that put more power into corporate hands / push costs off on to the citizens of the country.
+1
Most regulations are written by the megacorps to keep-out new upstarts.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
Reducing government regulation only leaves a power vacuum that big players in the private sector (transnational corporations, etc.) would gladly fill. These new overlords would gladly oppress the public if it meant a secured source of profit, and they wouldn't have to worry about the pesky constitutional limitations our government operates under.
Reducing government influence is the same as reducing public influence. I don't want to return to the Gilded Age just for promises of a more efficient capitalism.
If you can build a car with a 3D printer you can also build a gun or a bomb, so they'll be banned.
Yeah, the proles will run all those machines, keep them running too.
Wait a second, aren't these the same people who can't make 'crew chief' at McDonald's? Never mind.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
We could call the second group "Economists".
The incumbents prefer the status quo because that's where they make their money. If you're entrenched then change is bad.
Now apply this premise to fossil fuel companies.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
No, a handful of high level suggestions would be useful. I rarely even get that. Though I am not surprised to get an offhand dismissal from an AC. That said, when people scream about "reducing regulation" it rarely has anything to do with bills that benefit corporations.
And I expect better from /. as well, which is why I'm baffled that the GGP got modded +4 with such an empty post.
There's nothing wrong with Capitalism
There's nothing wrong with free enterprise
Don't try to make me feel guilty
I'm so tired of hearing you cry
There's nothing wrong with making some profit
If you ask me I'll say it's just fine
There's nothing wrong with wanting to live nice
I'm so tired of hearing you whine
About the revolution
Bringin' down the rich
When was the last time you dug a ditch, baby!
If it ain't one thing
Then it's the other
Any cause that crosses your path
Your heart bleeds for anyone's brother
I've got to tell you you're a pain in the ass
You criticize with plenty of vigor
You rationalize everything that you do
With catchy phrases and heavy quotations
And everybody is crazy but you
You're just a middle class, socialist brat
From a suburban family and you never really had to work
And you tell me that we've got to get back
To the struggling masses (whoever they are)
You talk, talk, talk about suffering and pain
Your mouth is bigger than your entire brain
What the hell do you know about suffering and pain . . .
(Repeat first verse)
(Repeat chorus)
There's nothing wrong with Capitalism
There's nothing wrong with Capitalism
There's nothing wrong with Capitalism
There's nothing wrong with Capitalism
(Nothing about fearing change, so if we utilize Danny Elfman as a pundit, we can anticipate that in the future 3d printers will be involved in the production of large corporations, brick by brick and Mr. Tucker will take on the wimps one at a time in a fabricated Rock-em-sock-em-robots ring, printed lifesize with a GNU print file.
I actually agree with the author, but felt that preaching to the choir would make boring conversation)
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
This is a ridiculous assertion. It's like telling a mom and pop retailer, "Good news! You don't have to worry about those pesky regulations any more. Now go and unseat Wal-Mart, who just fired their entire facade of a regulatory compliance department after they bought a small down to dump their e-waste in for massive savings. They may have a monopoly on lots of products, a 230 billion dollar market cap, and more revenue than many small countries, but you've got your wily can-do spirit and $10,000 to spend. Go get 'em, tiger!"
Wal-Mart has literally sued to put a store on top of native burial grounds. They purposefully don't give employees enough hours, even at minimum wage, to earn health care benefits. Instead they train staff to teach them how to use government programs to make ends meet. Wal-Mart, and most large corporations, don't give a damn about people. In the small government paradise of the late 19th Century, big businesses simply had people murdered for interfering with their operations. UCC, now a Dow subsidiary, killed 20,000 people in India and still don't want to pay for the resulting costs to the community. Cigarette manufacturers killed millions of people for decades before they admitted they were selling cancerous poison. And then they tried to start marketing their product to children, and they still do in South America where governments don't have the resources to combat them.
So, I call bullshit on the justice of small government. In most cases we need better government acting in the interests of the majority, not less government letting corporations plunder with impunity.
