The battle between the modern 'Left' and 'Right' is pure theater. It’s a false choice designed to keep us arguing over who holds the leash while we remain wage slaves. It would be interesting if some of those individuals could have been more convincing 150 years ago
Not true, the battle between wealthy and poor is the propaganda. In reality where revolution did occur, poor were used to battle the rich, so the communist party could enrich it self. By destroying the rich, they also destroyed the economy and made poor even poorer.
maybe i'm doing a No True Scotsman, but i can't see where the Left has ever been against the poors. I thought the the origin of the terms Left and Right was For Democracy (the poors have a voice), and For the King (the wealthies) from the French Revolution. How is 'wealthies vs poors' different from left vs right'?
I appreciate the acknowledgement ofthe 'No True Scotsman' trap. It is easy to define a side by its ideals (e.g., 'The Left is for the poor'), but the reality is that both sides muck it up the moment they take control.
Neither side actually supports the poor because both are funded by and literally are the wealthy masters. The evidence is in the trends/facts that for almost 50 years the wealth gap has only widened, regardless of who is in charge. At some point, we have to accept that the 'which side is right' argument is false.
Neither of the two major parties in US politics supports the poor.
Elsewhere there are broader choices in national politics.
eg: the current Prime Minister of Australia grew up with a single mother on a disability pension in council housing. His actions and politics are at least informed by real life experience as one of "the poor".
Depends how you define it and wether you’re defining it as intentionally en masse or as a byproduct of pure self interest regardless of anything else.
There’s plenty of examples, the most famous one in my opinion is that the popularity of legislation is irrelevant for passage, support by wealthy is. Similarly how the vast majority of people obtain political office is by and large courting the influence of wealthy donors (source - the amount of money being spent in politics and particularly dark money). Also how “lobbying” works even in the Supreme Court and pay to play by definition is politically battling the poor.
Obamacare is of no use at all for the wealthy. So why do those in power support it?
Everybody says that money buys elections. But consider that Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 and lost, Harris outspent Trump 3:1 and still lost. Bloomberg poured money into his presidential bid, and he didn't garner enough votes to be a blip on the radar.
Campaign money does buy you a stage, but it doesn't buy the votes.
> Obamacare is of no use at all for the wealthy. So why do those in power support it?
They... Didn't? It's been defanged and reduced to the aberration it is right now, instead of being single payer, universal healthcare.
> Everybody says that money buys elections. But consider that Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 and lost, Harris outspent Trump 3:1 and still lost. Bloomberg poured money into his presidential bid, and he didn't garner enough votes to be a blip on the radar.
> Campaign money does buy you a stage, but it doesn't buy the votes.
Without campaign money you have no chance at all, could you run a successful presidential campaign on 1/10th or 1/100th of the budget given you had a hypothetical bright candidate, someone that could objectively be a much better president than any of the moneyed ones? No, hence campaign money does buy votes, it just doesn't buy them completely but without campaign money you have absolutely no chance.
Sooo...Harris' failure to win proves that money doesn't win elections...you do realize that her opponent also had to spend dozens of millions to even be able to compete, right?
Really hard to imagine how you aren't being willfully ignorant on this. Money doesn't win elections. It just puts you in the only possible position where one can win. Those are your own words, yet you somehow conclude that money doesn't win elections? Money literally decides what choice WE HAVE in an election. You cannot vote for someone who doesn't have the extreme wealth required to compete. & someone who isn't competing, isn't a choice given to voters.
Electricity doesn't make computers run, pushing the on button does!
Sure, money buys a stage, and an outsized stage for a worse idea is still persuading many more voters than a smaller stage with a better idea. If one campaign saturates communication it drowns others, this is what money buys on political campaigns (especially in the US).
Where I vote money doesn't play much of a part in elections so no chance for my vote to be bought; in the USA, a society much less politically active and educated, money goes a much longer way to persuade, convince, deceive, and outright lie to voters. Hence so many Trump voters coming out of the woodwork to say "I didn't vote for this".
Both sides say that voters who didn't vote for their favorite candidate because they are uneducated fools and deplorable.
> If one campaign saturates communication it drowns others, this is what money buys on political campaigns (especially in the US).
Carly Fiona is another example of a big spender that got trounced in the polls.
BTW, no matter how much campaign money is spent by socialist candidates, I will never vote for them. If all the candidates on the ballot are socialists, I will turn in my ballot with no vote on it. My vote is not for sale.
You know about statistics and how population-wise aggregate data can be skewed given you know which levers to press and where, I don't know why you play dumb about money in politics being a massive influence. Nowhere is said "money buys YOUR vote", money does influence votes, it does influence people who are less educated (or less politically engaged) who watches ad after ad pushing the precise button they need to be pushed to tilt scales.
I don't care about your view on socialist candidates, it doesn't pertain to this discussion whatsoever. People would vote for a socialist candidate who said the right stuff to them, that's just how the statistics work.
> Obamacare is of no use at all for the wealthy. So why do those in power support it?
Health insurance companies love it.
> Campaign money does buy you a stage, but it doesn't buy the votes.
You literally just talked about how the people everyone got to select from are those that could raise billions for a campaign. Hell the current president is a billionaire - literally the wealthy - and staffed important posts by other wealthy people. Congress is stacked by wealthy people, in no small part because the salary for congress is not commensurate with the responsibility it has.
Also, your numbers seem off for the Harris v Trump campaign (not what I’m seeing looking online) but it doesn’t matter (I highlight where you may have made the error below).
> Nobody has ever bought my vote. How about you?
No one serious about this issue suggests that they hand out money for votes. Well Elon actually did engage in that in this prior election cycle in swing states so there is that undermining your rhetorical comment.
But it’s also the height of naïveté to either not believe advertising/marketing (aka propaganda) works (you know, the trillion billion dollar companies of Google and Facebook) or to believe that politics is somehow immune from its effects as well (which requires ignoring how political movements work or what we learned about propaganda and its efficacy in WWII). And all of that takes big $. Of the 1.2B Kamala raised, 40% was small dollar donations. Of the 400M Trump raised, only 133M was small dollar donations (28.8%). Note: if this is where you’re getting the 3:1 number you’re not reading the data correctly - democrats spent ~1.9B total vs Republicans 1.6B and Trump directly spent >900M (presumably carrying over the donations from the previous campaign? Not sure).
And again - I’ll refer you to the research showing the general popularity of a proposal is irrelevant to it getting passed. How popular it is among wealthy does have that effect. And it again, you seem to struggle when I say this and try to point out some particular piece of legislation - it’s percentages. It doesn’t matter if it’s not an absolute. You don’t need to win every battle to win the war.
Anyway, Walter you’re a smart guy. I expect more from you than rudely dismissive comments that insinuate committing a crime is the only way money and wealth can influence and “buy” politics (and ignoring that Republicans did attempt to do so this past cycle)
Oh and I suggest you look at how advertising works. It’s classic 0 sum game. If you and I spend 0 on advertising, the outcome is the same as if we both spent $100 on advertising (assuming equivalent efficiency of conversion). However if you spend $100 and I spend 0 you capture the market. If you outspend 2:1 you’ll get 2/3 of the market (roughly). Obviously efficiency of the spend is also important, but it’s literally a 0 sum information war between competitors. If you didn’t think it mattered, you’d have to explain why companies spend hundreds of millions on advertising - that would be money more efficiently invested somewhere else.
Is there any case where this is remotely even true?! The way advertising budget is spent always has an enormous impact on the outcome.
One competitor spends in print, another on TV. One competitor targets young professionals, another families with kids. One competitor goes to best and most famous agency but buys the cheapest package and fights any decision, another gets a genius kid at the beginning of his career to create a most brilliant TikTok ad. Etc...
For the purposes of a simplified discussion it’s true enough. It’s also true enough in the commercial context for the biggest players. For example, Coke and Pepsi spend similar amounts of advertising and the market share isn’t really changing. But that’s also because the products are very mature and in repeated games the players are likely to reach a stale mate (and the talent pool for the advertising teams is largely the same).
Political contexts are obviously different because it’s constantly one off contests and the teams behind it constantly change. So yes, obviously efficacy of advertising matters. But I don’t see how my simplification meaningfully changes the point that money significantly impacts voting at scale in our society. This wasn’t the gotcha I think you thought it was.
Advertising is necessary to sell a product. Campaign money is necessary to buy you a stage. But if you don't like the product, you aren't going to buy it.
> Congress is stacked by wealthy people, in no small part because the salary for congress is not commensurate with the responsibility it has.
LOL, it seems they get wealthy after they get elected to Congress. (I wonder how that happens!)
> rudely dismissive comments that insinuate committing a crime is the only way money and wealth can influence
I don't know where you got that from.
I don't recall ever voting for someone because they spent more money on their campaign.
If elections are being bought, it's not by the campaign money, it's by the taxpayer money. I.e. the "chicken in every pot" promise to give people free stuff.
> I’ll refer you to the research showing the general popularity of a proposal is irrelevant to it getting passed.
I don't doubt that, but we're talking about an election, not passing legislation. The only election poll that matters is the final vote (note that a lot of people do not bother to vote).
You have such an exceedingly narrow definition of what it means when people say that money buys elections that I’m realizing it’s pointless to try to have a conversation.
> LOL, it seems they get wealthy after they get elected to Congress. (I wonder how that happens!)
Some yes. Insider trading is a problem. But I think you’d be surprised how many people who are already rich then enter politics. They may grow their wealth even more after but they start of supremely wealthy to begin with, not least of which because that also implies a network of rich people who will help you.
> If elections are being bought, it's not by the campaign money, it's by the taxpayer money. I.e. the "chicken in every pot" promise to give people free stuff.
So money selecting which candidates you can vote on isn’t money buying elections, but policy arguments over how to spend the public purse is buying the public? That’s like having the position that a toddler has a choice when you ask them would they like broccoli or celery - you’ve predefined their choices for them and given them the illusion of choice.
> I don't know where you got that from.
“No one bought my vote, how about you” is dismissive and rude, not least of which because I’m sure you know buying votes is a crime. It’s not the effective rhetorical device you think it is. It’s also horribly undermined precisely because politics has gotten so messed up Republicans are bold enough to literally trying this strategy now.
> I don't doubt that, but we're talking about an election, not passing legislation
Actually, no. This conversation started with your bold claim: “Can you show us how the wealthy are battling the poor?”. You’re now trying to shift the goal posts claiming it’s only about elections.
> You have such an exceedingly narrow definition of what it means when people say that money buys elections that I’m realizing it’s pointless to try to have a conversation.
The definition of "buy" according to google: "obtain in exchange for payment." I accept the standard definition of words, not made up definitions. It's not possible to have a debate when words are redefined.
> “No one bought my vote, how about you” is dismissive and rude, not least of which because I’m sure you know buying votes is a crime.
Do you know of anyone who was paid for their vote? or anyone who was offered payment for their vote?
He’s had to repeatedly tweak the wording of the payment to stay away from a textbook definition of vote buying, but it’s certainly violating the spirit of the law.
> The definition of "buy" according to google: "obtain in exchange for payment." I accept the standard definition of words, not made up definitions. It's not possible to have a debate when words are redefined.
Only if you treat the English language as something that you can understand the meaning by combining the meaning of individual words and that words only ever have one possible meaning. For example, if I say “you’re a horse’s ass” am I claiming that you are literally the rear end of a horse? Or am I claiming that you’re a donkey owned by a horse? Or am I using a euphemism to describe obnoxious behavior?
