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Silicon Valley Bosses Are Globalists, Not Libertarians (economist.com)
From a report via The Economist: In a recently published survey of 600 entrepreneurs and executives in Silicon Valley, conducted by David Broockman and Neil Malhotra of Stanford University and Gregory Ferenstein, a journalist, three-quarters of respondents said they supported Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential election. But although technology-firm leaders hold views that in general hew much closer to Democratic positions than Republican ones, they are far from reliable partisan ideologues. As you might expect from captains of industry, Silicon Valley executives are much more likely to support free trade and to oppose government regulation of businesses than your average Democrat is. For example, just 30% of tech bosses believe that ride-hailing companies need to be regulated like the taxi industry, compared with 60% of Democrats.
Given their combination of socially liberal attitudes and a preference for free markets, you might call Silicon Valley executives libertarians. However, libertarians generally advocate shrinking the state as a share of the economy, which technology bosses resolutely do not. When asked if they "would like to live in a society where government does nothing except provide national defense and police protection, so that people could be left alone to earn whatever they could," just 24% agreed. In contrast, 68% of Republican donors concurred with that statement. Moreover, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are just as likely to favor redistributive economic policies, such as universal health care and higher taxes on the rich, as an average Democrat is. The outlook of our new robot-building overlords is far more communitarian than, say, the doctrines of Ayn Rand.
Given their combination of socially liberal attitudes and a preference for free markets, you might call Silicon Valley executives libertarians. However, libertarians generally advocate shrinking the state as a share of the economy, which technology bosses resolutely do not. When asked if they "would like to live in a society where government does nothing except provide national defense and police protection, so that people could be left alone to earn whatever they could," just 24% agreed. In contrast, 68% of Republican donors concurred with that statement. Moreover, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are just as likely to favor redistributive economic policies, such as universal health care and higher taxes on the rich, as an average Democrat is. The outlook of our new robot-building overlords is far more communitarian than, say, the doctrines of Ayn Rand.
Yup, globalists. Just as bad as socialists, and worse for the American workforce.
I can't help but think, that anyone who thought they were "libertarians," were the same type to get all their information from one of the main news networks while they cook dinner. You don't have to agree with someone's position to understand it, and most people don't even understand their own sadly.
Isolationism and nationalism simply won't work in the long term. Eventually you end up with a bunch of Kim Jong Uns who will either want to prove their manhood or take your stuff. Nationalism always results in war, people who think of themselves as superior will end up fighting others or factions within themselves. We need to figure out how to get along with everyone. Globalisation will happen, either through genocide or through more peaceful means.
Globalization is a means to lower business operating cost. It's that simple. Libertarianism is about maximizing personal freedom of everyone not just corporations. Do you see most companies doing this? Apple locking people into their platform and not interoperating with other platforms. Comcast locking you into archaic price models because it's what's best for them, not you. The US Chamber of Commerce rubbing elbows with politicians to slant things in their favor at your expense. They do not represent the true views of Libertarians which would be promoting this country to be as free as possible for all citizens. Companies don't want humans to be free. They want them locked in as loyal consumers and to pay the highest prices possible.
We'll make great pets
Most of us give up on Ayn Rand when we get out of puberty and start reading books for adults. Others, however, never develop beyond adolescence and become Fed chairmen or Speakers of the House and base their horrible policies on their childish dogma and set the stage for economic ruin.
"you might call Silicon Valley executives libertarians"
Wait you were serious?
Nationalism is a form of collectivism.
Libertarianism celebrates the individual.
I never got any indication that they were anything other than collectivist, globalists.
If they were libertarians, they would have been trying to break the stranglehold the political left has on California politics.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Given the manor in which the survey was conducted (not described in pdf), the 691 likely did not did not assume that their responses were really anonymous or confidential.
In this political climate, the wrong words or opinions could bring the mob/antifa/media down upon a person.
-anonymous executive
Fake News? Like Republicans are any closer to being Libertarians than Democrats.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
No, it's more things like the propritary 'lightening' connector for only Apple phones, the 'extended' bluetooth protocol on their new earplugs, the closed off app store for iOS.
Kay, now. Come back with your bulleted list of rebuttals.
These things are not mutually exclusive at all. "Left" does not mean you want a communist central leadership. "Right" does not mean you want a fascist central leadership.
-I- want global coorperation for our global problems, and I want as much freedom as possible without destroying the world in exploding anarchy.
Do I need to explain this further? Labels mean nothing, as everyone has a different meaning attached to it.
FTA: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/f...
We gathered a random sample of all individuals listed as founders or CEOs of companies in Crunchbase in 2013, 8,499 individuals in all. We then manually searched for emailaddresses for these individuals. In most cases we were able to gather personal email addresses
Most of them probably said what they thought the researchers wanted to hear.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
the us needs Medicare for all that is the big part about losing jobs in the usa
Rich people wanting government to stay the hell out of their business of using their power to get richer.