And since Wal-Mart continues to do what they do, obviously regulations are not hurting them.
Let smaller competitors compete.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Pick any industry, and look up the number of regulations. The sheer number of them keeps some businesses from doing anything because of the cost of keeping track of being compliant.
The number alone, never mind any one regulation in particular, can easily keep smaller players out of the game.
So basically just reduce them by half. Any regulations, it doesn't really matter which ones - because they are mostly selectively enforced anyway whenever someone gets uppity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All that hardware must be fed with something..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Just name one. Name it and target it. You have to start somewhere. Nebulous comments about "shrinking government" without any kind of details is straight from the Fox News daily playbook.
Unsubstantiated vagaries. I wanted one example, can you not even provide that? If you are so concerned, obviously you have specific examples you have selected as evidence for your case.
Such as? Let's go at this another way, name a company that has been shut down or kept out of a market because of regulations?
It does matter. Suggesting that you can just arbitrarily drop half the regulations in existence implies that no one rule has any more value than another, which is totally disingenuous.
inherently big business only has the power of whatever intellect they have multiplied by the money they have on hand.
i.e. still much more than new players. Enough to erect nearly insurmountable barriers to entry, in fact.
The trick is rather to not let big business control the government, but to ensure that it works in the interest of society as a whole. Which is achieved by making it less corrupt and more transparent. Which may require downsizing it in some aspects, but certainly not for the sake of the mythical free market.
This is firmly in the conspiracy theory territory (so go fetch your tinfoil hat), but I do wonder sometimes about how many promising scientists and engineers working in appropriate fields around the world "accidentally" die or have their lives ruined every year to ensure that the Universal Constructor is built later rather than sooner...
"The people he describes are rentseekers, mercantalists, fascists, protectionists, etc. They are not capitalists in any meaningful sense of the term."
No true Scotsman...
"The larger the government is, the more is can be used as a cudgel to take down smaller competitors by big business."
Quite true.
And then, the shorter the government is, the easier is for big business to crush new competitors before they become a real menace.
"Reduce regulation, reduce the power the federal government wields and inherently big business only has the power of whatever intellect they have multiplied by the money they have on hand."
Which is still orders of magnitude bigger than the intellect multiplied by the money of any little business.
Do you want a really short government with minimal regulation? Look at basically any third world country: they perfectly fit the bill. And as an added bonus you will see how good it would end up.
Folks like the RIAA and MPAA are at the top of the heap. The way things were 10 years ago, if you wanted music or movies you would likely obtain it from a RIAA/MPAA-approved source. Yes, there was indie stuff, but "nobody" bought from there. (Where "nobody" = a very tiny segment of the population... small enough to ignore.)
Then change came and threatened to shift the heap. Where would the RIAA/MPAA end up? Perhaps they wouldn't really move and would weather the change just fine. Perhaps they would find that the heap grew and they were even higher up (bigger profits). The more likely scenario, though, would be that they'd no longer be at the top of the heap. This scared them and they went to great lengths to prevent change from coming lest they lose their "King of the Heap" status.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
'remove legislation which serves only to provide an advantage to 'large corporations' and 'rich people,''
Are you kidding?! Those large corporations and rich people are job creators--they're what allow the other 99% to be able to eat and have a place to sleep! We have to protect them because, if we don't, we'll have widespread unemployment! If you don't support these people, you'll be out on the street living in a cardboard box!
Look at China! They don't have these pesky environmental regulations and everybody's doing great over there! If we're going to compete with them, we need to get rid of these namby-pamby-NIMBY environmental regulations protecting the spotted owl and the sea slug!