But anyway. This is getting way off the mark. You’ve hyper focused on one thing (election outcomes) ignoring the larger point about whether there is a class war going on (raising Obamacare which was a compromise from Medicare for all and has been repeatedly gutted but also ignoring the defunding of SNAP and various other programs this year that are disproportionately hitting the poor while wealthy are getting a huge tax break on inheritance taxes due to Trump’s bill this year - how again are the wealthy not getting what they want at the expense of everyone else?)
I've posted numerous examples of politicians attempting to "buy" an election and then losing the election. The reason an election cannot be bought in the US is because we have a secret ballot (besides being illegal). There's no way to verify who Bob actually voted for.
> wealthy are getting a huge tax break on inheritance taxes
The inheritance tax rate remains the same. The gift tax exemption was raised from 11 million to 15 million. This is going to affect the upper middle class, but not so much on the wealthy.
Medicare has hardly been gutted. It needs to be cut more, as it is still on track to sink the budget.
You could do some basic research on this topic, it's been exhaustively covered over the past few centuries, but I'll drop you three starting points.
Pushing the tax burden for upkeeping society off people who own more shit than any of us ever will onto people who have to work for a living.
Legal protection and structural advantages for landlord interests over tenant interests.
Legal protection and structural advantages for employer interests over employee interests vis a vis wage theft, worker safety, worker injuries, etc.
There are many others, but even a brief summary of injustice in any one of these topics is big enough for ~a few hundred books, and alas, the margins of this website are too small to contain them.
> Legal protection and structural advantages for landlord interests over tenant interests.
Rent control is not in the landlord's business. In Seattle, the other legislation against landlords is pushing them out of business.
> Pushing the tax burden for upkeeping society off people who own more shit than any of us ever will onto people who have to work for a living.
1% pay 40% of the federal income tax.
Google [percent of federal government spending spent on wealth redistribution] says: "A significant portion of U.S. federal spending, around 60-70%, goes to social insurance and safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Income Security, which function as wealth redistribution by supporting retirees, the needy, and vulnerable populations, though the exact "wealth redistribution" percentage varies by definition but centers on these large mandatory spending categories. In FY 2024, Social Security and Medicare alone were 36% of the budget, with Income Security adding another ~9-10%."
> Legal protection and structural advantages for employer interests over employee interests vis a vis wage theft, worker safety, worker injuries, etc.
The legal advantage again is for the employee. For example, wage theft is illegal and is aggressively prosecuted.
> Rent control is not in the landlord's business... Seattle... Landlords going out of business...
And you immediately demonstrate why having a conversation with you on this subject is pointless.
There's a million different dimensions in which the problem that I've pointed at manifests. But what you do is you cherry-pick one particular dimension of it in one particular municipality in one particular time period[1], claim that that dimension is (allegedly) biased in the other direction, and thus you reach the universal conclusion that clearly landlords are the real victims[2], and you can just sweep the entire issue off the table.
I don't have enough words to describe how incurious and chock-full-of-fallacies this kind of thinking is.
You already know everything that you feel you need to, and there's nothing more that needs to be said. It's like you have found the number 2, and conclude that therefore, most numbers are even primes.
---
[1] Actually, you don't do even that. You just vaguely wave your hands in its direction.
[2] Kind of weird that the market values their real estate to be worth twice what it was a decade ago if they are getting such a raw deal. I'm sure PE is snapping up rental properties because they are money-losing investments, too. After all, serious people who have done the math and are putting billions of dollars into this (and are reaping profits on their investments hand-over-fist) must all be too stupid to understand just how awful renting out property is.
> And you immediately demonstrate why having a conversation with you on this subject is pointless.
That's because my positions are correct.
BTW, rent control in 9 states is statewide, and is commonplace in cities.
Google [does seattle provide free lawyers for tenants?] for more examples.
For more,
In California, over 35 cities and counties have implemented long-term rent control ordinances for residential rental housing. In addition, since Jan. 1, 2020, the California Tenant Protection Act has extended rent caps and eviction restrictions to many properties not governed by local ordinances.
Google also reports:
Tens of thousands of NYC rent-stabilized apartments are vacant, with estimates varying from around 26,000 to over 60,000, often described as "warehoused," because strict rent caps (especially after 2019 laws) make costly renovations financially unviable for landlords, leading to units sitting empty rather than being rented or sold. While some vacancies are for legitimate repairs, many are held off-market as owners await the ability to renovate and raise rents, contributing to the city's housing shortage, say housing advocates and reports.
And yet, investors and landlords are scooping up every rental property they can, and are as a class, making mountains of money in those states.
It's wild that as a whole they are so advantaged that they are still net-in the green when they let properties sit empty and unused.
It's just as wild that you continue digging deeper. Reality in the big picture isn't compatible with your 'correct' viewpoint, so you keep drilling down to microdetails.
No profits == no business. Profits in very competitive markets might be low, but you still need them to survive.
Walmart is under 6% of profit, but due to the enormous revenue it is still a lot.
That’s not the question, it’s where do profits come from in the economic equation? What part of the value chain is adding but not subtracting its full cut?
As Hayek proved the information in free markets is encoded by prices, so the value is up to the consenting parties. There is no "good" or "bad" or "improper" profit. If there is competition and willing parties that's where the profit will be. It will go down to something more or less sustainable for the market participants that are willing to work for that profit.
Sure, there may be a price a customer is willing to pay, but how does the business owner make a profit? Aren't there other people being paid too? If they are paid less, doesn't that sound more like a negotiating position than mere "information" signals?
Free market countries are more abundant than non-free market ones because the system is brutally efficient. If you can't sell something for a profit, you might be forced to sell it for a loss and eat the difference. This is the way the system regulates itself.
The business owners invest their resources and own the risk. Employees sell their work hours by a fixed price and this is calculated in the total cost for the business to sell. The price their work is bought by is also regulated by free market and is an input to the total price. They aren't forced to be paid less than the going market rate (may be short term until contract expires) so the prices and unforced cooperation based on price it shte "magic" that makes USA to have 100s of types of biscuits and Cuba to have empty stores.
Having needs is not the same as slavery. Wage slavery is described as such because of the power imbalance between employer and worker, who has limited agency to find another employer, with whom he would also have a relationship with a power imbalance.
A wealthy man who receives a check for dividends and interest most months is not subject to such power imbalances. Wealth makes him free.
It's not an argument that socialism would enable people to just live off a public dividend, so to speak. Somebody has to work, and workplaces require discipline. Rather it's an argument for better labor safety controls, and a personal appeal to people to save as much money as they can.
I've been an employer. I didn't have any power over my employees. If there was anything they didn't like, they simply stopped coming to work. How was I supposed to make them show up?
One embezzled a large amount of money and spent it on drugs. What was I supposed to do about that? He was broke, he couldn't pay the money back. All I could do was tell him to not come back.
I've also been employed at minimum wage jobs, and salaried jobs. I never felt the employer had power over me. At my salaried jobs, my coworkers complained about all the power the company had over them. The company had no power over me, so I would ask them what the power was. After some long conversations, the problem was the coworkers spent every dime of their income. So not having a paycheck for a week was a catastrophe. The company, however, was unaware of these issues.
I recommend saving up to 6 months of living expenses, and then the employer will have no leverage over you.
A lot of people forget that going hungry is the default state of not doing a thing. The super rich and socially progressive societies redistribute the taxes they levy on the productive people to help the people who can not (elderly, ill) or won't (lazy bastards) work.
It might be a better deal for the society as a whole, to offset the cirme that would ensue if there isn't any social net.
A lion in the plains of Africa is not entitled to a dinner, the farmer in not entitled to a crop yield. It is super rare that people can't do anything to better themselves and get more for their own skills or execution. Any buisness owner will gladly share a percentage of profit you generate for them if you can show them you're indeed generating such profit.
If you're in DPRK or Cuba then you'd need to check your free-market priviledge of having a market for your skills.
It's not the social safety, but the bad enforcement of the law. When bad acts are not punished, this is the problem that occurs.
Some social systems like in Israel if you're ablebodied you are given a public service job, like cleaning the park and etc... so you aren't entitled to a check for doing nothing.
South Africa hasn't any meaningful social net and the wealthy people live in special "high security" enclaves with additional guards and fenced perimeters. If you have a lot of hungry people on the street they will be forced to survive somehow and you'd get more crime.
This is part of the false dichotomy you are not understanding. It's not actually a valid choice if there are no options. And that is what this is actually about, understanding how we have no good options, and what to do about it. I recommend start digging in and we all question or own understanding and acceptance of the system. Is it actually working with even a simple majority in the best position we can be?
Currently employing 130 wage slaves and unduly profiting from their margins, and not satisfied with the overall system at all.
Asking this question leads me to suspect you have no true curiosity or willingness to learn a new perspective as it's literally a Google away. And then you will reply in another direction that justifies your narrow world view that is of course justified 100% by your experience. This is not effective discourse and I see you doing it all over.
It’s a well-documented economic concept. You can find plenty on it if you're actually curious about the perspective. And understanding it thoroughly is a strong prerequisite to seriously engaging with other people with intent to learn. It's work you need do yourself.
It's 30F outside right now, and I can live a lot longer without food than without shelter.
You are just playing at word games. The system is trapping the have-nots into unpleasant, lifelong conditions, and that's what "wage slave" means. As you know.
What he's missing is that scaling started working around 1900, when railroads started consolidating. Railroads were the first businesses that had overwhelming economies of scale. No small co-op could possibly compete. Over the next century, more obstacles to scaling were overcome. Container shipping, freeways, cheap communications, mass market products and advertising, and computers removed the obstacles to scaling businesses up to planetary size.
Why it's the Uneeda biscuit made the trouble, Uneeda
Uneeda, put the crackers in a package, in a
package, the Uneeda buscuit in an airtight
sanitary package, made the cracker barrel
obsolete, obsolete Obsolete! Obsolete!
Cracker barrel went out the window with the mail
pouch, cut plug, chawin by the stove. Changed the
approach of a traveling salesman, made it pretty hard.
Gone, gone
Gone with the hogshead, cask, and demijohn,
Gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan
Gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce. - The Music Man
I'm so glad that you mentioned railroads because there is a great book, Railroads and Regulation by Gabriel Kolko about the capitalist anti-competiton regulation of the railroad industry that caused their concentration. If you wanna read about it, an essay about it is called "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism" inside of Markets Not Capitalism (freely available online). I'll summarize what it says tho:
Every time big railroad magnates tried to form a cartel to fix prices, a smaller competitor would lower rates and steal all the customers; freight rates went wayy down in this time period. The big railroad owners (like JP Morgan's clients) lobbied for the ICC not to regulate them, but to regulate their competitors. They wanted the government to make price-cutting illegal (calling it rebates or discrimination).
Regarding sanitary packages, the essay _also addresses this_: the big Chicago meatpackers supported regulations because the compliance costs were so high they drove small local butchers and slaughterhouses out of business. The "sanitary" laws were a weapon to kill local competition, not a way to keep food safe
I would argue that consolidation happened because rail is a capital-intensive natural monopoly. It's easy to dominate a region just by buying up lines.
Smaller lines couldn't steal customers from big players because no other lines were physically able to offer the same service. Trucking is another story. There, the highways are natural monopolies, and trucks are an over-the-top service.
Before even railroads, the original manufactory boom that is commonly associated with the industrial revolution is the exact kind of case the other poster is alluding to when thinking of large economies of scale. I think Kolko is great to demonstrate that economies of scale aren't infinite, and in the absense of government intervention, market forces actively conspire to ensure firms shrink to their optimal size. But that also proves the flip side: firms will grow to their optimal size too. There is no economic reason to be suspicious of large firm sizes, and the political reasons inevitably hinge on some sort of mistaken assumption of the economics of the matter; anti-trust regulations advocacy is a perfect example of this.
