I'm pretty sure that if the anti-trust litigation in 2001 hadn't battered microsoft then tech wages would not be as high today. Competition among employers is good for wages, and the fewer and bigger the employers, the less the competition.
I continued to be surprised by how much they got away with and how little in the way of consequences there seems to have been. After his involvement in the scandal, Lazlo Bock got a book deal for a work celebrating Google’s HR practices.
Eric Schmidt got a book deal and general global elite status despite writing an email acknowledging that what they are doing was illegal and asking to stop writing about what they were doing.
Warren's motivation behind breaking the Googles of the world up is to .... wait for it, ensure that the already overpaid tech workers at Google, get paid "free-market" wages, because if Warren is known for anything these days, it is for fighting for the pay-rights of Google employees
The underlying issue is that while the Sanders campaign’s collective bargaining agreement with its staff union sets hourly pay above $15, there are also salaried workers on the team.
Your statement is at minimum misleading, according to the article you linked.
EDIT: Reading it further, it's a terrible article. Yglesias is a hack. No Sanders fan, but this is yellow journalism.
It doesn't say anything on Warren (who I happen to dislike intensely). It's on Sanders, and it's misleading because the article itself notes that Sanders is trying to make it right, and that it's on a technicality that it happened in the first place.
It's always a technicality, and with enough pressure, any company is likely to "make it right". The point is that Sanders' demagoguery of companies exploiting workers mismatches with his own campaign's actions.
Likewise, Warren can rail on and on about underpaid, "exploited" workers, but her own campaign staff are subject to this, as it is an industry standard way to run campaigns!! They like to ignore free market rates for other companies, but insist on paying free market rates for their campaigns - hypocrites.
What's stunning about Warren is her 180 on just about everything, from when she was an unbiased researcher/academic at Harvard, to her new Avatar as a progressive, socialist Democrat.
1. She argued FOR women to stay at home, instead of the universal child care narrative adopted now [1]
2. She's not for collage debt forgiveness or even for subsidies. She argues for students to work through college, and pay their own way, contrary to her position on the matter now. [2]
3. She's been a steadfast capitalist calling for limited welfare, v.s. the hyper sociologist welfare state she's proposing now
Not sure why you are ignoring the fact that Sanders and Warren don't have stockpiled profits or billionaire managers taking home the cash not being paid to staffers.
If they could they would. Who do you think is more powerful, the billionaire, or the politician who asserts his will on the billionaire? Case (s) in point:
1. Amazon/AWS losing the Pentagon cloud deal to Microsoft [1]
2. Amazon driven out of NYC by AOC and co. [2]. And still people think Bezos is the powerful one.
I am not quite sure that smaller companies can offer higher wages.
Also, keep in mind a story of Bell Labs - the innovation power house hugely responsible for tens of Nobel Prize winning inventions such as transistor and solar cells. You need an insanely rich and powerful parent company to fund something like this (only Alphabet is kind pf doing it these days)
Bell Labs was prohibited from commercializing UNIX thanks to an antitrust settlement, which led to it being widely distributed to both academic and commercial users (who could commercialize it themselves). This led to the Berkeley Software Distribution of UNIX, as well as numerous improvements by both academic and commercial users sharing patches. According to ESR, when the settlement was made irrelevant by the Bell breakup, "AT&T promptly rushed to commercialize Unix System V—a move that nearly killed Unix." http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/ch02s01.html
Funding and profit motive are different things and optimize for different results.
There is a difference between big companies and monopolies. Big companies will likely always be the ones offering the highest salaries and they'll always exist. Once they monopolize the labor market though: they'll no longer have a need to offer those wages as high (even if they're the highest within the market).
How do you break up alphabet?they will just move their corporation over seas, set up in africa and avoid any monopoly breakers. The government has no power over these companies. They would have to raid the offices and send the ceo to prison before alphabet agrees to break their monopoly.
Restructuring the company as Alphabet with a set of subsidiaries was a start to setting up lines to divide the company along.
The way to divide up Google is into the ad network, the search engine, operating systems, and everything else. Allow them to contract each other on public FRAND terms to start with, but setup annual reviews to consider a bigger hammer.
If they play games with moving house to avoid jurisdiction, ban payments to and from them.
You can also say the search engine and operating system drive the ad network.
Google the search engine could charge an ad network a lot for the right to show sponsored results and provide analytics.
Android/Chrome could charge a lot for user data, analytics, have their own mobile ad network and app store. Android could also start charging a licensing fee to vendors
The market didn't always work that way. Until Google monopolized it, search engines and ad networks were independent pieces competing on an open market. For example, one of early Google's successes was getting Yahoo to license its search engine.