(In case you're missing it, I'm being facetious)
if you talk up the mythology enough, your mind's eye won't notice how the ideal has never been met by any living person
i'm not talking about your quote specifically. i'm talking about free market fundamentalist fools in general who attribute mythological qualities to capitalism and free markets that have never existed and never will. for example: that they self-regulate. that they are egalitarian. that they are fair. no, no, and no: they need a strong central government, to regulate them and keep them fair and just. otherwise, naturally, the large abuse the weak, and much money is lost in natural inefficiencies and unfairness
reality sucks when compared to myth, doesn't it?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Serious protip: If you are 30 and don't own any means of production yet you are doing it wrong.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I'd start by wrapping up business and closing down Freddy and Fanny. Just to know how deep the shit is. Of course they won't do that. It might allow a open secondary market for home loans to develop. There would be players. Capital is searching for safe harbor. Transition would be a bitch, but delay will only increase the pain.
Less ambitious then closing the fed, besides we don't want to destabilize the dollar. The euro is about to do us a favor. Last currency standing, capital flight etc.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Would be nice. But no. Economist castes a much wider net. See 'labor economists' for a bunch of foaming at the mouth, gibbering Marxists.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Hidden behind the scenes of this discussions is the inherent and unquestioned assumption that capitalism is good.
Note that I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying that there is an entrenched belief here even stronger than religion. The arguments all seem to be "whose definition of capitalism" and "One True Scotsman" type of arguments. But under it all is the (again) unquestioned assumption that capitalism (appropriately defined, of course) is the One True Way of resource management.
Again, in this I'm not questioning capitalism, I'm questioning the degree to which it has become a base assumption.
So here's a bit of a progression...
1 - Democracy and elections are good - not because they generate the best government, but because when properly executed, they peacefully remove and replace the government. Sometimes the replacement is better, sometimes worse, but at the very least, the replacement process is less disruptive and wasteful than a bloody revolution. If democracy were really working well, principally if the electorate chose to educate themselves well, governance would get incrementally better, where "better" is defined by a majority of the people. Things may not be happening that way, currently.
2 - Capitalism is good - not because it does the best job of distributing resources, but because when properly executed, bad players in the system exit and others take their place. If the market were properly transparent, and properly policed, even if only by its participants, the job of distributing resources would get incrementally better. Things may not be happening that way, currently.
There is nothing sacrosanct about the "profit motive". It's a nod to human nature, recognizing that personal gain can be highly motivating. Other than that motivational factor, "profit" is simply inefficiency in moving goods from supplier to consumer. The real idea behind the "free market" is that it harnesses chaos - a sort of natural selection of a wide array of ideas. When incumbants are able to suppress emergents, the free market is failing.
It's amusing/astonishing/sad that people rail at the thought of economic central planning by a government, yet accept economic central planning by entrenched market incumbants. It's not the government that's the enemy, it's the central planning, by whatever party. Some amount of chaos must exist, some continual level of instability, or the system isn't really working.
Food for thought...
In a world with nuclear bombs, genetically engineered virii, and other results of high technology becoming widely available, "human nature" is no longer good enough. If we don't start doing better than "human nature", we'll probably stop doing. Thinking about it a little, we're more likely to crash our society, crash our population, lose our technology, and be lucky to work our way back to a feudal steam age. (The easy energy is gone. The easy resources are gone, perhaps accessible in landfills, perhaps locked up in alloys that need high energy and high-tech to get out.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The problem I have with people that just say we have to cut regulations is they don't fully explain the alternative. This is how I see it. Regulation is prior restraint. Take illegal drugs for instance. The argument you always hear from the drug warriors is that drugs are bad because people could do bad things on drugs. You don't want your bus driver on drugs do you? To me drugs can be legal and yet you can still sue a bus driver or company that causes an accident because the driver was high.
It's the same with all regulations. The EPA doesn't protect the environment, it protects the companies from lawsuits. The EPA sets rules for how much companies are allowed to pollute legally. What a company opens near my home and starts polluting within the EPA regulations but it causes damage to me or my family? Too bad for me I can't sue. And when a company does pollute too much they pay a fine to the government not to those they harmed. The EPA exists to help companies avoid the expense of lawsuits if they follow those rules even if it injures people.