Kolko talks about that in the context of scaling social/charitable solutions.[1]
There's a cite to Marshall, who talks about it in an industrial context.[2] But Marshall wrote in the days before computers and the Internet. There was a time when big companies had enormous clerical plants and corporate headquarters operations. Some paperwork and management operations scale O(N log N) or even O(N^2). At some point, corporate overhead became too large.
But we got past that. Walmart, Amazon, Samsung, McDonalds, Starbucks, Foxconn, and BYD all have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of employees, but don't seem to be hitting scaling limits. There may be an optimal size limit, but it's above planetary scale now.
Computers have made this possible.
This leads to monopoly or oligopoly being reached before any natural limit to growth appears.
I am not convinced it is above planetary scale, nor that these are monopolies. For one thing, all the companies you named have competitors, and no company has a distribution center or restaurant in the arctic. There are plenty of other more populated areas that those companies do not serve. Administrative work still requires overhead, and the internet does not remove that burden, otherwise companies wouldn't be scrambling to invest in AI which they expect to reduce this overhead. AI wont entirely remove the administrative overhead either; there are hard economic limits to the efficiency of a bureaucracy.
But more to the point, consider what you're saying. Is the world, viz-a-viz these companies/services that you refer to, worse off than before the internet? Obviously not. In fact, it is substantially better, because higher economies of scale mean mass production for mass consumption. There would be no way you and I could converse this way on our phones without the hyper extensive scaling of production caused by capitalism. This calls into question the concern over scaling. Large scaling and less firms is preferable when they perform a social function.
If co-ops were replaced by big business, this is something everyone should be grateful for. To go back to the industrial revolution example, there were a form of early mutualist co-op that dominated the non-farm market in the pre-capitalist era: the guilds. And the guilds had a stranglehold on handicrafts, apprenticeships, and all manner of specialized production. In order to increase guild profits, the guilds, through their noble patrons, regulated and limited production of all kinds, who was allowed to sell their craft, and all while being worker-owned. And yet these guilds were the true monopoly: they used legal privileges granted through lobbying to the kings to limit production and raise prices. Their products were exclusively for the wealthy and privileged. On the other hand, it was the capitalists that found a loophole in this system that condemned people to poverty and starvation: the mass production with unskilled labor by manufactories. And, through the manufactory system, they smashed the guilds, producing tons of goods for the everyday man, contributing greatly to the prosperity over and above the medieval system that we see today.
Oops I forgot to respond to the other things you mentioned. That list of removed obstacles is technically correct, but it misses that those things were mostly subsidized
1. Regarding transportation, the interstate highway system and the containerization infrastructure (ports, dredging, naval security) were massive state subsidies to long-distance distribution. If Walmart had to pay the full property tax and maintenance cost of every mile of road their trucks used, their economies of scale would evaporate instantly. The state artificially lowered the cost of long distance shipping below the cost of local production. That isn't efficiency, but the taxpayer subsidizing the inefficiency of moving a toothbrush 3,000 miles. (Carson called these "diseconomies of scale")
2. The Uneeda Biscuit era of mass production created a crisis in that high fixed costs meant factories had to run 24/7 to be profitable, they couldn't wait for orders but had to force product onto the market. This required the state to intervene again via imperialism and arguably the creation of a consumer culture to absorb the surplus in the form of advertising and other means.
3. Computers are the most ironic part; Computers and CNC tools actually destroyed the rationale for the large factory, made it possible for a garage shop to produce with the same precision as a General Motors plant ("Homebrew Industrial Revolution" book by Kevin Carson again which in my mind is not one of his most defensible but it's still interesting).
I would argue that IP was the main reason that small shops didn't take over. As physical capital costs dropped, the state ramped up IP laws (patents/copyrights) to protect corporate hierarchies from the decentralization computers should have caused. I think that Big Tech isn't Big because of hardware efficiency but because of the state-enforced monopoly on information
> If Walmart had to pay the full property tax and maintenance cost of every mile of road their trucks used
There's everyone else who uses the road, too.
Lots of railroads were built with private money for various purposes.
These days, even the government doesn't seem capable of building railroads. There's Caltrain, and in Seattle it's taking decades to build a few miles of light rail, at a cost that exceeds the GDP of Norway. Well, maybe not quite that much (!) but it sure seems like it.
Walmart uses it a lot more than I do.
Civeng principles show that road damage rises to the fourth power of axle weight, a fully loaded tractor-trailer does roughly 10k times structural damage of a passenger car but they definitely don't pay that amount.
And yeah the government is consistently incompetent. But there's no incentive for them to be competent in the first place. Either a mostly exempt-from-competiton company does it badly or a fully exempt-from-competition state does it badly in our system.
I know about the fatigue damage problem, and have advocated that higher taxes should be put on the trucks.
Anyhow, the most efficient travel for freight is by rail. But due to all the mismanagement by the government, it remains cheaper to ship by truck. You cannot really blame capitalism for that.
Railroads are a natural monopoly, as are highways, power lines, last-mile internet, etc. Once you have a railway in place, it is rarely profitable to have a single competitor, let alone the three or four you would need for a genuinely competitive market.
Railroads, like airliners, form a network. There are multiple paths to the same destination. There are also competitors in the form of waterways, air corridors, and highways.
Before the government began regulating the railroads, this is exactly what happened (though no air corridors then!).
Power lines also form a grid, and can route around failures. The power to my house got a lot more reliable when the other side of the neighborhood got connected to the grid.
When the power does go down, so does the cable internet, but the internet still works because the cell towers take over the last mile traffic. There's also Starlink.
One would think it's the same, but it's not. Each leg of a route is unique. Travel time, distance, and stops on the way. They are not interchangeable.
Practical example: a former customer of mine had a specific route carved out for transporting fruit and vegetables from the West Coast to the East Coast. They had exactly one time slot in the day they could take, which brought the travel time down to about 3-5 days. If they missed that time slot, it was up over 10 days. If one of the route segments was out of service, it could have been two weeks or more. Yeah, you could get from point A to point B, but the time made the alternative routes unacceptable.
The power grid is not sufficiently redundant to protect against many forms of damage. Find power substations and count how many 10 kVA lines feed each substation. Then ask yourself, what happens when that substation goes down because a good old boy decided to take potshots at the transformers? When there's a natural disaster like a winter storm here in Boston, there are a lot of power outages, indicating that the grid is not a grid but a lot of branches.
As for the last mile, no, cell towers don't take over for my FiOS fiber when it fails, nor does Starlink.
Cell, fiber, cable, and Starlink are not expanding the market for internet access. The cable market, the internet end-user market, is mostly saturated. Users switch but do not duplicate the service.
FWIW, this is another example of you never eliminate single points of failure, you only move them.
It's not just that they may cost more, but constraints on the alternatives may render them unsuitable.Maybe your fruit will rot, maybe your hotspot use consume your data allocation, maybe your generator only produces enough power to keep the refrigerator/freezer running and the house heat on, or maybe the ambulance can't get you to the hospital in time.
There's a saying in real-time systems out a late answer is the same as a wrong answer. In this situation, a solution that does not satisfy all the constraints is the same as no solution.
On the East Coast, the NYC subway could be one example of enshittification running the course. It started with competing private companies.. now if they'd go into real estate like the Tokyo metro
IP has subtle things going against it, which you should certainly analyze more.. eg University research teams have IP too, but no clear network effect (maybe even an anti-network effect?)
To me the overall "anti-network effect" for Big Tech looks like the metatheory Krugman proposed to explain enshittification. The initial ramp up can come from proprietary code, hiring power, regulatory capture, branding, anything really, but especially a synthesis of all these
To try to dispel the myth of a "coop" being defined as four old hippies sorting groceries in the back room of their run down victorian house in Portland:
The Mondragon Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain
Like any large entity, it's had it's share of criticism as well as praise. But in general, works to the advantage of it's workers, not just for shareholder returns.
The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good, rather than accept selfish gain and leverage it for greater good.
At it's core, socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more. It's annoying because even the most die-hard college campus communist still complains that they did all the work for the group project while pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets. Given the opportunity to chose their group next time, the power players all naturally congeal. And probably talk about how to make society more fair.
> someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more
This is true of all societies, not just socialist ones. In capitalism, it's called philanthropy and charity. The underlying social contract is noblesse oblige, that the right to enjoy the trappings of wealth comes with an obligation to ensure that the poor are reasonably taken care of.
The real difference that socialism poses is not that it should happen at all, but that it should happen by force with the power of the State, due to the wealthy as a class no longer making the independent free choice of discharging such obligations.
> The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good
1) You think that human behaviour is selfish by default (it is, but only until adolescence) and not subject to parental education and/or influence by media and general society. Everything in the western world promotes selfishness. Selfish people are a natural consequence of that.
2) If you read the article, socialism can still use (free) markets, which is the basis of your argument that people acting in their self-interest are still good to society.
> socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more
3) Another of your flaws is to think that only in socialist/communist societies some people need to get less for doing more. Completely wrong. In all societies some people need to be getting less for doing more. The only difference is which, and how many of them. Poor people in capitalist countries can work 2 jobs and still can't get out of poverty while stock owners get passive income for life. You should judge societies by the proportion between those getting less than they work and those getting more than their work - a statistic traditionally called "inequality".
> pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets
A correct and fair approach is to find out why Beth is a pot head and why she doesn't attend group meets (most likely a separate issue with the group).
College campus communists don't have the resources to do drug education, health (including mental health and addiction treatment), career counseling, drug police, etc., but states (communist or not) do. The communist state I lived in did all that, but badly because of corruption, and treatments and counseling didn't invovlve any psychology, which was entirely forbidden as a science.
I'm not sure if you read more than the title... this isn't socialism. Yet even the title suggests that it isn't socialism.
Instead, this uses the selfishness that the free market is built upon and removes the capitalist wealth-extracting layer to provide the rich egalitarian society that socialism and broader anti-capitalist movements aim for.
Who does not have a market? In the USSR people went to markets to buy radishes, just like we do here, except paying with rubles not dollars.
What was different was not the market but the production, or control over production. In the US heirs own the majority of the Fortune 500 and thus control it, their things worked differently.
So why is production not discussed but a market? Or not even a market but a "free" market - I suppose to be in a free market you buy radishes in a market with dollars and not rubles.
>“freed markets” would naturally tend toward far less concentration of wealth – a world of small firms, worker cooperatives, self-employed artisans, and peer-to-peer production.
And quoting Proudhon
>Property is freedom
Imho insurance networks are also politically agnostic:
to each according to his need, from each according to his ability
Interesting to think about how insurance "markets" can _support_ production... (Not just distributing the means thereof, eg how to insure group owned GPUs? Is there a timeline in which GPUs do not depreciate? Do we have to bet on different rates/architectures? There aren't more than a handful)
State control over production means instead of letting the free market decide what’s worth producing, the central planners believe they know better than the market (and the 2nd, 3rd order effects) what to produce and how to allocate and price resources and production. It very much removes or diminishes the “market”.
> the “equation of capitalism and markets” is a tragic misconception
Must be a big city isolation thing? In rural areas co-ops are a common part of every day life. The internet is provided by a co-op, the store is a co-op, the gas station is a co-op, etc. It is impossible in that environment to not see that shared ownership and markets fit together just fine.
I think what they’re getting at with this is that markets can exist without some of nastier parts of capitalism (e.g. a co-op operates in a market economy) but so much of the prevailing wisdom (both positive and negative) about capitalism equates markets with capital’s power-distribution function.
Maybe I'm too busy counting my dividend cheques from the co-ops I share ownership in, but I just don't see this prevailing wisdom of which you speak.
