#xhxhxhx #fighting the good fight
@argumate is tired of my neoliberal bullshit
The threat of new entrants keeps monopolists on their toes. Deep, liquid, and liberal capital markets ensure that the entrants always have access to deep pools of money.
Deregulation is good, privatization is good. Private firms do what public firms don’t. There were too many mines and rail lines, too many plants, too many lines, too many products, and too many employees. There are still too many post offices and airlines.
Norton Villiers Triumph was a mistake. British Leyland was a mistake. British Aerospace was a mistake. British Airways was a mistake. British Steel was a mistake. British Rail was a mistake. British Coal was a mistake. There was much to be liquidated, and much that was not.
Deregulating the railroads was a good thing. Rate setting, employment, and capital investment did not need to follow the priorities of the regulators. It could follow demand instead, and liquidate everything that was not worth the cost. And the Bell System breakup was a wash.
I don’t know whether the app market works the same way, but you’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical of state monopolies and state regulation of private carriers. It doesn’t usually work well.
I’m always eager for your bullshit! :)
It’s certainly easy to point to examples of successful deregulation and privatisation, and China could benefit from a whole heap of that right now.
It’s also possible to point to awful failures of privatisation where the state ends up subsidising private companies to do the same job more expensively, typically due to other natural monopoly constraints that make it impossible to have a truly competitive market.
But back to Apple, that may actually be an example of an overly-regulated market, just the regulation is being done by a (huge) company, not the state.
While the app market seems free and competitive as absolutely anyone can make an app and try to sell it, Apple has absolute discretion on which apps they approve for sale and can deny you at any time based on criteria they don’t even have to reveal. They use this power to protect their monopoly, but this can make it very risky to innovate as you have to develop the entire app and submit it for approval and only then once the entire development costs have been paid will you find out if Apple will let you sell it or not.
Then of course if you make something amazingly brilliant and lots of people buy it, Apple take 30% of your revenues in exchange for doing absolutely nothing :|
The app store itself is a terrible piece of software, but you can’t make a better app store and charge more competitive rates as Apple won’t let you.
Basically if the tech giants were states they would not be very good ones.
monopolists are not kept on their toes because they use their glut of market power and collude with related monopolies in order to destroy or consume all newcomers. tech startup culture is about getting your company valuable enough for one of the agglomerates to notice you and perform extend-embrace-extinguish on your products in return for paying back your investors and yourself. the only exchange of value is in currency between the capitalists; the social value of the product is lost and even corrupted against the consumers.
the lifecycles of these giants are on a continental scale, they do everything they can to ensure that they themselves survive. all selective pressure has been lost, and these are in fact worse than the government because they have political power and simultaneously answer to none but their owners.
companies aren’t selected for market freedom or perfection, they’re selected for survival. the free market is an unstable equilibrium. at the very best you have different monopolists and monopolies at the helm, and that is not better.
IP, IP, IP
Those companies would be in a lot more precarious position if the state didn’t send PoliceMob after anyone who “violates” “ownership” of numbers.
And excuse me, but I’ve got to be the one to say this: not all startups
Some of us are actually trying to bring down some giants for being so shitty. The freedom of dying starving wolves is just a nice bonus compared to the livestock complacency of being a corp drone.
that is a good point, though i would not call it a necessary and sufficient condition for anticompetitive practices. you would agree with regulation of force, correct? i can’t picture ancapistan without companies having their own PoliceMobs, which may keep them from committing violence on each other (sans literal corporate warfare), but definitely does not keep them from protecting their own position against newcomers. the actual mob is a thing.
This margin is too narrow to contain a treatise on Non-Police Mob, other than that state enforcement of bans on drugs, gambling etc. make those industries both profitable and violent, thus in a certain way serving to protect the Mob.
A libertarian economy would need to be fragmented enough that no single actor could re-establish “effectively a regulatory state, no matter what one calls it de jure” and there are reasons to believe that private-as-in-privacy police and courts and polycentric law could be less vulnerable to monopolistic capture than state monopoly law.
Also, I consider Pure Ancapistan relatively unlikely as a lot of people seem to want different things and thus an actual libertarian society would probably be a patchwork of all kinds of systems, from Ancapistan somewhere to Ancomalia elsewhere and Consensual Social Democracy in its own place, the market for governance systems supplying the various demands competitively, and thus the existence of different systems throws a wrench into the plans of trying to model just a single one (I suspect it might possibly have a stabilizing effect, as the failures of one system could just destroy it without having massive effects on everyone else; think startups going bankrupt whereas the USSR was the equivalent of a “too big to fail” megacorp; and thus the overall system could figure out what actually works well; and less-than-destructive failures could be moderated by the alternatives, as the standard of living in $alternative_system effectively sets the floor for how terrible things could get in $another_system (and ancaps and ancoms seem to basically simply disagree on which system is the one where all the refugees from the other system’s Inevitable Failure would end up at)).