What I would like to see is the government make it easier and cheaper to bring lawsuits forward. This would require a drastic reduction in the executive branch but an increase in the judicial branch. More courts and more judges. This way when damages are alleged to occur people can have their day in court and juries can decide damages not politicians.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
"provided that those who lack the imagination to see the potential here don't get their way."
yea thats sort of the fucking problem now, douches patenting the color black and the idea of a icon, invent and be destroyed
People in general fear change. Once they reach 25 or 30, they want things to keep on being like "the good old days". But that's not how the world has ever worked, and it won't start now.
Not everybody starts fearing change once they mature, but most of us stop thinking that change for its own sake is a good thing. I know that I wouldn't want to go back to the way computers worked when I was young. I have absolutely no desire whatsover to go back to punched cards and a specialized typewriter on the console!
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Book by Dr Raghuram Rajan, Boothe School of Economcs, University of Chicago: http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Capitalism-Capitalists-Unleashing-Opportunity/dp/0609610708 Basically the winners of the moment will do everything in their power to maintain their edge, and unless we as a Democracy fight them and make the playing field level, we will end up in a medieval feudal system.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Is there any possible way that we could stop confusing capitalists with fascists? Capitalists don't hide behind government force to do business. The US switched away from capitalism in 1913 when it established a central bank, and has at best been a mixed market since. With government intervention in the markets at an all time high, what we have now is the opposite of capitalism, which is a terrifying blend of socialism and fascism--the type that presages the fall of a once-great power.
So you are saying it is better for governments to privatize gains and make losses public, as they do now, and have done since the inception of the central bank? You do realize that the central bank artificially sets interest rates, and thereby can force spending to happen, and thus cause capital destruction at will, right? You do realize that the central bank is 100% privately owned, and is not regulated or overseen by anyone other than bought and paid for congressmen, right?
Simple, eliminate the central bank, and thus allow the market to set interest rates, and determine who fails and who wins according to their own merits.
The only reason that banks are able to steal from people and wreak havoc on the economy is because of regulations regarding setting of interest rates. That has been the problem since day one. It caused frequent, shallow, recoverable recessions to become infrequent, devastating, potentially collapse-inducing depressions. They caused the Great Depression after they caused the roaring twenties, they caused the Stagflation of the 1970's after the guns and butter of the 60's, and they caused this Greater Depression after the roaring 90's. It is madness, and anyone with a lick of common sense and the inclination to examine the evidence can see it.
Wal Mart wrote the regulations. Or did you forget that corporate lobbyists write all of our laws?
If the government recognizes the free market, then they don't have any rent to seek. That is why Standard Oil reduced the price of Kerosene by 90% from the time they started to the time they were broken up, well after they had reduced their competition to shambles.
The only bad anti-competitive behavior is behavior that includes arbitrary force. Doing things like lowering prices to squeeze your competition only drives those who are too inefficient to compete out of the market place, making room for those who ARE. This is why even with his 90+% monopoly on oil, Rockefeller never raised the price of his product substantially. If he had, other companies would have sprung up to take his market share.
ITT people who have no idea why third world countries are poor.
Such as? Let's go at this another way, name a company that has been shut down or kept out of a market because of regulations?
Look up the taxi cartels in any major city for a great example that's easy to understand. If you want to get more specific, look at Nashville TN and the recently passed law setting rate limits on sedan and limo services. Not only are they blocking entry to the market, they're actively trying to destroy a particular business that I have used in the past.
I can come up with other examples in other industries if you'd like, but I'm guessing that you'll attempt to move the goalposts and claim you still got a touchdown....
Do you have ESP?
Lessig gives some examples on this talk: http://blip.tv/lessig/republic-lost-my-favorite-version-5697728 I'm not sure they represent regulation that can be reduced, but they DO illustrate how corporate money influence the agenda. Just my 2 cents
They are not capitalists in any meaningful sense of the term.