I mean, I do see it online so I know what you're talking about, but I mean coming from humans. Which is why I ask if it is a product of big city isolation?
Oh I don’t necessarily mean that co-ops are competitive at all with traditional ownership structures at all. Part of that is likely due to taxes and general financial forces (co-ops tend to need to be low-debt, privately held, etc.) and part of that is related to them being rare and largely concentrated in hyper liberal cities like Portland or SF or Seattle.
I just mean that they technically operate in markets but are not synonymous with the traditional notions of Marxian capitalism.
markets have existed forever. what is new since the dutch invention of capitalism is the cycle of money->commodity->money instead of commodity->money->commodity. That is, production for money instead of simple exchange.
This different cycle has massive implications, and changes how investments are made. Instead of people investing in things for themselves, they invest explicitly for production for the market and for other people for things they will never use themselves.
In China, the post-Deng consensus is to use markets in service of socialist development. People can be critical of this, but Deng's idea was that: "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it's a good cat" meaning that markets, even with some capitalist mechanics, if subservient to socialist politics, can still be used to socialist ends. Personally, I am still trying to decide how I feel about that, but it's also hard to argue with (so far) something that looks like success.
I agree, and I agree with Deng’s hypothesis, at least insofar in that China’s maintenance of social benefits appears to be successful, and, importantly, it operates strictly without actual political freedom.
To what degree is marginalism dependent on price as the active force? How can marginal utility be realized without all goods having a market price? What happens when goods are difficult or impossible to price?
Marginalism just means that the specific, concrete good or thing as the object of choice is the object of people's action and therefore valuation. Marginalism does not require having a market price, but quantitative calculations of accounting magnitudes, like profits, losses, cost, revenue, do require market prices.
I don't know if I totally understand these theories but I think modern market anarchists would say that a "freed" (anti-capitalist) market does use prices, and further strips rent/interest/privilege to make those prices accurately reflect subjective cost of labor as well. A freed market would still need commons rules, democratic decisions, norms, hard constraints, which isn't a contradiction in the system. I've seen Carson synthesize marginalism and LTV, that marginal utility decides price in more short term and competition drives cost to labor over the long term, as under the distorting effects of capitalism, these two are further apart than they need be.
What's the point of all this naval-gazing? How are Adam Smith and Karl Marx relevant to anything? They're not gods writing gospel. Whatever valid ideas they had can stand on their own. Where's the modelling, simulations, experiments? It sounds like a hobby project for people who spent too much time in liberal arts where they learnt they're not allowed to think for themselves and have to cherry pick ideas from authorities and write a lot of words but in the end create nothing. Excuse me for losing it a bit there.
I do acknoledge the better society that socialism can create, but I'm still not convinced it's possible/achievable long-term. My only concern is corruption.
Some people (we could call them psychopaths and narcissists, even though that's a rather strong word and only describes the worst of them) have a natural tendency to exploit other people to get to the top of whatever social structures exist. There are many of them, somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population depending on criteria used.
In capitalism most of these people become managers, CEOs, politicians, cops, TV stars, etc. and satisfy their tendencies by legal means. Still bad for society, but at least legal. In a socialist society, when exploitation isn't easy and "VIP" doesn't mean very much, they tend to become corrupt officials, which in time fundamentally break the entire society. This happend in all East-Europe communist countries.
I don't see a working succesful socialist or communist society without some means of empolying these people in a way that they find satisfying, but still not allow them to break society.
I love how handy-wavy control attempts get from every direction, instead of addressing the real problem.
Society is cells and organs in the body of a country. All we want is a good neural system to take feedback back and forth to the brain, which that takes care of the body well, so it can compete and cooperate in an arena with other large bodies.
Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body. That means wounds start bleeding, organs deflect to other bodies, because they know nobody cares about them. The system runs out of blood, since the cognitive load of taking care off all cells and organs properly is too much for one or two cells that helm a party. Politics evolves to distrust so that brain trust that is supposed to take care of everyone inevitably shrinks and becomes paranoid and violent as it loses control.
Capitalism generates extra blood to all organs and cells that seem capable of helping the body get what it wants - great way to increase supply. This can cause hematomas as some areas get pumped up more than they can ever return even with over supply, but in general it works. Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits.
Society wants to know that it will be allowed to produce at its absolute best and know that its offspring will not starve and will have a chance to produce too, and then when you lose your strength the body will not amputate you too early. Needs change too. the body can break a leg, get sick, get trauma. We need a nervous system that can understand the needs and feel pain if there is some somewhere, because pain can propagate, and defend against cancer and other social issues. The nervous system that can architect responses that benefit all. It’s all a feedback mechanism. We need better ones and that’s the opposite of putting people in power to do as they will for years without consequence.
> Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body.
Is this not the case with capitalism, right now? Except with political influence being led with money? The people with power, control, and political influence right now are absolutely not functioning in favour of the body.
> Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits.
I'm so glad that you're equating me, and people like me, who the system repeatedly failed over and over, and who could be functional if I was able to afford even a minimum of help and support for my situation, to cells being shed in a body. This doesn't feel dehumanising at all.
The fact of the matter is that there is a very Gattaca-like system that exists right now in the world. It brands you valid or invalid based on values like inherited wealth, social class, race, mental health, etc. People who are branded as "invalid" are an underclass who could be functional, and contribute to society, and perhaps already are contributing to society in ways that are not accounted for in pure economic value (For example, I have talked a great many number of people out of suicide over the last ten years), and yet none of the support given to "valids" is given, and when it is, it is a bureaucratic fight to get it (I personally am thinking about a friend who is currently working as a graphic designer, who had a long period of disability and had to fight for support through the court system. Not because it was an abnormal case, but because the disability support system is set up to automatically deny support, and the system (as any caseworker will tell you) relies on the vast majority either dying or giving up, rather than suing them).
To put it mildly, this feels like a leaky metaphor. I won't say the rest of what came into my mind, to keep things civil.
The metaphor makes you break away from existing labels and think of newer approaches, enabled by the faster methods of communication we have available. In the past, the head of was many days or weeks ride away for most citizens. It made sense for people to relocate for 4 years and represent interests. Now that agency is proving very corruptible, especially because the enforcement of the rules is corrupted. What would be a faster, more reliable, less corruptible approach? You still need people to implement the will of the people, but can we come up with better ways to communicate that will to those in power?
If by capitalism you mean whatever is happening right now, then there is a mix of different things going on.
There is the system of private enterprise governes by capitalist accounting methods which is driven by the action and exchange of people acting to fulill their needs. This is like a functioning organism whose organs act autonomously, and in doing so affirm the life of the organism itself.
There is then the system of hegemony and bureaucracy which is organized by rules, dictates, and orders. It is like an organization, a machine whose parts operate according to a will, and function only so far as the will of the organizer operationalizes them into the pattern that fulfills the organizer's ends.
A natural, organic system can survive only as it functions in the matter of the former. When it functions in the matter of the latter, it dies with the failure of the organizing force which binds the parts. Society is an organism, not an organization. It is as senseless to organize society as it is to tear a plant to bits and make a flower out of the pieces. I should hope that we figure this out sooner rather than later before we smother society and its people with endless bureaucracy and regulation.
The things you recognize are the tragedies of authoritarianism in all forms to me: nobody can possibly understand the system that well, and central planning simply doesn't work whether it's in a State or a company, because it just cannot and never will recognize each individual person for what they are actually worth as a human.
> It brands you valid or invalid based on values like inherited wealth, social class, race, mental health, etc.
Mostly inherited wealth I would guess, correlated to the other things for sure. Capital is everything in capitalism. Wealth distro follows a power law instead of Normal for this exact reason.
Capitalism is the term for the market system popularized by Karl Marx. If socialists want to incorporate markets, I am all for it, since it slips capitalism through the back door. This represents a total classical liberal/libertarian victory over socialist ideologies of the past. The only thing they have kept are slogans and terms.
The key thing modern progressives need to do is cut out their naiive criticisms of economics. The usual gambit is to repeat criticisms of Marx, et al. of classical economics, which mostly amount to charicature and ridicule, and don't even apply to classical economics, let alone modern subjectivist economics.
The so-called left libertarians represented by C4SS are the most pre-eminent and sophisticated of the 'socialist'-oriented political ideologies. But like all socialist types, they cannot free themselves from the dogma that labor is a special kind of factor of production which, as they think, not being exposed to the principles of choice under scarcity, follows different principles governing action and exchange than those which cover all other economic factors of production. Carson takes pains to demonstrate this in his book, but is ultimately unsuccessful.
I find it interesting, perhaps ironic, how much the cause of social ownership of businesses/'means of production' will be advanced by ... Trump, via the 530A a.k.a. Trump Account.
"At the other end of the scale are Australia, Chile, Iceland, Ireland and South Korea, with spending on pensions below 4% of GDP, albeit for different reasons."
Singapore started earlier with national pension schemes - the caning laws and extreme policing aside, the financials of Singapore and support for the population through jobs and life is worth a serious look.
Australia has the 1907 Harvester case that set minimum wage to be indexed at a level which would supposedly allow an unskilled labourer to support a wife and three children, to feed, house, and clothe them. By the 1920s it applied to over half of the Australian workforce. It became known as the ‘basic wage’.
That's been tweaked since, but it still carries weight in wage setting and goes a long way to explaining a lack of tipping culture in Australia.
The battle between the modern 'Left' and 'Right' is pure theater. It’s a false choice designed to keep us arguing over who holds the leash while we remain wage slaves. It would be interesting if some of those individuals could have been more convincing 150 years ago
Yes, it is a false dichotomy, and politics are in fact much more complicated than that.
Yep. The real battle is wealthies vs poors.
Everything else is just propaganda.
Not true, the battle between wealthy and poor is the propaganda. In reality where revolution did occur, poor were used to battle the rich, so the communist party could enrich it self. By destroying the rich, they also destroyed the economy and made poor even poorer.
No war but class war
So, the left is right?
maybe i'm doing a No True Scotsman, but i can't see where the Left has ever been against the poors. I thought the the origin of the terms Left and Right was For Democracy (the poors have a voice), and For the King (the wealthies) from the French Revolution. How is 'wealthies vs poors' different from left vs right'?
I appreciate the acknowledgement ofthe 'No True Scotsman' trap. It is easy to define a side by its ideals (e.g., 'The Left is for the poor'), but the reality is that both sides muck it up the moment they take control.
Neither side actually supports the poor because both are funded by and literally are the wealthy masters. The evidence is in the trends/facts that for almost 50 years the wealth gap has only widened, regardless of who is in charge. At some point, we have to accept that the 'which side is right' argument is false.
Neither of the two major parties in US politics supports the poor.
Elsewhere there are broader choices in national politics.
eg: the current Prime Minister of Australia grew up with a single mother on a disability pension in council housing. His actions and politics are at least informed by real life experience as one of "the poor".
Brazil’s President faced famine as a child, lost a pinky in a factory accident and is a life-long union leader.
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Depends how you define it and wether you’re defining it as intentionally en masse or as a byproduct of pure self interest regardless of anything else.
There’s plenty of examples, the most famous one in my opinion is that the popularity of legislation is irrelevant for passage, support by wealthy is. Similarly how the vast majority of people obtain political office is by and large courting the influence of wealthy donors (source - the amount of money being spent in politics and particularly dark money). Also how “lobbying” works even in the Supreme Court and pay to play by definition is politically battling the poor.
Obamacare is of no use at all for the wealthy. So why do those in power support it?
Everybody says that money buys elections. But consider that Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 and lost, Harris outspent Trump 3:1 and still lost. Bloomberg poured money into his presidential bid, and he didn't garner enough votes to be a blip on the radar.