That's new... how? That might only change when (not if, more "as soon as") they're the ones owning the politicians to add that aspect to their power base.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Libertarianism does not eschew hierarchy or submission to authority; libertarianism merely requires that such social structures emerge through voluntary interaction between individuals.
Centralization that emerges from voluntary interaction is just a matter of efficiency; should that centralization become corrupted (that is, should it become a tool to impose on individuals against their will), then a libertarian culture is able to fall back on the less efficient, decentralized system of voluntary interaction between each individual (e.g., a free market), and thereby construct new, clean forms of centralization.
A libertarian society interprets imposition as damage and routes around it.
Just look at the Military Industrial Complex that lives and dies at the government teat. $400 hammers and $1200 toilet seats.
To be fair, those are really good hammers and toilet seats, not necessarily in quality but in standardization. The thing about the military is: they hack shit together A LOT. What ends up happening is that hammer might just happen to fit perfectly between some components of an HMMWV to pry them apart while nothing else does, or that toilet seat might fit perfectly to support a satellite dish when the mount for it fails or you might be able to melt it down very quickly or burn it for 3 hours of fire. Well, you can't just use a different hammer or a different toilet seat from the cheapest vendor because the designs might be different and the materials might be different. What if that hammer has to insulate against a certain voltage and be tested to show that it does? (hint: they do)
Mil specs are all about reproducability - and just as critical as all the stuff above is "what if the vendor goes bankrupt or their manufacturing plant gets nuked?" Well it's the most powerful military on Earth, being SOL isn't an option, this means vendors have to hand over their designs, all of them from the conception and R&D of the product up through manufacturing techniques, spec sheets and CAD drawings to the military so that they can give it all to their competitors and ensure they have multiple sources which are all exactly the same. This means a company doing military work very often doesn't own their own stuff, they (except in very rare cases like a complete F-32, all the components of which still fit the above) give up the rights to be the sole beneficiaries of their own R&D work, and that has a massive overhead in itself (not that the standardization and reproducability isn't a royal fucker.)
Sounds more like yet another slashdot poster with a silly agenda to smear libertarianism. I say "silly" because libertarianism is so far removed from mainstream politics that attacking them is like stomping on ants when the elephants are stampeding.
Interestingly, of all the political ideologies, none receives quite as much seething hatred and ruthless attack as libertarianism -- the philosophy of individual freedom and voluntary association. Can that even be put into perspective?
My personal theory is that the people who spend the most time attacking a political ideology that will never come to fruition are the people who are least confident in their own political ideology.
When asked if they "would like to live in a society where government does nothing except provide national defense and police protection, so that people could be left alone to earn whatever they could" Of course they don't. And neither do most people when given historical context and an explanation of exactly what that means. And what it means is a complete private tyranny by the biggest capital players with no regard for labor. We've tried that before in various states and times (including in the U.S.) , and it got so bad for people that they were constantly on the threshold of revolt and business had a real fear of losing all of it. Furthermore, except for a few powerful players, it is bad for most business since a competitive market is a myth that has never and will never exist in a capitalist system.
... People who falsely believe Ayn Rand's Objectivism defines the entire thing, or those who falsely believe conspiracy theorists define them?
Most intelligent people I know who claim to be libertarian are interested in looking at all different philosophies related to a core idea that people have natural rights and freedoms, and these shouldn't be taken away by a central government.
In fact, while the majority of libertarians probably fall into a rough category of being socially liberal but fiscally conservative? It's possible to be a libertarian who believes in liberal fiscal policies. (I was initially at a loss to explain how that could even work, until I asked someone in that camp to explain it to me. Apparently, the gist of it is an idea that you could create a society full of unions, but these unions would completely dictate pay, because you'd have one for each type of job in demand. The idea that the employer would offer a salary would be gone. Rather, they'd decide what labor they needed to have done, and approach the proper unions to obtain the labor required.)
The point is, libertarian politics is (or should be) a very big "tent". There's room for the Randians, along with plenty of others with differing ideas about the details of how some things should work. The core principles remain the same, and they're the ones the "big 2" political parties in America today both choose to largely ignore.
To the US If we hadn't deposed the dictators of Iraq no and Libya (still a right bastard to his people but so are the Saudies and I don't see anyone calling to liberate then). We backed him into a corner. He knows that without nukes he'll eventually get deposed and hung when a US president needs a way to keep him and his party in power.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The reality is that "libertarians" originally, and in the European context, means something like "democratic socialist", or at any rate a left-leaning socialist philosophy. In the U.S. in the 1960's, this meaning was highjacked by thinkers like Milton Friedman who held a religious advocacy of the rights of capital over men. I mean, it takes a giant leap of logic to conclude that capital does NOT seek to do exactly what you say "isn't libertarian". Despite what so-called U.S. "libertarians" think, there is absolutely no a priori reason that capital owners will do what's best in the free and moral interest of men, and likewise there is no reason to think a "free market" involves an invisible referee that ensures fair play -- that's simply religious dogma.