Do your arms ever get tired moving that goalpost so much?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
When confronted with this fact they either ignore it, minimize its threat, offer up irrelevant counter arguments or offer up solutions that make no sense whatsoever, such as eliminating government altogether.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
John Stossel is a libertarian twat. And not only is he a libertarian twat but you haven't even read his book yet, which shows that you're a twat. Stossel's schtick is to take some stupid regulation or a regulation that was enforced by someone who is stupid, make a big deal about it and then say "See! All government regulations are stupid. Big corporations should be allowed to do whatever they want!" Not only are we supposed to ignore the fact that his conclusion doesn't follow from the evidence he presents but we're also supposed to ignore the fact that John Stossel is anything but a disinterested party and is actually a corporate ass-whore who gets his paycheck by being willing to go A2M, any time, any place, on whatever corporation is willing to cut him a check.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I'm an agorist, so I advocate eliminating all statism.
Neither do you you lying fuck. I work in a small business and have been a contractor and I call bullshit on your "you need permits to poop". Speaking of poop have you ever noticed how much libertarian shit is spouted by people posting anonymously. What, are you guys ashamed of your ideas?
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Yeah, Somalia's a real paradise too. I'm sure that they're going to have the largest GDP in the world in no time thanks to their lack of a pesky and interfering central government.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
Well if you weren't an ignorant piece of shit, and a fucking worthless coward posting anonymously you might realize that our current system of health insurance is a relic of the socialistic policies enacted by the Roosevelt administration during the Second World War. See during World War II wages and prices were strictly controlled, so in order to compete for workers businesses had to offer other forms of compensation. One that they could offer, and that they were given a tax write-off for, was employer provided health insurance. Now, if we had a true free market then there wouldn't be any reason to have preferential tax treatment for employer provided health insurance over any other employer provided benefit. Every once in a while someone suggests that we get rid of this particular tax break, and when they do they end up getting their balls ripped off by everyone including the insurance companies who absolutely love the fact that their product has been given an unfair competitive advantage by decades of government regulation. I wouldn't expect you to know this though. You sound like a Libertarian, and Libertarians are nothing more than a bunch of retards, dildos and losers who talk shit about how great their ideas are and how both parties are really the same but despite that end up voting Republican every single election.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
they wouldn't have to worry about the pesky constitutional limitations our government operates under.
What a coincidence; our government doesn't worry about those limitations, either!
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
No she didn't. Rand was a total whore for ultra-restrictive IP regulations.
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
I'm pretty sure the meager savings the average adult owns count as owning the means of production. At least not when compared to those at the top.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
"ITT people who have no idea why third world countries are poor."
Because in an unregulated world the big fish crushes the little one?
Just because you're a capitalist doesn't mean you're intolerant of new business models. To the contrary, the people actually building new industries based on these business models are capitalists.
What is the alternative here? Socialist 3d printers and socialist music? So the idea is that the government taxes people to subsidize these projects? Or are we simply suggesting that copyrights be abolished? Because if you do that what will become of all the authors? Why write a book if the instant it's published anyone can copy it and you don't get a dime?
I'm not saying the publishing industries aren't full of tired fossils intolerant to change. They are obviously are... but is that capitalism or is that just old people being old people. Look at Castro... he's currently resisting capitalism being introduced in his country even though it would bring a big boost to the economy. But he won't do it. He's too old and too stubborn. So everyone is waiting for him to die and shortly after he dies the reforms will come.
That's just how this works.
It's not about capitalism... it's about the old generation needing to die off for something new to come. It's a tale that goes back to the days following the great animals herds and stories over camp fires. Be patient.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Ok, so you might have found an example of a good regulation to cut. Of course, you're going to have to fight against the corporations who want the regulations to begin with, so good luck with that. Making government smaller probably wouldn't help, since the cartel would probably just use other means to enforce its power.
Of course, I never actually moved the goalposts. I simply pointed out that SuperKendall was reiterating his empty bullshit a second time and wanted him to cough up something to back up his statements. He never did and I suspect he can't.