Campaign money does buy you a stage, but it doesn't buy the votes.
Nobody has ever bought my vote. How about you?
> Obamacare is of no use at all for the wealthy. So why do those in power support it?
They... Didn't? It's been defanged and reduced to the aberration it is right now, instead of being single payer, universal healthcare.
> Everybody says that money buys elections. But consider that Hillary outspent Trump 2:1 and lost, Harris outspent Trump 3:1 and still lost. Bloomberg poured money into his presidential bid, and he didn't garner enough votes to be a blip on the radar.
> Campaign money does buy you a stage, but it doesn't buy the votes.
Without campaign money you have no chance at all, could you run a successful presidential campaign on 1/10th or 1/100th of the budget given you had a hypothetical bright candidate, someone that could objectively be a much better president than any of the moneyed ones? No, hence campaign money does buy votes, it just doesn't buy them completely but without campaign money you have absolutely no chance.
Money buys a stage, not a vote. If the voters don't like what you're selling, you're going to lose.
After all, was your vote bought in the last election?
Money too often decides who we get to vote for. It definitely does in the USA.
Again, money buys you a stage. You'll need a stage to run for office. But if your message stinks, people won't vote for you.
Kamala bought a big stage (she outspent Trump by a wide margin). But she lost. If money buys elections, she would have won.
Sooo...Harris' failure to win proves that money doesn't win elections...you do realize that her opponent also had to spend dozens of millions to even be able to compete, right?
Really hard to imagine how you aren't being willfully ignorant on this. Money doesn't win elections. It just puts you in the only possible position where one can win. Those are your own words, yet you somehow conclude that money doesn't win elections? Money literally decides what choice WE HAVE in an election. You cannot vote for someone who doesn't have the extreme wealth required to compete. & someone who isn't competing, isn't a choice given to voters.
Electricity doesn't make computers run, pushing the on button does!
Sure, money buys a stage, and an outsized stage for a worse idea is still persuading many more voters than a smaller stage with a better idea. If one campaign saturates communication it drowns others, this is what money buys on political campaigns (especially in the US).
Where I vote money doesn't play much of a part in elections so no chance for my vote to be bought; in the USA, a society much less politically active and educated, money goes a much longer way to persuade, convince, deceive, and outright lie to voters. Hence so many Trump voters coming out of the woodwork to say "I didn't vote for this".
Both sides say that voters who didn't vote for their favorite candidate because they are uneducated fools and deplorable.
> If one campaign saturates communication it drowns others, this is what money buys on political campaigns (especially in the US).
Carly Fiona is another example of a big spender that got trounced in the polls.
BTW, no matter how much campaign money is spent by socialist candidates, I will never vote for them. If all the candidates on the ballot are socialists, I will turn in my ballot with no vote on it. My vote is not for sale.
You know about statistics and how population-wise aggregate data can be skewed given you know which levers to press and where, I don't know why you play dumb about money in politics being a massive influence. Nowhere is said "money buys YOUR vote", money does influence votes, it does influence people who are less educated (or less politically engaged) who watches ad after ad pushing the precise button they need to be pushed to tilt scales.
I don't care about your view on socialist candidates, it doesn't pertain to this discussion whatsoever. People would vote for a socialist candidate who said the right stuff to them, that's just how the statistics work.
> Obamacare is of no use at all for the wealthy. So why do those in power support it?
Health insurance companies love it.
> Campaign money does buy you a stage, but it doesn't buy the votes.
You literally just talked about how the people everyone got to select from are those that could raise billions for a campaign. Hell the current president is a billionaire - literally the wealthy - and staffed important posts by other wealthy people. Congress is stacked by wealthy people, in no small part because the salary for congress is not commensurate with the responsibility it has.
Also, your numbers seem off for the Harris v Trump campaign (not what I’m seeing looking online) but it doesn’t matter (I highlight where you may have made the error below).
> Nobody has ever bought my vote. How about you?
No one serious about this issue suggests that they hand out money for votes. Well Elon actually did engage in that in this prior election cycle in swing states so there is that undermining your rhetorical comment.
But it’s also the height of naïveté to either not believe advertising/marketing (aka propaganda) works (you know, the trillion billion dollar companies of Google and Facebook) or to believe that politics is somehow immune from its effects as well (which requires ignoring how political movements work or what we learned about propaganda and its efficacy in WWII). And all of that takes big $. Of the 1.2B Kamala raised, 40% was small dollar donations. Of the 400M Trump raised, only 133M was small dollar donations (28.8%). Note: if this is where you’re getting the 3:1 number you’re not reading the data correctly - democrats spent ~1.9B total vs Republicans 1.6B and Trump directly spent >900M (presumably carrying over the donations from the previous campaign? Not sure).
And again - I’ll refer you to the research showing the general popularity of a proposal is irrelevant to it getting passed. How popular it is among wealthy does have that effect. And it again, you seem to struggle when I say this and try to point out some particular piece of legislation - it’s percentages. It doesn’t matter if it’s not an absolute. You don’t need to win every battle to win the war.
Anyway, Walter you’re a smart guy. I expect more from you than rudely dismissive comments that insinuate committing a crime is the only way money and wealth can influence and “buy” politics (and ignoring that Republicans did attempt to do so this past cycle)
Oh and I suggest you look at how advertising works. It’s classic 0 sum game. If you and I spend 0 on advertising, the outcome is the same as if we both spent $100 on advertising (assuming equivalent efficiency of conversion). However if you spend $100 and I spend 0 you capture the market. If you outspend 2:1 you’ll get 2/3 of the market (roughly). Obviously efficiency of the spend is also important, but it’s literally a 0 sum information war between competitors. If you didn’t think it mattered, you’d have to explain why companies spend hundreds of millions on advertising - that would be money more efficiently invested somewhere else.
> assuming equivalent efficiency of conversion
Is there any case where this is remotely even true?! The way advertising budget is spent always has an enormous impact on the outcome.
One competitor spends in print, another on TV. One competitor targets young professionals, another families with kids. One competitor goes to best and most famous agency but buys the cheapest package and fights any decision, another gets a genius kid at the beginning of his career to create a most brilliant TikTok ad. Etc...
> I suggest you look at how advertising works
A valuable advice, try following it sometimes.
For the purposes of a simplified discussion it’s true enough. It’s also true enough in the commercial context for the biggest players. For example, Coke and Pepsi spend similar amounts of advertising and the market share isn’t really changing. But that’s also because the products are very mature and in repeated games the players are likely to reach a stale mate (and the talent pool for the advertising teams is largely the same).
Political contexts are obviously different because it’s constantly one off contests and the teams behind it constantly change. So yes, obviously efficacy of advertising matters. But I don’t see how my simplification meaningfully changes the point that money significantly impacts voting at scale in our society. This wasn’t the gotcha I think you thought it was.
True, but advertising does not buy an election.
Have you or anyone you know been paid for your vote? If the answer is no, then your vote was not bought.
Saying that election advertising "buys" an election is a misuse of the word.
It's in pretty wide use, like at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44209515
"Harris outspent Trump 3:1. Hillary outspent Trump 2:1. It's not that easy to buy an election."
Advertising is necessary to sell a product. Campaign money is necessary to buy you a stage. But if you don't like the product, you aren't going to buy it.
> Congress is stacked by wealthy people, in no small part because the salary for congress is not commensurate with the responsibility it has.
LOL, it seems they get wealthy after they get elected to Congress. (I wonder how that happens!)
> rudely dismissive comments that insinuate committing a crime is the only way money and wealth can influence
I don't know where you got that from.
I don't recall ever voting for someone because they spent more money on their campaign.
If elections are being bought, it's not by the campaign money, it's by the taxpayer money. I.e. the "chicken in every pot" promise to give people free stuff.
> I’ll refer you to the research showing the general popularity of a proposal is irrelevant to it getting passed.
I don't doubt that, but we're talking about an election, not passing legislation. The only election poll that matters is the final vote (note that a lot of people do not bother to vote).
You have such an exceedingly narrow definition of what it means when people say that money buys elections that I’m realizing it’s pointless to try to have a conversation.
> LOL, it seems they get wealthy after they get elected to Congress. (I wonder how that happens!)
Some yes. Insider trading is a problem. But I think you’d be surprised how many people who are already rich then enter politics. They may grow their wealth even more after but they start of supremely wealthy to begin with, not least of which because that also implies a network of rich people who will help you.
> If elections are being bought, it's not by the campaign money, it's by the taxpayer money. I.e. the "chicken in every pot" promise to give people free stuff.
So money selecting which candidates you can vote on isn’t money buying elections, but policy arguments over how to spend the public purse is buying the public? That’s like having the position that a toddler has a choice when you ask them would they like broccoli or celery - you’ve predefined their choices for them and given them the illusion of choice.
> I don't know where you got that from.
“No one bought my vote, how about you” is dismissive and rude, not least of which because I’m sure you know buying votes is a crime. It’s not the effective rhetorical device you think it is. It’s also horribly undermined precisely because politics has gotten so messed up Republicans are bold enough to literally trying this strategy now.
> I don't doubt that, but we're talking about an election, not passing legislation
Actually, no. This conversation started with your bold claim: “Can you show us how the wealthy are battling the poor?”. You’re now trying to shift the goal posts claiming it’s only about elections.
> You have such an exceedingly narrow definition of what it means when people say that money buys elections that I’m realizing it’s pointless to try to have a conversation.
The definition of "buy" according to google: "obtain in exchange for payment." I accept the standard definition of words, not made up definitions. It's not possible to have a debate when words are redefined.
> “No one bought my vote, how about you” is dismissive and rude, not least of which because I’m sure you know buying votes is a crime.
Do you know of anyone who was paid for their vote? or anyone who was offered payment for their vote?
However you call it, Musk is certainly getting as close as he can to the line of paying people to vote a certain way.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/01/politics/elon-musk-million-do...
He’s had to repeatedly tweak the wording of the payment to stay away from a textbook definition of vote buying, but it’s certainly violating the spirit of the law.
> The definition of "buy" according to google: "obtain in exchange for payment." I accept the standard definition of words, not made up definitions. It's not possible to have a debate when words are redefined.
Only if you treat the English language as something that you can understand the meaning by combining the meaning of individual words and that words only ever have one possible meaning. For example, if I say “you’re a horse’s ass” am I claiming that you are literally the rear end of a horse? Or am I claiming that you’re a donkey owned by a horse? Or am I using a euphemism to describe obnoxious behavior?
But anyway. This is getting way off the mark. You’ve hyper focused on one thing (election outcomes) ignoring the larger point about whether there is a class war going on (raising Obamacare which was a compromise from Medicare for all and has been repeatedly gutted but also ignoring the defunding of SNAP and various other programs this year that are disproportionately hitting the poor while wealthy are getting a huge tax break on inheritance taxes due to Trump’s bill this year - how again are the wealthy not getting what they want at the expense of everyone else?)
I've posted numerous examples of politicians attempting to "buy" an election and then losing the election. The reason an election cannot be bought in the US is because we have a secret ballot (besides being illegal). There's no way to verify who Bob actually voted for.
> wealthy are getting a huge tax break on inheritance taxes
The inheritance tax rate remains the same. The gift tax exemption was raised from 11 million to 15 million. This is going to affect the upper middle class, but not so much on the wealthy.
Medicare has hardly been gutted. It needs to be cut more, as it is still on track to sink the budget.
Same for Snap.
99% of zoning is just class-based segregation.
Here's a recent American example: https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-tax/by-the-numbers-har...
You could do some basic research on this topic, it's been exhaustively covered over the past few centuries, but I'll drop you three starting points.
