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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
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.
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.
The title clearly says "Capitalists WHO fear change", not "Capitalists fear change".
Learn the difference.
Can you imagine where we would be now if companies like the RIAA, AT&T, Time Warner and other big media/telecom firms had fully realized what the Internet would turn out to be like 20 years ago? I shudder to imagine what they would have made it instead of what it is now. I'm so grateful for their lack of imagination.
Not really. The goal of a capitalist is to make money. If you are successful and at the head of your market then fear of change is natural, as change is not likely to benefit you. If on the other hand you are new and not yet established then change is likely to provide opportunites for advancement and is less likely to be feared.
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.
This is a 'lies to children' explanation of capitalism. A more accurate definition is the ownership of capital, especially the means of production, by private interests.
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.
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.
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That's not a coherent explanation, it's a list of things. What did you mean?
That's as coherent as it gets. Capitalism is an economic system wherein private interests own all capital, i.e. means of production. Means of production are things like tools, factories, etc., basically any durable good that is used to manufacture something else for profit. The definition doesn't get much simpler without losing some accuracy, so if you're having a hard time with it you might read a bit of basic economics.
Capitalism is based upon the selfish desire to make money.
Centrally-controlled socialist economies can also be based on the "selfish desire to make money." After all, they use the power of law and their ability to enforce laws with violence to remain the dominant (or only) economic actor. I always think it's funny that people see corporations as big, evil, monolithic robber-barons, but have no problem with an entire government controlling your access to resources with tanks and assault rifles. I mean, do you think your one vote has more impact on your happy smileville socialist government than my spending or not spending money on something has on a company?
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No, actually, it's the "no true scotsman" fallacy:
Assertion: No capitalist would fear change.
Counterexample: But these [examples listed] capitalists fear change.
Rebuttal: those are no true capitalists!
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This is true. Too many people on all sides of the ideological map don't understand there's a gigantic difference between capitalism and corporatism. In one, you actually have free markets, and inefficient businesses actually lose money and go under. But in the corporatist system we have, executives of giant corporations (which rely on limited liability that couldn't even exist in a real free market) cozy up to policy makers for mutual advantage. They're as different from each other as either is from socialism.
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It's not that the "No True Scotsman" fallacy doesn't exist; it does. But sometimes it turns out it really was an Englishman.
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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.
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.
By the same token, there are two types of communism - a pure type where all resources are shared by the people for the good of the people. The other is what we end up with, and is closer to fascism.
The dream market will never exist. It will always degrade into something else.
SteveFoerster opined:
Too many people on all sides of the ideological map don't understand there's a gigantic difference between capitalism and corporatism. In one, you actually have free markets, and inefficient businesses actually lose money and go under. But in the corporatist system we have, executives of giant corporations (which rely on limited liability that couldn't even exist in a real free market) cozy up to policy makers for mutual advantage. They're as different from each other as either is from socialism.
Man, am I sick of this argument.
"I fiercely defend free-market capitalism! But we don't actually HAVE free-market capitalism ... we have corporatism, instead. And, er, Ludwig Von Mises!"
Give to me a break.
We will NEVER have free-market capitalism. It's a mythical state of being, like pure communism. We will always have a tilted playing field, because human beings are not perfectable. People are crooked - or, at least, enough of them are that any economic system that depends on "fair play" to work WON'T.
Full stop.
The libertarian utopia is as much a pipe dream as the communist one, and for the same reason: both depend on humans to act in perfectly logical, reasonable, and predictable ways. They won't. They can't. Humans are irrational, short-sighted, emotional beings, not robots. Just as they're not content with "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need," they're not willing to compete without seeking an edge, literally by hook or by crook. YOU may be willing to compete on a level playing field - but it only takes a few scammers and con artists to upend that field to the point where EVERYONE starts scrambling for an unfair advantage.
That's why regulated markets exist. Because humans lie, steal, and cheat - predictably so. Regulators come into being in an attempt to address those problems. Do the regulators get coopted, or misidentify problems and therefore apply inappropriate strategies to correct them? Oh, hell yes. That's because those regulators are themselves human beings, for which see above.
And around and around and around it goes.
FUCK Ludwig Von Mises. He isn't talking about the real world. The real world is crooked, unfair, and messy - and it's never magically going to change into the ideal, free-market condition about which libertarians, Randroids, and other such shut-ins so endlessly hyperventilate. Pull your collective heads out of your determinedly-individualistic asses, and DEAL WITH IT. There IS no ideal free market economy. There never WILL be an ideal free-market economy. And any philosophy that depends on the existence of an ideal free-market economy is a PIPE DREAM.
Grow the fuck up.
Check out my novel.
Communism works fine. Hutterite colonies all around here operate on communal ownership and have for decades.
What communism does not do is scale up worth a damn. Seemingly, once the population goes past Dunbar's number, it breaks down. A non-homogenous population probably would knock that limit down further.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time