"Do you believe that governments in third-world countries place few barriers on those starting businesses or engaging in business?"
But of course yes. No nasty papers nor regulations: all is needed is an AK-47 and the will to use it.
As I point out occasionally, 3D printing isn't all that great. TechShop has both a little MakerBot and a commercial stereolithography machine. I've never seen anything come out of the MakerBot but simple decorative plastic objects, and mostly it sits idle. The commercial machine makes good quality objects, but the process is so slow that the expense is high.
There's this mindset that additive machining is some magic process comparable to a SF matter duplicator. It's not. It's far slower and much more expensive than mass production. Too many people today have never been on a factory floor. If you want to see something that looks like matter duplication, check out a high speed injection molding line or a small parts stamping plant.
Reduce regulation, reduce the power the federal government wields and inherently big business only has the power of whatever intellect they have multiplied by the money they have on hand.
The smaller government is the more small businesses will thrive.
But you get non-linear effects with larger organizations, as people build off each others' work (or conspire to cause chaos; non-linear is complicated). In particular, it's been measured that larger organizations tend to be more productive overall because of this non-linearity; cities benefit from the same sort of thing as well, provided they can pull in sufficient resources to maintain themselves at all. Given that, removing regulation will still leave big business in place, and will indeed give it more ability to act in their own narrow interest rather than that of everyone else. While you might be right that we wouldn't have got to this point without some government regulations making it easy for corporations to grow large, any real change must start from where we're at and not from a hypothetical ideal.
Crudely put, you've got to have some laws and regulations, things like prohibitions against slavery, murder, arson and careless poisoning. Those are very great constraints on business! (After all, it would be very much more profitable if business was allowed to boost baby milk with cheap toxic additives like melamine. Or if a big corporation and their hired pinkertons could roll into town and burn out anyone who tried to disagree with their takeover.)
Oh, so you want to keep some regulations? Well that's a much more reasonable position. Which exact ones did you want to be rid of or to modify (and if so, in what way)?
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Ok, so you might have found an example of a good regulation to cut. Of course, you're going to have to fight against the corporations who want the regulations to begin with, so good luck with that. Making government smaller probably wouldn't help, since the cartel would probably just use other means to enforce its power.
That last statement was where you tried to move the goalposts. FYI.
Do you have ESP?
I'm fully in favor of paying artists (and programmers) for their work, unless they choose to give it away for free. But I'm struck by the similarity between MPAA/RIAA, which represent established stick in the mud power and seeks to terrorize the common man, and Mubarak, who is the same but used more violent methods. If the MPAA/RIAA could mow people down in the street legally, would they not do it?
that was beautiful
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
LvM and other free market advocates depend upon human beings behaving like human beings have never behaved, in any time or culture before. and people never will behave in the way LvM and free market advocates requiring them to behave in order for their sophomoric fantasies to exist
ergo, the grandfather post to this hits the nail dead on the head: we need a strong central government and strongly regulated markets in order for them to be truly free. free as in fair and just, as in the big guys and the little guys acting with equal potential, as in the big guys not colluding and taking advantage of the little guys, which is what would actually transpire, and has always transpired, in truly "free", as in natural and unregulated, markets
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Right, because Mugabe was a big business owner, not dictator for life.
Capitalism = Promoting race to the top
Socialism = Preventing race to the bottom
Casteism
Yup, just like home printers (dot matrix, inkjet) put book and magazine publishers out of business.
Instead of a ban on softdrinks, enforce a regulation requiring publishing of the amount of sugar in a drink. I loved eating out in Washington, DC, and yes the nutrition information in the menu did have an impact on what I ordered. But, do you see the difference? Instead of making decisions for me, the government enforces regulations that allow me to make informed decisions.
Instead of the FDA regulating what drugs can be sold or who can claim to be a doctor, enforce a system of credentials. Like a business won't buy a microwave that doesn't have an UL stamp, most people won't give money to shills.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Do you mean a central government like Syria, Libya and Egypt have/had?