Pushing the tax burden for upkeeping society off people who own more shit than any of us ever will onto people who have to work for a living.
Legal protection and structural advantages for landlord interests over tenant interests.
Legal protection and structural advantages for employer interests over employee interests vis a vis wage theft, worker safety, worker injuries, etc.
There are many others, but even a brief summary of injustice in any one of these topics is big enough for ~a few hundred books, and alas, the margins of this website are too small to contain them.
> Legal protection and structural advantages for landlord interests over tenant interests.
Rent control is not in the landlord's business. In Seattle, the other legislation against landlords is pushing them out of business.
> Pushing the tax burden for upkeeping society off people who own more shit than any of us ever will onto people who have to work for a living.
1% pay 40% of the federal income tax.
Google [percent of federal government spending spent on wealth redistribution] says: "A significant portion of U.S. federal spending, around 60-70%, goes to social insurance and safety net programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Income Security, which function as wealth redistribution by supporting retirees, the needy, and vulnerable populations, though the exact "wealth redistribution" percentage varies by definition but centers on these large mandatory spending categories. In FY 2024, Social Security and Medicare alone were 36% of the budget, with Income Security adding another ~9-10%."
> Legal protection and structural advantages for employer interests over employee interests vis a vis wage theft, worker safety, worker injuries, etc.
The legal advantage again is for the employee. For example, wage theft is illegal and is aggressively prosecuted.
> Rent control is not in the landlord's business... Seattle... Landlords going out of business...
And you immediately demonstrate why having a conversation with you on this subject is pointless.
There's a million different dimensions in which the problem that I've pointed at manifests. But what you do is you cherry-pick one particular dimension of it in one particular municipality in one particular time period[1], claim that that dimension is (allegedly) biased in the other direction, and thus you reach the universal conclusion that clearly landlords are the real victims[2], and you can just sweep the entire issue off the table.
I don't have enough words to describe how incurious and chock-full-of-fallacies this kind of thinking is.
You already know everything that you feel you need to, and there's nothing more that needs to be said. It's like you have found the number 2, and conclude that therefore, most numbers are even primes.
---
[1] Actually, you don't do even that. You just vaguely wave your hands in its direction.
[2] Kind of weird that the market values their real estate to be worth twice what it was a decade ago if they are getting such a raw deal. I'm sure PE is snapping up rental properties because they are money-losing investments, too. After all, serious people who have done the math and are putting billions of dollars into this (and are reaping profits on their investments hand-over-fist) must all be too stupid to understand just how awful renting out property is.
> And you immediately demonstrate why having a conversation with you on this subject is pointless.
That's because my positions are correct.
BTW, rent control in 9 states is statewide, and is commonplace in cities.
Google [does seattle provide free lawyers for tenants?] for more examples.
For more,
In California, over 35 cities and counties have implemented long-term rent control ordinances for residential rental housing. In addition, since Jan. 1, 2020, the California Tenant Protection Act has extended rent caps and eviction restrictions to many properties not governed by local ordinances.
Google also reports:
Tens of thousands of NYC rent-stabilized apartments are vacant, with estimates varying from around 26,000 to over 60,000, often described as "warehoused," because strict rent caps (especially after 2019 laws) make costly renovations financially unviable for landlords, leading to units sitting empty rather than being rented or sold. While some vacancies are for legitimate repairs, many are held off-market as owners await the ability to renovate and raise rents, contributing to the city's housing shortage, say housing advocates and reports.
And yet, investors and landlords are scooping up every rental property they can, and are as a class, making mountains of money in those states.
It's wild that as a whole they are so advantaged that they are still net-in the green when they let properties sit empty and unused.
It's just as wild that you continue digging deeper. Reality in the big picture isn't compatible with your 'correct' viewpoint, so you keep drilling down to microdetails.
Did you read the part about 26,000-60,000 units left vacant because it was unprofitable to rent them out under the NYC rent control laws?
where does profit come from? Simply trading items in a competitive market will not turn profits.
No profits == no business. Profits in very competitive markets might be low, but you still need them to survive. Walmart is under 6% of profit, but due to the enormous revenue it is still a lot.
That’s not the question, it’s where do profits come from in the economic equation? What part of the value chain is adding but not subtracting its full cut?
As Hayek proved the information in free markets is encoded by prices, so the value is up to the consenting parties. There is no "good" or "bad" or "improper" profit. If there is competition and willing parties that's where the profit will be. It will go down to something more or less sustainable for the market participants that are willing to work for that profit.
Sure, there may be a price a customer is willing to pay, but how does the business owner make a profit? Aren't there other people being paid too? If they are paid less, doesn't that sound more like a negotiating position than mere "information" signals?
Free market countries are more abundant than non-free market ones because the system is brutally efficient. If you can't sell something for a profit, you might be forced to sell it for a loss and eat the difference. This is the way the system regulates itself. The business owners invest their resources and own the risk. Employees sell their work hours by a fixed price and this is calculated in the total cost for the business to sell. The price their work is bought by is also regulated by free market and is an input to the total price. They aren't forced to be paid less than the going market rate (may be short term until contract expires) so the prices and unforced cooperation based on price it shte "magic" that makes USA to have 100s of types of biscuits and Cuba to have empty stores.
> how does the business owner make a profit?
Revenue - Expenses = Profit
The term "wage slave" is a cop-out. People -- all of us -- are stomach-slaves, not wage-slaves.
Having needs is not the same as slavery. Wage slavery is described as such because of the power imbalance between employer and worker, who has limited agency to find another employer, with whom he would also have a relationship with a power imbalance.
A wealthy man who receives a check for dividends and interest most months is not subject to such power imbalances. Wealth makes him free.
It's not an argument that socialism would enable people to just live off a public dividend, so to speak. Somebody has to work, and workplaces require discipline. Rather it's an argument for better labor safety controls, and a personal appeal to people to save as much money as they can.
I've been an employer. I didn't have any power over my employees. If there was anything they didn't like, they simply stopped coming to work. How was I supposed to make them show up?
One embezzled a large amount of money and spent it on drugs. What was I supposed to do about that? He was broke, he couldn't pay the money back. All I could do was tell him to not come back.
I've also been employed at minimum wage jobs, and salaried jobs. I never felt the employer had power over me. At my salaried jobs, my coworkers complained about all the power the company had over them. The company had no power over me, so I would ask them what the power was. After some long conversations, the problem was the coworkers spent every dime of their income. So not having a paycheck for a week was a catastrophe. The company, however, was unaware of these issues.
I recommend saving up to 6 months of living expenses, and then the employer will have no leverage over you.
A lot of people forget that going hungry is the default state of not doing a thing. The super rich and socially progressive societies redistribute the taxes they levy on the productive people to help the people who can not (elderly, ill) or won't (lazy bastards) work. It might be a better deal for the society as a whole, to offset the cirme that would ensue if there isn't any social net.
A lion in the plains of Africa is not entitled to a dinner, the farmer in not entitled to a crop yield. It is super rare that people can't do anything to better themselves and get more for their own skills or execution. Any buisness owner will gladly share a percentage of profit you generate for them if you can show them you're indeed generating such profit.
If you're in DPRK or Cuba then you'd need to check your free-market priviledge of having a market for your skills.
> to offset the cirme that would ensue if there isn't any social net.
The recent news from Minnesota suggests that the social safety net is a magnet for astonishing levels of theft.
It's not the social safety, but the bad enforcement of the law. When bad acts are not punished, this is the problem that occurs.
Some social systems like in Israel if you're ablebodied you are given a public service job, like cleaning the park and etc... so you aren't entitled to a check for doing nothing.
South Africa hasn't any meaningful social net and the wealthy people live in special "high security" enclaves with additional guards and fenced perimeters. If you have a lot of hungry people on the street they will be forced to survive somehow and you'd get more crime.
This is part of the false dichotomy you are not understanding. It's not actually a valid choice if there are no options. And that is what this is actually about, understanding how we have no good options, and what to do about it. I recommend start digging in and we all question or own understanding and acceptance of the system. Is it actually working with even a simple majority in the best position we can be?
Currently employing 130 wage slaves and unduly profiting from their margins, and not satisfied with the overall system at all.
If you are a US citizen in the US, you have options. There's absolutely nothing an employer can do to force them to stay.
I understand your point that a typical US citizen has options where they work.
My point is when all options include wage slavery it's not an actual option. That's it, a false dichotomy.
And that is what the OP is about. It's exploring a fundamentally different system which I understand is scary.
Please tell me about "wage slavery" in the US with US citizens and why they have no options.
Asking this question leads me to suspect you have no true curiosity or willingness to learn a new perspective as it's literally a Google away. And then you will reply in another direction that justifies your narrow world view that is of course justified 100% by your experience. This is not effective discourse and I see you doing it all over.
It’s a well-documented economic concept. You can find plenty on it if you're actually curious about the perspective. And understanding it thoroughly is a strong prerequisite to seriously engaging with other people with intent to learn. It's work you need do yourself.
It would have taken less effort to answer the question than what you did write.
that may be so, but a stack of bills or small bag of coins is sure easier to cart around than things I can eat are.
It's 30F outside right now, and I can live a lot longer without food than without shelter.
You are just playing at word games. The system is trapping the have-nots into unpleasant, lifelong conditions, and that's what "wage slave" means. As you know.
What he's missing is that scaling started working around 1900, when railroads started consolidating. Railroads were the first businesses that had overwhelming economies of scale. No small co-op could possibly compete. Over the next century, more obstacles to scaling were overcome. Container shipping, freeways, cheap communications, mass market products and advertising, and computers removed the obstacles to scaling businesses up to planetary size.
Why it's the Uneeda biscuit made the trouble, Uneeda Uneeda, put the crackers in a package, in a package, the Uneeda buscuit in an airtight sanitary package, made the cracker barrel obsolete, obsolete Obsolete! Obsolete!
Cracker barrel went out the window with the mail pouch, cut plug, chawin by the stove. Changed the approach of a traveling salesman, made it pretty hard.
Gone, gone Gone with the hogshead, cask, and demijohn, Gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan Gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce. - The Music Man
I'm so glad that you mentioned railroads because there is a great book, Railroads and Regulation by Gabriel Kolko about the capitalist anti-competiton regulation of the railroad industry that caused their concentration. If you wanna read about it, an essay about it is called "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism" inside of Markets Not Capitalism (freely available online). I'll summarize what it says tho:
Every time big railroad magnates tried to form a cartel to fix prices, a smaller competitor would lower rates and steal all the customers; freight rates went wayy down in this time period. The big railroad owners (like JP Morgan's clients) lobbied for the ICC not to regulate them, but to regulate their competitors. They wanted the government to make price-cutting illegal (calling it rebates or discrimination).
Regarding sanitary packages, the essay _also addresses this_: the big Chicago meatpackers supported regulations because the compliance costs were so high they drove small local butchers and slaughterhouses out of business. The "sanitary" laws were a weapon to kill local competition, not a way to keep food safe
I would argue that consolidation happened because rail is a capital-intensive natural monopoly. It's easy to dominate a region just by buying up lines. Smaller lines couldn't steal customers from big players because no other lines were physically able to offer the same service. Trucking is another story. There, the highways are natural monopolies, and trucks are an over-the-top service.
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Before even railroads, the original manufactory boom that is commonly associated with the industrial revolution is the exact kind of case the other poster is alluding to when thinking of large economies of scale. I think Kolko is great to demonstrate that economies of scale aren't infinite, and in the absense of government intervention, market forces actively conspire to ensure firms shrink to their optimal size. But that also proves the flip side: firms will grow to their optimal size too. There is no economic reason to be suspicious of large firm sizes, and the political reasons inevitably hinge on some sort of mistaken assumption of the economics of the matter; anti-trust regulations advocacy is a perfect example of this.
