#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.
(via metagorgon)
3 weeks ago · 100 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from metagorgon and added:The ILA had bought off the politicians. That’s exactly what I’m talking about; good government is a public good, bad...
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collapsedsquid reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:Argh Archipelago thing.That thing just is entirely missing the point. It does not solve the problems that governance...
- metagorgon said: it is not well-embedded in my brain, but of course i agree
gcu-sovereign reblogged this from metagorgon and added:Point of diction: I thought the preferred term was ancapistan?
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peopleneedaplacetogo said: The trouble with railways is they compete with hugely subsidised roads; funding them entirely out of user willingness to pay only makes sense in general if roads are funded the same way.
xhxhxhx liked this- argumate reblogged this from xhxhxhx and added:
I’m always eager for your bullshit! :)It’s certainly easy to point to examples of successful deregulation and...
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Railways and postal services are meant to ship goods and people efficiently. Efficiency means that services are provided...
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tropylium reblogged this from neoliberalism-nightly and added:Amusingly, I think it’s obviously the case that fees for state services should not directly reflect actual costs. They...
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neoliberalism-nightly reblogged this from tropylium and added:There are reasons for state service to make a profit, since fees are less distortionary than taxes, and the ability to...
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rock-a-la-carte said: In the US there are (or at least have been) restrictions on growing certain things for your own consumption (famously, wheat) justified on the theory that to take yourself out of the market also affects interstate commerce, so can be regulated- Show more notes