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
No more shit than you're spouting.
I tried to hire someone for the software company I started. The tax paperwork was enough to bulldoze anyone who was already busy trying to actually make something that someone wanted to buy. The EOE regulations were a nightmare. And this was just for a part-time guy to do testing from his own home. I ended up paying a contracting company to pay him for me. I knew someone that cut me a deal, so that I was only paying a 15% premium.
A friend ran a small printing shop out of their family home. Business was pretty good and they wanted to hire on a part-time person. The regulators came in and would have them install a second bathroom, handicap ramps, and a host of other useless additions to their house. They chose to scale back their business.
Try to open an airport sometime, you worthless barnacle. The government will bury you in paperwork. The owner of the airpark where I'm renting an hangar won't allow training operations, because of what all the regulations will cost him. No one is ashamed of anything. You're just asking us how do we know that blood is red, or what do we know about recent history. The scope of the question is so hard, it is hard to see a single tree for the forest. Try doing something useful someday, and you'll understand.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
A big difference between China and Somalia is that China's government is extremely powerful and centralized and they interfere all the time -- specifically, interfere to favor business growth, whether it's to manipulate the entire country's currency to ensure products can be sold abroad for cheap to drive out foreign competition, or perform industrial sabotage or spying of other countries' companies.
There are a few things I would trim out and shed few tears about:
1) A trimming of defense. Since so much of the economy is tied to this by now, it'd have to be trimmed slowly, progressively. A weaning will cause less fallout than slashing.
2) The Department of Education. There's one thing that this department does that I'd like seen preserved in some way: low-cost student loans and grants. I can't think of a single thing the department does otherwise that should be spared. The states handle all the school and staff and curriculum, the DoEd is just a thick layer of bureaucracy on top.
3) Farm subsidies. Should there be some subsidies? Maybe. But right now the system is used to dole out rewards to political supporters, artificially increase/decrease prices on crops like corn, and prop up certain crops (corn again) at the expense of others. It leads directly to the disproportionate amount of influence that those subsidy states wield, from favorable legislation to their early primary status, etc.
4) Medicare. I'll admit I don't really know what the solution here is, but the amount we spend on health care is wildly out of control. This is one of those areas though that you CANNOT cut because seniors vote more than anyone else. Political suicide.
That's a decent start, anyway.
The EPA doesn't protect the environment, it protects the companies from lawsuits.
Where were the lawsuits against Monsanto back in the '60s, when the air around one of the foul things burned your lungs as you drove past? Where were the lawsuits when rivers caught fire? That was what it was like before the EPA.
What a company opens near my home and starts polluting within the EPA regulations but it causes damage to me or my family?
The regs are strict enough that that the factory CAN'T cause damage to your family, and none of the regulations say that they are undemnified from lawsuits from injured parties. If you cause an auto accident that injures me, you're going to get sued, and lose, even if you followed all the laws.
What I would like to see is the government make it easier and cheaper to bring lawsuits forward.
Holy shit, how old are you, kid? Did your mother drink when she was pregnant with you?
Free Martian Whores!
Look up the taxi cartels in any major city for a great example that's easy to understand.
He asked for examples of FEDERAL regulations. Would reducing emmissions controls enable smaller players to enter some fields of endeavors? Yes, but I was alive before those regs were enacted, and it was a damned filthy mess. Before drug regulation you had snake-oil salesmen selling poison as medicine. Before environmental regulations, rivers caught fire and the air around a monsanto plant burned your lungs.
You kids should read a little history, because you're advocating repeating the same mistakes made in the past.
Free Martian Whores!
- Eliminate all patents and copyrights.
Too bad! I rather liked high-quality movies made by professionals.
- Remove all drug licensing. Legalize everything. Caveat emptor.
I also liked being able to shop through the pharmacy without having to worry if this medicine would kill me. Caveat emptor means: lots of people will die. Same goes for meat inspectors, etc.