Kolko talks about that in the context of scaling social/charitable solutions.[1] There's a cite to Marshall, who talks about it in an industrial context.[2] But Marshall wrote in the days before computers and the Internet. There was a time when big companies had enormous clerical plants and corporate headquarters operations. Some paperwork and management operations scale O(N log N) or even O(N^2). At some point, corporate overhead became too large.
But we got past that. Walmart, Amazon, Samsung, McDonalds, Starbucks, Foxconn, and BYD all have hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of employees, but don't seem to be hitting scaling limits. There may be an optimal size limit, but it's above planetary scale now. Computers have made this possible.
This leads to monopoly or oligopoly being reached before any natural limit to growth appears.
[1] https://www.jonkolko.com/writing/notes/13
[2] https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/economics/economies-...
I am not convinced it is above planetary scale, nor that these are monopolies. For one thing, all the companies you named have competitors, and no company has a distribution center or restaurant in the arctic. There are plenty of other more populated areas that those companies do not serve. Administrative work still requires overhead, and the internet does not remove that burden, otherwise companies wouldn't be scrambling to invest in AI which they expect to reduce this overhead. AI wont entirely remove the administrative overhead either; there are hard economic limits to the efficiency of a bureaucracy.
But more to the point, consider what you're saying. Is the world, viz-a-viz these companies/services that you refer to, worse off than before the internet? Obviously not. In fact, it is substantially better, because higher economies of scale mean mass production for mass consumption. There would be no way you and I could converse this way on our phones without the hyper extensive scaling of production caused by capitalism. This calls into question the concern over scaling. Large scaling and less firms is preferable when they perform a social function.
If co-ops were replaced by big business, this is something everyone should be grateful for. To go back to the industrial revolution example, there were a form of early mutualist co-op that dominated the non-farm market in the pre-capitalist era: the guilds. And the guilds had a stranglehold on handicrafts, apprenticeships, and all manner of specialized production. In order to increase guild profits, the guilds, through their noble patrons, regulated and limited production of all kinds, who was allowed to sell their craft, and all while being worker-owned. And yet these guilds were the true monopoly: they used legal privileges granted through lobbying to the kings to limit production and raise prices. Their products were exclusively for the wealthy and privileged. On the other hand, it was the capitalists that found a loophole in this system that condemned people to poverty and starvation: the mass production with unskilled labor by manufactories. And, through the manufactory system, they smashed the guilds, producing tons of goods for the everyday man, contributing greatly to the prosperity over and above the medieval system that we see today.
But they did have the unintended consequence of keeping food safe.
Allegedly. And just so happened to create a massive cost barrier to competition from smaller companies.
There's a mountain of data gathered over decades behind that "alleged" assertion.
Oops I forgot to respond to the other things you mentioned. That list of removed obstacles is technically correct, but it misses that those things were mostly subsidized
1. Regarding transportation, the interstate highway system and the containerization infrastructure (ports, dredging, naval security) were massive state subsidies to long-distance distribution. If Walmart had to pay the full property tax and maintenance cost of every mile of road their trucks used, their economies of scale would evaporate instantly. The state artificially lowered the cost of long distance shipping below the cost of local production. That isn't efficiency, but the taxpayer subsidizing the inefficiency of moving a toothbrush 3,000 miles. (Carson called these "diseconomies of scale")
2. The Uneeda Biscuit era of mass production created a crisis in that high fixed costs meant factories had to run 24/7 to be profitable, they couldn't wait for orders but had to force product onto the market. This required the state to intervene again via imperialism and arguably the creation of a consumer culture to absorb the surplus in the form of advertising and other means.
3. Computers are the most ironic part; Computers and CNC tools actually destroyed the rationale for the large factory, made it possible for a garage shop to produce with the same precision as a General Motors plant ("Homebrew Industrial Revolution" book by Kevin Carson again which in my mind is not one of his most defensible but it's still interesting).
I would argue that IP was the main reason that small shops didn't take over. As physical capital costs dropped, the state ramped up IP laws (patents/copyrights) to protect corporate hierarchies from the decentralization computers should have caused. I think that Big Tech isn't Big because of hardware efficiency but because of the state-enforced monopoly on information
> If Walmart had to pay the full property tax and maintenance cost of every mile of road their trucks used
There's everyone else who uses the road, too.
Lots of railroads were built with private money for various purposes.
These days, even the government doesn't seem capable of building railroads. There's Caltrain, and in Seattle it's taking decades to build a few miles of light rail, at a cost that exceeds the GDP of Norway. Well, maybe not quite that much (!) but it sure seems like it.
Walmart uses it a lot more than I do. Civeng principles show that road damage rises to the fourth power of axle weight, a fully loaded tractor-trailer does roughly 10k times structural damage of a passenger car but they definitely don't pay that amount.
And yeah the government is consistently incompetent. But there's no incentive for them to be competent in the first place. Either a mostly exempt-from-competiton company does it badly or a fully exempt-from-competition state does it badly in our system.
I know about the fatigue damage problem, and have advocated that higher taxes should be put on the trucks.
Anyhow, the most efficient travel for freight is by rail. But due to all the mismanagement by the government, it remains cheaper to ship by truck. You cannot really blame capitalism for that.
... until you realize that the government is just reacting to lobbying by trucking concerns, which are driven by capitalist greed.
The failure of government is a failure of government, not capitalism.
Railroads are a natural monopoly, as are highways, power lines, last-mile internet, etc. Once you have a railway in place, it is rarely profitable to have a single competitor, let alone the three or four you would need for a genuinely competitive market.
Railroads, like airliners, form a network. There are multiple paths to the same destination. There are also competitors in the form of waterways, air corridors, and highways.
Before the government began regulating the railroads, this is exactly what happened (though no air corridors then!).
Power lines also form a grid, and can route around failures. The power to my house got a lot more reliable when the other side of the neighborhood got connected to the grid.
When the power does go down, so does the cable internet, but the internet still works because the cell towers take over the last mile traffic. There's also Starlink.
One would think it's the same, but it's not. Each leg of a route is unique. Travel time, distance, and stops on the way. They are not interchangeable.
Practical example: a former customer of mine had a specific route carved out for transporting fruit and vegetables from the West Coast to the East Coast. They had exactly one time slot in the day they could take, which brought the travel time down to about 3-5 days. If they missed that time slot, it was up over 10 days. If one of the route segments was out of service, it could have been two weeks or more. Yeah, you could get from point A to point B, but the time made the alternative routes unacceptable.
The power grid is not sufficiently redundant to protect against many forms of damage. Find power substations and count how many 10 kVA lines feed each substation. Then ask yourself, what happens when that substation goes down because a good old boy decided to take potshots at the transformers? When there's a natural disaster like a winter storm here in Boston, there are a lot of power outages, indicating that the grid is not a grid but a lot of branches.
As for the last mile, no, cell towers don't take over for my FiOS fiber when it fails, nor does Starlink. Cell, fiber, cable, and Starlink are not expanding the market for internet access. The cable market, the internet end-user market, is mostly saturated. Users switch but do not duplicate the service.
FWIW, this is another example of you never eliminate single points of failure, you only move them.
Oh, I agree that alternatives can cost more money, but they are still there.
Roads go out or are down for maintenance. People use alternate routes. Happens all the time.
And yes, the last time the power went out at my house I connected to the internet via cell phone. Google says that Starlink provides internet access.
P.S. I also have a generator, as do my neighbors, because the power grid here is unreliable. Alternatives exist.
It's not just that they may cost more, but constraints on the alternatives may render them unsuitable.Maybe your fruit will rot, maybe your hotspot use consume your data allocation, maybe your generator only produces enough power to keep the refrigerator/freezer running and the house heat on, or maybe the ambulance can't get you to the hospital in time.
There's a saying in real-time systems out a late answer is the same as a wrong answer. In this situation, a solution that does not satisfy all the constraints is the same as no solution.
On the East Coast, the NYC subway could be one example of enshittification running the course. It started with competing private companies.. now if they'd go into real estate like the Tokyo metro
IP has subtle things going against it, which you should certainly analyze more.. eg University research teams have IP too, but no clear network effect (maybe even an anti-network effect?)
To me the overall "anti-network effect" for Big Tech looks like the metatheory Krugman proposed to explain enshittification. The initial ramp up can come from proprietary code, hiring power, regulatory capture, branding, anything really, but especially a synthesis of all these
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/api/v1/file/7510035f-d377-4...
To try to dispel the myth of a "coop" being defined as four old hippies sorting groceries in the back room of their run down victorian house in Portland:
The Mondragon Corporation is a corporation and federation of worker cooperatives based in the Basque region of Spain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation
Often touted as "the worlds largest coop".
Like any large entity, it's had it's share of criticism as well as praise. But in general, works to the advantage of it's workers, not just for shareholder returns.
The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good, rather than accept selfish gain and leverage it for greater good.
At it's core, socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more. It's annoying because even the most die-hard college campus communist still complains that they did all the work for the group project while pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets. Given the opportunity to chose their group next time, the power players all naturally congeal. And probably talk about how to make society more fair.
The 38% of Stanford students that claim to be disabled is an ample illustration:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150715
> someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more
This is true of all societies, not just socialist ones. In capitalism, it's called philanthropy and charity. The underlying social contract is noblesse oblige, that the right to enjoy the trappings of wealth comes with an obligation to ensure that the poor are reasonably taken care of.
The real difference that socialism poses is not that it should happen at all, but that it should happen by force with the power of the State, due to the wealthy as a class no longer making the independent free choice of discharging such obligations.
I see 3 flaws here.
> The fundamental flaw at hand here is the belief that you can reprogram human behavior to ignore selfish gain for the greater good
1) You think that human behaviour is selfish by default (it is, but only until adolescence) and not subject to parental education and/or influence by media and general society. Everything in the western world promotes selfishness. Selfish people are a natural consequence of that.
2) If you read the article, socialism can still use (free) markets, which is the basis of your argument that people acting in their self-interest are still good to society.
> socialist societies unwind because someone needs to be getting less for doing more
3) Another of your flaws is to think that only in socialist/communist societies some people need to get less for doing more. Completely wrong. In all societies some people need to be getting less for doing more. The only difference is which, and how many of them. Poor people in capitalist countries can work 2 jobs and still can't get out of poverty while stock owners get passive income for life. You should judge societies by the proportion between those getting less than they work and those getting more than their work - a statistic traditionally called "inequality".
> pot head Beth no-showed the two group meets
A correct and fair approach is to find out why Beth is a pot head and why she doesn't attend group meets (most likely a separate issue with the group).
College campus communists don't have the resources to do drug education, health (including mental health and addiction treatment), career counseling, drug police, etc., but states (communist or not) do. The communist state I lived in did all that, but badly because of corruption, and treatments and counseling didn't invovlve any psychology, which was entirely forbidden as a science.
I'm not sure if you read more than the title... this isn't socialism. Yet even the title suggests that it isn't socialism. Instead, this uses the selfishness that the free market is built upon and removes the capitalist wealth-extracting layer to provide the rich egalitarian society that socialism and broader anti-capitalist movements aim for.
Who does not have a market? In the USSR people went to markets to buy radishes, just like we do here, except paying with rubles not dollars.
What was different was not the market but the production, or control over production. In the US heirs own the majority of the Fortune 500 and thus control it, their things worked differently.
So why is production not discussed but a market? Or not even a market but a "free" market - I suppose to be in a free market you buy radishes in a market with dollars and not rubles.