Wasn't this obvious??
It was founded by organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation specifically to propagandize a non-nationalist conception of money and to acclimate "the right" to this concept. The "gold standard" that libertarians champion has only existed as either part of the British Empire or as administered by the United Nations until the Nixon Shock.
Yes, this.
"would like to live in a society where government does nothing except provide national defense and police protection, so that people could be left alone to earn whatever they could,"
As opposed to, "would you like to see less government regulation" or "smaller government"
They're Libertarians and FYI Hillary Clinton is a Republican so stop thinking that makes them aligned with Democratic ideals...
Sadly, so many, including the idiots at the economists, tend to see political POV as right vs left and then shift policies as they see fit.
,such as no pollution being dumped in rivers, or air, is about the same thing.
Worse yet, they think that Republicans want smaller gov and nothing but a strong defense. That is NOT a republican POV. That is a GOP POV that has more in common with NAZIs than with Abe Lincoln and what he wanted.
The Republican party is the one that stood up for BIG GOVERNMENT. They also support gov helping develop businesses. Railroads? Lincoln. Highway system? IKE. Nuke power plants? IKE. Plenty of support for business development by Republicans.
Now, the GOP, that is a different matter. They contstantly shift. Back in 1860, they were the liberals. Now the GOP is a conservative party.
As to Libertarian, well, the party has plenty of shifts, which makes sense. We believe in FREEDOM. Freedom to decide. Freedom to change. etc.
What is interesting is that SV exec actually fit us pretty well. They push freedom. Now, do they support regulations to protect ppl? ABSOLUTELY. Yet, Libertarians are all about freedom to do whatever, until you infringe on others. So, regulations to protect ppl
Regulations that protect businesses is where my party opposes things, and instead, we see the GOP supporting that. For all intents and purposes, Libertarians are OPPOSED to what today's GOP does. Ask a good Libertarian if America should go to war over oil and they will tell you that we need out of ALL WARS. And many of us DO support seeing America switch to EVs and AE. Why? Because it makes us avoid going to war, except internally.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
>All the Trump voters
Recognizing that you're targeting specific people in a specific situation... your arguments are still flawed. Trump's base is reacting in an ignorant way to a real problem. Just because they haven't correctly identified cause and effect doesn't mean they're not legitimately hurting.
>When you admit that you simply aren't as competitive in the free market as you thought you deserved to be
Globalism is ideal in that it shares opportunity around the world. None of us got to choose the circumstances of our birth, and in a perfect world we should all have an equal opportunity at the best life on Earth possible.
Globalism fails in that different societies have different standards that affect what a 'living wage' is. How am I supposed to compete with someone who lives in a country that doesn't bother with pollution regulations, or is OK with the common citizen living in abject poverty or maybe just doesn't worry so much about social safety nets?
The free market - without taxes and tariffs adjusting for those differences - simply means that the quality of life my ancestors made possible in my country will go down the shitter as every possible bit of labour and manufacturing is relocated to the worst places on Earth to exist as an average participant in the local economy.
> that your hatred of immigrants and non-whites is born of insecurity and envy
I don't hate immigrants; my country is full of them. I hate the idea that we should treat nations with lesser environmental, employment, health, and social standards as equals. That helps a few rich people get massively richer while draining wealth from the rest of us. It does also seem to (slowly) increase the average standard of living for those other nations, but I'm fairly confident that's accidental. The drive is more money for the richest of the rich.
Sadly, it's very easy for those of the common people on the losing side of this to just 'blame brown people' - most of us being white, after all. But again, that just means the people doing so have latched onto a false cause, not a false symptom.
When a significant segment of your population is losing hope watching wealth disparity leave them further and further behind and seeing no opportunity to catch up... there's a problem.
You can be a libertarian and a globalist at the same time. In fact the two are compatible. The dangerous philosophies are the authoritarian systems such as nationalism and socialism. They block people from interacting with and trading with each other based on what an authority think is best.
True. Socialism is Communism-lite. The difference is merely in the degree. The (glorious) Collective is more important and trumps the Individual. And, as Karl Marx taught us, Socialism is merely a stepping stone to Communism.
Nope, not the actual Karl Marx' version of it. But, whether the means of production are ostensibly private owned or in outright government possession is of no importance — a distinction without difference — when the government can control any aspect of the production it chooses to. And it can, through that vastly giant loophole of "sensible regulations" you allow it to have.
It works exactly like that. There is not argument for nationalizing public education, that can not also be made — indeed, is already made — for nationalizing public health care, or public housing, or public Internet service provision, public science, music and other arts.