In fact, there’s an argument to be made that Scott’s Archipelago is basically very close to what an Actual Anarchist World (as opposed to various unrealistic utopias that are basically “what if everyone automagically suddenly agreed with us and coordinated perfectly in implementing it?”) might be expected to look like.
I agree with regulation of force, but I really want to see alternative ways of regulating it because I’m highly suspicious of the claim that “The State is best supplier of that service and the fact that it has been violently suppressing competition is totally not in any way related to its degree of confidence in how well it effectively believes it could compete against consensual alternatives”. And when one looks at the period of history closest to “companies having their own PoliceMobs” which is still in any way relevant to modern society, the state was there watching the back of those companies, thus effectively subsidizing their ability to do violence and passing the costs of that enforcement to taxpayers and other innocent victims.
i agree that prohibitions protect and nurture organized crime, but that wasn’t how organized crime got started. the irish mafia came before prohibition. i don’t know enough about the time period to say more, but i would think the only prohibition in effect at the time was on good jobs for irish workers. that might be isomorphic to substance prohibitions, i don’t know.
scott’s archipelago rests on a meta-state, unigov, which is a minarchist complete monopoly on inter-state force with universal community taxes for coordination, externalities, and an enforcing military. i would hesitate to call it anarchist.
though i haven’t seen a working state yet, i believe technology can enable one just as you believe technology can enable a working anarchy. friendly ai is the problem of good governance.
my main concerns with states and their alternatives are:
- protection against harm and interventions to reduce expressed harm
- increasing freedom of behavior and movement
- counteracting externalities
- counteracting poverty and inequity, necessary for the above
- increasing perfection of markets
- reducing anticompetitive practices, necessary for the above
- reducing cognitive complexity, i.e. different standards of information and behavior, complex standards (this is not done well by central authorities or otherwise, possibly the only solution is intelligence enhancement)
- reducing coordination costs of all of the above
a lot of it has to do with providing public goods, which benefit everyone and can be paid for by no one in particular.
there are probably more. with foot-voting, tax evasion is a concern. basic income is a strong intuition for me. i don’t see how basic income can be reliably funded without a simple universal progressive tax, and i don’t see how a universal tax can be levied without a universal centralized monopoly on force.
aside: advertising and applied memetics in general are massive issues for me. which side wins is a priori neutral save for those with more resources being more likely to succeed. all that is produced then is a massive negative externality in coercion, cognitive load, misinformation, tribal polarization, anti-competition, resource costs, security vulnerabilities, i hate it i hate it i hate it. ad blockers are certainly a blessing, but they’re only individual-level solutions, while the problems are with the society that enables and lives by them. off-topic, though…
a micro/transaction-based system might have some improvements, it certainly would for removing the parasite of advertising from the otherwise-starving face of media (at least, small media, big media can go choke). i am hesitant to go down that route, though. it has dystopic feels if there is any coercive pressure (though to some extent this would be replacing taxation?), poverty in general has to be addressed, and administrative/coordination costs have not been addressed yet.
now i’m basically spewing disconnected thoughts. i will leave this here.
The ILA had bought off the politicians. That’s exactly what I’m talking about; good government is a public good, bad government is a private good, thus the former will always be undersupplied and the later oversupplied. The politicians helped pass the costs of organized crime onto citizens, whereas in hypothetical Anarchistan the honest businesses and citizens would be able to wage war on the ILA without politicians and their police being there to stop them.
Scott’s version of the Archipelago features Unigov, and even I suspect that Firewall might be necessary, but the basic anarchist idea is that the absence of states would render it unprofitable to try to re-establish states. David Friedman’s claim seems to basically be that genuine polycentrism would turn good law into a private good and bad law into a public good, and while I lack the qualifications to evaluate it properly, it at least sounds very interesting.
(Firewall, being an organization with a strictly restricted purpose which would have to be internally tailored to resist attempts at co-option to serve private interests, would be an interesting problem to solve but a very vital problem nonetheless. I’m not saying it would necessarily be solvable, but if it isn’t, we’re fucked anyway so one might as well operate off the assumption that the world can be saved and the only question is “how”.) (And even semi-georgist Unigov taxing land and common pool resources to do its very limited functions with otherwise a total hands-off approach would probably be Least Bad State, especially compared to what we have now. My anarchism will be pragmatic or it will not get anything done.)