Gets a nod though:
>“freed markets” would naturally tend toward far less concentration of wealth – a world of small firms, worker cooperatives, self-employed artisans, and peer-to-peer production.
And quoting Proudhon
>Property is freedom
Imho insurance networks are also politically agnostic:
Interesting to think about how insurance "markets" can _support_ production... (Not just distributing the means thereof, eg how to insure group owned GPUs? Is there a timeline in which GPUs do not depreciate? Do we have to bet on different rates/architectures? There aren't more than a handful)How is control over production not part of the market?
State control over production means instead of letting the free market decide what’s worth producing, the central planners believe they know better than the market (and the 2nd, 3rd order effects) what to produce and how to allocate and price resources and production. It very much removes or diminishes the “market”.
I don’t believe central planning is strictly a requirement of communism. It’s just lumped into it because the USSR did both.
> the “equation of capitalism and markets” is a tragic misconception
Must be a big city isolation thing? In rural areas co-ops are a common part of every day life. The internet is provided by a co-op, the store is a co-op, the gas station is a co-op, etc. It is impossible in that environment to not see that shared ownership and markets fit together just fine.
I think what they’re getting at with this is that markets can exist without some of nastier parts of capitalism (e.g. a co-op operates in a market economy) but so much of the prevailing wisdom (both positive and negative) about capitalism equates markets with capital’s power-distribution function.
Maybe I'm too busy counting my dividend cheques from the co-ops I share ownership in, but I just don't see this prevailing wisdom of which you speak.
I mean, I do see it online so I know what you're talking about, but I mean coming from humans. Which is why I ask if it is a product of big city isolation?
Oh I don’t necessarily mean that co-ops are competitive at all with traditional ownership structures at all. Part of that is likely due to taxes and general financial forces (co-ops tend to need to be low-debt, privately held, etc.) and part of that is related to them being rare and largely concentrated in hyper liberal cities like Portland or SF or Seattle.
I just mean that they technically operate in markets but are not synonymous with the traditional notions of Marxian capitalism.
markets have existed forever. what is new since the dutch invention of capitalism is the cycle of money->commodity->money instead of commodity->money->commodity. That is, production for money instead of simple exchange.
This different cycle has massive implications, and changes how investments are made. Instead of people investing in things for themselves, they invest explicitly for production for the market and for other people for things they will never use themselves.
In China, the post-Deng consensus is to use markets in service of socialist development. People can be critical of this, but Deng's idea was that: "it doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it's a good cat" meaning that markets, even with some capitalist mechanics, if subservient to socialist politics, can still be used to socialist ends. Personally, I am still trying to decide how I feel about that, but it's also hard to argue with (so far) something that looks like success.
I agree, and I agree with Deng’s hypothesis, at least insofar in that China’s maintenance of social benefits appears to be successful, and, importantly, it operates strictly without actual political freedom.
Cosma Shalizi has a great article on these themes, arrives at similar conclusions https://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiz...
To what degree is marginalism dependent on price as the active force? How can marginal utility be realized without all goods having a market price? What happens when goods are difficult or impossible to price?
Marginalism just means that the specific, concrete good or thing as the object of choice is the object of people's action and therefore valuation. Marginalism does not require having a market price, but quantitative calculations of accounting magnitudes, like profits, losses, cost, revenue, do require market prices.
I don't know if I totally understand these theories but I think modern market anarchists would say that a "freed" (anti-capitalist) market does use prices, and further strips rent/interest/privilege to make those prices accurately reflect subjective cost of labor as well. A freed market would still need commons rules, democratic decisions, norms, hard constraints, which isn't a contradiction in the system. I've seen Carson synthesize marginalism and LTV, that marginal utility decides price in more short term and competition drives cost to labor over the long term, as under the distorting effects of capitalism, these two are further apart than they need be.
What's the point of all this naval-gazing? How are Adam Smith and Karl Marx relevant to anything? They're not gods writing gospel. Whatever valid ideas they had can stand on their own. Where's the modelling, simulations, experiments? It sounds like a hobby project for people who spent too much time in liberal arts where they learnt they're not allowed to think for themselves and have to cherry pick ideas from authorities and write a lot of words but in the end create nothing. Excuse me for losing it a bit there.
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Came to this post hoping to see C4SS mentioned. "Markets not capitalism" is a fantastic read in general and the PDF is freely available / open access.
Someone's look to re-describe anarcho-capitalism?
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I do acknoledge the better society that socialism can create, but I'm still not convinced it's possible/achievable long-term. My only concern is corruption.
Some people (we could call them psychopaths and narcissists, even though that's a rather strong word and only describes the worst of them) have a natural tendency to exploit other people to get to the top of whatever social structures exist. There are many of them, somewhere between 0.1% and 1% of the population depending on criteria used.
In capitalism most of these people become managers, CEOs, politicians, cops, TV stars, etc. and satisfy their tendencies by legal means. Still bad for society, but at least legal. In a socialist society, when exploitation isn't easy and "VIP" doesn't mean very much, they tend to become corrupt officials, which in time fundamentally break the entire society. This happend in all East-Europe communist countries.
I don't see a working succesful socialist or communist society without some means of empolying these people in a way that they find satisfying, but still not allow them to break society.
I love how handy-wavy control attempts get from every direction, instead of addressing the real problem.
Society is cells and organs in the body of a country. All we want is a good neural system to take feedback back and forth to the brain, which that takes care of the body well, so it can compete and cooperate in an arena with other large bodies.
Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body. That means wounds start bleeding, organs deflect to other bodies, because they know nobody cares about them. The system runs out of blood, since the cognitive load of taking care off all cells and organs properly is too much for one or two cells that helm a party. Politics evolves to distrust so that brain trust that is supposed to take care of everyone inevitably shrinks and becomes paranoid and violent as it loses control.
Capitalism generates extra blood to all organs and cells that seem capable of helping the body get what it wants - great way to increase supply. This can cause hematomas as some areas get pumped up more than they can ever return even with over supply, but in general it works. Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits.
Society wants to know that it will be allowed to produce at its absolute best and know that its offspring will not starve and will have a chance to produce too, and then when you lose your strength the body will not amputate you too early. Needs change too. the body can break a leg, get sick, get trauma. We need a nervous system that can understand the needs and feel pain if there is some somewhere, because pain can propagate, and defend against cancer and other social issues. The nervous system that can architect responses that benefit all. It’s all a feedback mechanism. We need better ones and that’s the opposite of putting people in power to do as they will for years without consequence.
> Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body.
Is this not the case with capitalism, right now? Except with political influence being led with money? The people with power, control, and political influence right now are absolutely not functioning in favour of the body.
> Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits.
I'm so glad that you're equating me, and people like me, who the system repeatedly failed over and over, and who could be functional if I was able to afford even a minimum of help and support for my situation, to cells being shed in a body. This doesn't feel dehumanising at all.
The fact of the matter is that there is a very Gattaca-like system that exists right now in the world. It brands you valid or invalid based on values like inherited wealth, social class, race, mental health, etc. People who are branded as "invalid" are an underclass who could be functional, and contribute to society, and perhaps already are contributing to society in ways that are not accounted for in pure economic value (For example, I have talked a great many number of people out of suicide over the last ten years), and yet none of the support given to "valids" is given, and when it is, it is a bureaucratic fight to get it (I personally am thinking about a friend who is currently working as a graphic designer, who had a long period of disability and had to fight for support through the court system. Not because it was an abnormal case, but because the disability support system is set up to automatically deny support, and the system (as any caseworker will tell you) relies on the vast majority either dying or giving up, rather than suing them).
To put it mildly, this feels like a leaky metaphor. I won't say the rest of what came into my mind, to keep things civil.
The metaphor makes you break away from existing labels and think of newer approaches, enabled by the faster methods of communication we have available. In the past, the head of was many days or weeks ride away for most citizens. It made sense for people to relocate for 4 years and represent interests. Now that agency is proving very corruptible, especially because the enforcement of the rules is corrupted. What would be a faster, more reliable, less corruptible approach? You still need people to implement the will of the people, but can we come up with better ways to communicate that will to those in power?
There's whole volumes of academic literature where people debate this topic, it is filed under "communism", "anarchism", and "sociology".
If by capitalism you mean whatever is happening right now, then there is a mix of different things going on.
There is the system of private enterprise governes by capitalist accounting methods which is driven by the action and exchange of people acting to fulill their needs. This is like a functioning organism whose organs act autonomously, and in doing so affirm the life of the organism itself.
There is then the system of hegemony and bureaucracy which is organized by rules, dictates, and orders. It is like an organization, a machine whose parts operate according to a will, and function only so far as the will of the organizer operationalizes them into the pattern that fulfills the organizer's ends.
A natural, organic system can survive only as it functions in the matter of the former. When it functions in the matter of the latter, it dies with the failure of the organizing force which binds the parts. Society is an organism, not an organization. It is as senseless to organize society as it is to tear a plant to bits and make a flower out of the pieces. I should hope that we figure this out sooner rather than later before we smother society and its people with endless bureaucracy and regulation.
The things you recognize are the tragedies of authoritarianism in all forms to me: nobody can possibly understand the system that well, and central planning simply doesn't work whether it's in a State or a company, because it just cannot and never will recognize each individual person for what they are actually worth as a human.
> It brands you valid or invalid based on values like inherited wealth, social class, race, mental health, etc.
Mostly inherited wealth I would guess, correlated to the other things for sure. Capital is everything in capitalism. Wealth distro follows a power law instead of Normal for this exact reason.
Capitalism is the term for the market system popularized by Karl Marx. If socialists want to incorporate markets, I am all for it, since it slips capitalism through the back door. This represents a total classical liberal/libertarian victory over socialist ideologies of the past. The only thing they have kept are slogans and terms.
The key thing modern progressives need to do is cut out their naiive criticisms of economics. The usual gambit is to repeat criticisms of Marx, et al. of classical economics, which mostly amount to charicature and ridicule, and don't even apply to classical economics, let alone modern subjectivist economics.
The so-called left libertarians represented by C4SS are the most pre-eminent and sophisticated of the 'socialist'-oriented political ideologies. But like all socialist types, they cannot free themselves from the dogma that labor is a special kind of factor of production which, as they think, not being exposed to the principles of choice under scarcity, follows different principles governing action and exchange than those which cover all other economic factors of production. Carson takes pains to demonstrate this in his book, but is ultimately unsuccessful.
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I find it interesting, perhaps ironic, how much the cause of social ownership of businesses/'means of production' will be advanced by ... Trump, via the 530A a.k.a. Trump Account.
$1000 at a 10% return for 65 years is $490,371
Ahh yes, yet another vehicle to move public money to the private markets, continuing to prop them up for the current retirees.
You want to check out Superannuation in Australia.
It's been a pretty successful program to reduce the amount of support retirees need.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia
From :
https://www.aman-alliance.org/Home/ContentDetail/97783#
"At the other end of the scale are Australia, Chile, Iceland, Ireland and South Korea, with spending on pensions below 4% of GDP, albeit for different reasons."
Singapore started earlier with national pension schemes - the caning laws and extreme policing aside, the financials of Singapore and support for the population through jobs and life is worth a serious look.
Australia has the 1907 Harvester case that set minimum wage to be indexed at a level which would supposedly allow an unskilled labourer to support a wife and three children, to feed, house, and clothe them. By the 1920s it applied to over half of the Australian workforce. It became known as the ‘basic wage’.
That's been tweaked since, but it still carries weight in wage setting and goes a long way to explaining a lack of tipping culture in Australia.
I tried to bookmark this with Karakeep, but the URL ended up being this; https://yourusername.github.io/2100/history/