Some countries are further along down this path — to their patently obvious detriment — than others. Like I said, a matter of degree, a quantitative rather than qualitative difference. The greater the share of the GDP, that is spent by the government, the greater the degree of Collectivism in the country...
Who the fook are you to "sensibly regulate", what I am doing in my house or what sort of thing I sell to willing buyers?
Yes, it is awfully scary, that despite being the most murderous school of thought known to humanity, the branches of Collectivism (Fascism, Socialism, Communism) continue to appear attractive to a substantial proportion of population... You'd be appalled to meet an asshole in a KKK-outfit, but a far more dangerous asshole in a Che Guevara T-shirt hardly raises an eyebrow. Indeed, I suspect, I may be conversing with one on Slashdot right now...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Why does apple have a connectors for a descending uterus? Or did you mean lightning?
They are moving to a standard cable with the new devices. Lightning was a horrid connector.
Yes, Apple does have a history of creating their own proprietary cables.
" 'extended' bluetooth protocol on their new earplugs,"
Company invents new protocol. shocking.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
People who think they might get rich through luck have a legitimate fear that the current system would make them poor again. If I'm going to get a one-time windfall and have to make it last, of course I don't want a large portion to go to taxes. If I can do something that adds value continuously so I always have income, then I'm not so concerned.
To generalize, either you believe that all of your success is 100% due to your own brilliance and hard work, with almost none of it due to luck or any help you got from anyone else, in which case you end up on the Libertarian/Republican side of the chart. Or you believe that even though you worked hard you also got a lot of benefits from society and got some lucky breaks along the way ... and feel like you should pay it forward, in which case you end up on the Democratic/Socialist ... side of the spectrum.
Yeah, this is nonsense. You don't have to believe that you are entirely responsible for your own success to be an individualist (Libertarian or Republican). "Paying it forward" just takes a different form: private charity rather than public services. Along the same lines, collectivism does not imply that you are in favor of contributing personally; it's all about getting other people to pay for the programs you think should be available. Sure, you'll (probably) be paying those taxes you lobbied for along with everyone else... but there was nothing stopping you supporting those programs privately, out of your own funds, if that was what you wanted. The only reason to bring in the power of the State is to force others to participate.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
They sure need them, because their Collectivism is killing them and their performance is pathetic. For just one sign, consider the fact, that these countries (with the possible exception of Finland) haven't been bombed/destroyed in the WW2. Which means, their standards of living ought to be, if Socialism really was so grand, well above that of the US. It is not — not even in Norway, for all their vast oil exports propping up the GDP.
And that's despite their spending much less on military — to the point, the otherwise decrepit Russia can overrun them in a matter of weeks.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Because some people like to interfere with other peoples lives. You could put a coal plant ion you back yard and I wouldn't care IF none of the waste ever left your property.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The US needs a new Constitution? Another George Washington as President?
I think you meant corporatocrats - similar words, different ideologies.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
>
Sadly, it's very easy for those of the common people on the losing side of this to just 'blame brown people' - most of us being white, after all.
Equally sad is the easy ability of the globalist getting rich from this situation to misconstrue and even misrepresent the concerns of the common people as being about brown people.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Silicon Valley Bosses Are Capitalists, And Then Whatever...
FTFY.
I think the alt-right cretins on Slashdot predate Breitbart.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Libertarianism is about not allowing the government to restrict your freedom. Companies are free to do what they want. Presumably, the customer can choose a different company if he does not like how he is treated...
Chris Mesterharm
>"When asked if they "would like to live in a society where government does nothing except provide national defense and police protection, so that people could be left alone to earn whatever they could,""
Sorry, that is a loaded question because it is not what mainstream USA Libertarianism is. It seems very popular for many to label Libertarianism that way, however. But it would be like me asking this to determine if they would agree with the Democrat party:
"Would you like to live in a society where everything you do is regulated and controlled by the government, especially at the Federal level, where government redistributes income aggressively, and the Constitution is flexible and interpreted any way the wind blows?"
First, most USA Libertarians will say that the Federal Government should be limited exactly as it says in the Constitution. But there are more things the Fed is supposed to do (per the Constitution) than just provide defense and police. And except for radical Libertarians (extremists, just like you have in all parties), most also support LIMITED government to do things like prevent monopolies, provide for patents, regulate scarce resources (like airwaves/radio frequencies), etc.
It explains their efforts to silence those who dare oppose globalism.
"Forget the engineers." -Carly Fiorina, briber of MIT Technology Review.
Citations?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"Paying it forward" just takes a different form: private charity rather than public services.
History proves private charity doesn't work. Look at France, or Russia, or China, or any other place with a socialist revolution. Private charity has never been illegal anywhere, but people still starved or died of treatable disease. Eventually people will have had enough and put the rich and powerful to the guillotine. If you don't want to end up headless, pay into the social safety net.