> Until Google monopolized it, search engines and ad networks were independent pieces competing on an open market
It was always a mixture of both scenarios.
Yahoo prior to using AltaVista, Inktomi or Google had its own search tech - going back to 1995 - and its own advertising network.
AltaVista had its own search tech and its own ad network.
Lycos, a top 5 portal at the time, had its own search tech and its own ad network.
GoTo.com, very popular in its day, was both a search engine (acquired) paired up with its own famous ad system.
For several years AOL flirted on & off again with their own search tech, initially based on WebCrawler, prior to and after their deal with Excite. They also ran their own ad network.
Google tried monetising search in other ways and apart from ads, none of them would have kept the company profitable. Even duckduckgo which considers itself the "anti Google" gets all its money from ads.
Of course an ad network would pay a search engine for clicks (and a premium for exclusivity, perhaps). There's certainly some synergy, but it's also quite possible to run them as separate businesses.
Operating systems might have to get lumped into the 'everything else' bucket if they don't generate enough revenue through charging manufacturers or getting paid by ad networks.
Splitting up these things may not make any of the markets (search, ads, OSes, other consumer services, other enterprise/cloud services) more competitive, but it would prevent using monopoly positions in search and ads to subsidize Google products in other markets.
Structural separation: you can't run a search engine and at the same time services that are the subject of it. For Amazon, you can't run the marketplace and at the same time sell own-brand (AmazonBasics) products. For Apple you can't run the app store and also sell apps.
It's in Warren's program, although of course the devil is in the details. Lina Khan is the thought leader on these issues (I am sure there are others, but like Hal Varian and Carl Shapiro, they tend to get coopted by the monopolists).
This is a completely destructive plan that will enable international competitors who aren’t subject to it to simply take the tech industry away from the US.
A lot of people just don’t get it. The US is the most powerful country in the word because of its technology and economy. Losing that will pretty much mean that others (likely non-democracies) will rule the world
Yeah that's not how laws work. Sure, they can move overseas, but for the business they conduct in the US they would need to comply with the post-breakup laws (assuming that happened, I don't think it will).
And if they don't comply? Fairly simple. Indictments. Raids. Arrests. Asset seizures. Public shaming of employees and executives working for the company. Etc.
Moving jurisdictions isn't a magic spell that grants protection. As long as a company is deriving value from something in a jurisdiction, then the government of that jurisdiction has power over that value because they can physically control it.
Companies have outsized power these days imo, but they still aren't at the point to compete with the United States military and resist the actual violence that be visited on their assets if they do not comply
The same way that most companies end up when they leave California. The engineers don't move away. They start up new companies that end up being competition to their old employer. Half the time, after some years, the big old company buys out the new competition and ends up with offices in the area again.
This happens all the time in the space industry lol.
There's a sense in which both systems tax ordinary folk to pay for science.
In the Bell Labs system, the tax is the monopoly price paid by folks on their phone bill. In the other system the taxes are collected by the government.
There's a lot of money to be made migrating such taxes to the private sector where private individuals can take a cut.
This is one of the reasons it's often profitable to campaign against things like the public funding of science (e.g. the recent attacks on the NSF).
It's about 50k employers versus 5k employers, not 500 versus 5.
The real effective argument/consideration IMO is the question of whether the technology MARKET is more prosperous /because/ of the centralization, and therefore leading to higher demand/wages, or vice versa.
Companies have been enjoying historically easy access to capital for years now. In fact, that was the prescription and treatment to remedy the GR to good results for corporations.
Just look at the recent IPOs. We had one go sour and it highlights how rare those occurrences are.
This is only surprising if you subscribe strictly to Sinclair's quote:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
In reality, many many people work at jobs that they don't believe in. I personally haven't been able to hack it - I'm too stubborn to keep my mouth shut at appropriate times.
But ultimately, people can and will vote against "their own self interest". I vote for and fund environmental parties, despite that meaning I will personally lose out in a lot of ways, because it's the right thing to do.
That's part of what being a mature adult is. Recognizing that it's not all about your personal status and/or livelihood.
The quote is highly contingent on one thing, that a man's salary is hard to replace. For most of humanity, it is. I'd wager if you work at a FANNG company you don't view it that way. Hard to get quite as much, maybe, but getting some making $250k to move to $200k a year is much, much different than someone moving from $45 a year to $30k a year, or $25k a year.
"FWIW I don't work in adtech, I think it's bollocks and that everyone doing it should stop."
We should try to follow the money from adtech to those who are providing their life blood: companies buying advertising (which is nearly all companies).
As long as there is a demand for advertising, some people will work at adtech companies and others who service that need.