Most of the things you listed are things existing states tend to suck at. Open source etc. seems to show that under conditions of sufficient material abundance, prosocial motivations combined with reputation economies can help incentivize the creation of public goods. Then there’s also the fact that any inefficiency in the market is theoretically an opportunity to make a profit if the inefficiency can be solved at less cost than it itself causes. Crowdfunding, for example, is one neat solution facilitated by modern technology reducing transaction costs and basically making copyright totally unnecessary for the “find out how art-makers get paid” purpose and exposing its true “find out how cronyists can extract maximum rents” purpose.
Basic income is obviously a problem because you can’t give people free money without taking it from others in some form (otherwise the money would just be worthless), but a possible alternative would be making some things so cheap that people can easily access their necessities. States tend to be terrible in this regard; due to regulatory capture etc. they don’t really have the incentives to safeguard commons but instead have historically systematically worked to fence them in and hand them to cronies (inclosure acts, intellectual property, etc.). And due to the monopoly on violence they can get away with it, but people who are dedicated to defending their commons from external seizure would be less likely to be worth messing with if there weren’t such big monopolistic organizations to render their resistance ineffectual. I’d expect an Actual Anarchist society to feature a lot of sharing as supporters of welfare could construct communities to do it voluntarily, and when someone wants to call themselves a king the anarcho-syndicalist communes could just disregard their claims and keep doing what they were doing, knowing that there isn’t enough violence inherent in the system to disrupt their utopias.
(A darker, more cynical possibility might be that nobody actually wants to help others, and superficially well-intentioned welfare states are a simple accidental side-effect of status signaling, and the inability to maintain the structures that keep them up would reveal the true preferences for dog-eat-dog brutality that people have underneath. That being said, even I, who have been described as “the most Slytherin/Slytherin person I’ve seen”, don’t believe freed humans would actually be like that.)
The argument that foot-voting and thus tax evasion would be a significant problem is true if one accepts some basic premises of the present system, but I doubt the strength of those basic premises under possible alternatives. Unregulated free-as-in-speech currency could reduce the power of financial rentseekers when people could just switch to some other means of exchange for their own needs. And without the state to enforce the property of absentee owners and pass the costs of citizens, capital-holders would need to be worth keeping around and non-value-creating rentseeking where some asshole simply calls themselves the Owner and wants to extract money from people without doing anything useful would be a lot more vulnerable to people just deciding that such shit wouldn’t fly. Thus, actually value-creating businesses could continue to operate within win-win frameworks, while artificially uppropped rentiers would be more precarious, and the system would have an incentive to create such win-win frameworks for people to operate in.
The problems of advertising and such things also apply to states as well; a lot of money and effort is wasted on democratic politics because whoever wins the election gets to pick their neighbors’ pockets, and thus it reallocates resources from productive activities to what’s basically thievery on an organized scale.
Then there’s the question of people optimizing for monetary gain over eudaimonia (”I am a contract-drafting EM…”), and I have a vague intuition that the decoupling of money from eudaimonia is an important factor, and if people were free to choose between systems they would probably prefer the ones that supply more eudaimonia and the exchange rate of money and eudaimonia would fluctuate freely, thus eradicating this particular failure mode. The failure mode of some people disregarding eudaimonia and optimizing for taking over the world would still persist, but that’s what Firewall/FAI is for. We can’t have everything, and even states-as-they-exist are vulnerable to the exact same processes (as anyone who has played 4X games knows, governments which sacrifice power for eudaimonia inevitably get outcompeted by those who don’t).
Poverty in general isn’t actually that much of an issue assuming near-future technology and absence of distorting factors. Most people can do something productive (as creation of material value grows ever more automated, they can switch to creating immaterial value instead, and prices should simply go down and down), and most people prefer to take care of people in their communities, and thus we should technically be in a better position than ever to eradicate poverty-as-in-deprivation. The problem is the allocation, and it seems that states mostly serve the interests of those who wish to see everything allocated to themselves (be they crony capitalists or redwashed rentiers). Any kind of centralization in power is probably dangerous (even if it may be sometimes necessary), and thus states are kind of not helping with this issue.
Of course, this is all just the type of vulgar theory which is mostly only good for eulering people.
(Also, as an interesting aside, the way people found startups to get bought out by the big tech monopolies seems entertainingly similar to how people built fake refineries just so they could sell them to Standard Oil and trick away a share of its monopoly profits. In a certain way the market is already making the corps bleed money everywhere even though in practice that “everywhere” tends to mean only “skilled programmers” (although programmers in turn create more jobs in the service sector than other fields, because we’re lazy af and like to pay people to do things we don’t feel like doing) while the government’s biggest contribution is upholding the patents and other bullshit that only help anti-competitive practices.)
(via metagorgon)
2 weeks ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist · 100 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