- Eliminate the limited liability of and fictional entity of the corporation. Those who engage in harmful actions to others must be held accountable. (Think how fast the faulty products would be recalled if the engineers/designers/project managers/etc. were held legally responsible for their decisions.)
Yeah and no one will be an engineer in our country. Who would want to put themselves in such legal liability? The only engineering work that would be done in the US would be work that has to be physically done here -- buildings, bridges, etc. Even then they would be enormously expensive. Everything else would flee the country.
I just want to see a 3d printer that it entirely made out of 3d printed parts and has the ability to assemble these parts and has the ability to move and find other 3d printers to melt down and make more in its own image. Then Id like to see a set of instructions that change over time making some useless, defective and sometimes random improvements over the original. That is all I want.
you're wrong and you're way too white and comfortable to understand why.
I may need to reuse this phrase.
I think you are on to something with all of these. For medicare, I don't think the problem is how much we spend but how much healthcare costs. Healthcare prices are actually set by a group of doctors called the Relative Value Update Committee (RVUC) that meets every 4 months. The meetings are in total secret and if you do get an invite to attend then you have to sign legal paperwork swearing you won't leak what you saw and heard. Here is one scam they run: the balloons used to do a sinus procedure cost $2600 each so the RVUC valued the cost of the materials for the procedure at NUMBER_OF_SINUES*2600 when only one balloon is typically used for all of the sinuses in a procedure. This is how these values get set and there appears to be ZERO oversight.
"Since you are too fucking stupid to know common objective rules, I'll explain three."
Do you want a more "common objective rules" with regards of what a capitalist is than Adam Smith himself?
Rentseekers and mercantilists are capitalists by the very damn definition: they procure there welfare by taking advantage of their capital instead of their labour. Ignoring that simple truth is as stupid as it can take, Mr Anonymous Coward.
Since you were preemtively ignoring that simple truth, you were failing on the "no true Scotsman" falacy, again, by its very definition.
"Right, because Mugabe was a big business owner, not dictator for life."
But *of course* that Mugabe was a big business owner, so big he owned a whole country.
That he played by rules you (and I) don't aprove doesn't make his rules any less effective towards his economic interests. Mugabe was not only a dictator: he was a *rich* dictator.
Are you kidding?! Those large corporations and rich people are job creators--they're what allow the other 99% to be able to eat and have a place to sleep!
I'm getting tired of that bullshit argument! Large corporations and rich people are not job creators! The job creators are the people who have enough money to spend that creates demand for products! Without demand why would corporations or rich people make the investments that require workers to fulfill that demand? You could be the richest person in the world but you're not going to create jobs unless you have enough people with enough disposable income to spend to make your investment profitable. How many jobs are created by entrepreneurs who go out on a limb and start their companies with money borrowed from their relatives or on a credit card? Calling large corporations and rich people "job creators" is just bullshit!
Idealistically I agree with you but if we'd let all of those banks go bankrupt in 2008 we'd be in a full fledged worldwide depression now that might rival the 1930's and take more than a decade to recover from.
The EPA has saved this country far more money than it has cost it.
You are making my point. I am critical of those wanting to roll back regulations to the good ole days. But like you wrote in the good ole days people were not able to bring lawsuits forward and the government made it easy for large corporations to pollute with no consequences.
I think a better system would be to allow better access to courts where actual damages would have to be proven and a jury would decide.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I think you are on to something with all of these. For medicare, I don't think the problem is how much we spend but how much healthcare costs
I think it's both, really. We are living longer and longer, but the 'healthy' area of life is not the part of life being extended. Instead, it's the older "body breaking down, need constant support" phase of life (the one I personally don't find worth living) that is getting longer.
It's extremely expensive to be old and/or sickly. This is the part of medicine that no one wants to talk about because it leads to uncomfortable situations like "should or should we not give grandma everything it takes to get her to live a few years longer?"