That's not to say that anyone who cares about privacy and is against manipulating others through advertising shouldn't be discouraged from working at adtech companies: they absolutely should. But the situation is similar to people working as part of drug cartels: they are meeting a demand, and no amount of finger wagging at them is going to change most of their minds.
For serious change to happen we have to find and address the root issues, which are really on the demand side rather than (ultimately) at the supply side.
It goes pretty fast if you have kids in the US. We have twins and preschool alone is 700/month. You're also supposed to save like 500/month/kid for college - we have 3 so that's another 1500/month. Minivan to lug everyone around is 600/month.
Student loans can pay public school tuition, and anyway $100K plus a decade of investment interest is quite generous for public school, or private school with a scholarship (aka not a diploma mill) or ivy league school with financial aid for non-1%ers. And counting both daycare and saving college tuition is double-counting on an annalized basis.
A minivan costs $600/month only if you buy new and trade in for another new car after 5 years. It's under $400 if you keep if for 7-10 years.
Your $2800/month is only $1000-$2000 in the real world.
I acknowledge your point. Then I wonder how much of that is that in a consumption oriented economy, there will always pop up services that will claim to provide enough marginal value to absorb all otherwise unspent cash. I acknowledge that it is especially hard to “skimp” on spending for the people one cares about — so one might feel guilty over any cash flow “not used”. It feels like a different version of hedonic adaptation, harder to make decisions in.
"Sure, people who are actually earning biscuits as a wage are basically slaves"
That is really an odd thing to say, even if people say it constantly as though it were obvious. What do you think the turnover is at minimum wage jobs? When you last went looking for one, how many different employers did you apply for? How far did you have to go to fill out applications for a bunch?
I think that's missing the point that should be obvious that people, including you, are simply misidentifying "self-interest" as if a person was an abstraction of an employee.
Every person has many interests. You have an interest in a salary, but you can still get a different job if necessary. You have an interest in staying out of prison that probably overrides doing what your boss says. You have an interest in your retirement savings, but you also have an interest in clean water. Nobody wants a company to poison the river in their town just to get 0.1% more of a dividend. Often people claim that others behave in this way, but it's absurd.
The peculiar mental state people seem to be in when talking politics is that they think they have an identity as a member of a class, rather than a human being that belongs to many classes at the same time.
I guess people talk about intersectionality, but I think that is a way to compartmentalize being human as a special thing special people do on special occasions.
>In reality, many many people work at jobs that they don't believe in. I personally haven't been able to hack it - I'm too stubborn to keep my mouth shut at appropriate times.
I'm in that situation, and I don't shut up either. I can't even count the amount of times I've said something along the lines of "this is not the way to do things, I can do it anyway since you pay me for it but I think it's a bad decision".
My company basically just humors me by hearing my complaint and doesn't make any change whatsoever. I get my salary anyway.
It's not the best situation to be in, but I'm sure it's not uncommon at all...
Maybe they are donating to candidates who they believe are good for everyone ( including themselves ) and not just good for their employers who could care less about them in most cases. Voting on one issue is a sure way to get a candidate who is against you when they ignore that issue.
also donating to reality-based candidates; even those who want to break up larger companies at least align themselves with a bit more with science and scepticism in things as they are. And to be honest as an employee if you end up in Facebook.codebase.1 or Facebook.codebase.2 who cares, your downside is minimal.
Pretty telling that the idea of voting against one's own financial self-interest, even as a single part of a large platform, is a wild idea to these business journalists.
Having a few large companies that have colluded to keep salaries down by having no poaching agreements doesn’t seem it’s good for tech workers. Having a bunch of companies and a competitive labor market is much better for tech workers.
Why should capitalist do-nothings and mangament capture all the wealth of a company? Lower pay for labor is an acceptable consequence of lowering consumer prices, not a goal in itself.
It actually can be self-interested. If you work for AWS, why would you want to be inside of Amazon, who you subsidize with your bsuiness’s profits? A lot of the subsidiaries would be massive companies in their own.
Yes, and no. Megacorps are many smaller entities, sometimes at war with eachother.
Maybe it makes sense to vote for breaking up the mothership if that means your product stays alive. See: the retardedly long list of things Google killed...
One thing I've definitely noticed is the culture of fear in tech about not appearing "progressive enough". Given that tech workers, especially in the bay area tend to come from fairly privileged backgrounds with relative financial stability and also live in safer areas they tend to underestimate the importance of reducing crime and maintaining a strong economy.
This definitely provides a "psychological safety net" that tends to push a lot of these people to vote for more radical leftist candidates that may be directly against their self (and future children's) interests.
Or alternatively, they believe that it's in the collective best interest of the country and future generations to elect candidates who are proposing stronger regulation to address income equality, rather than candidates who propose that income equality either doesn't exist, doesn't matter, or will sort itself out without regulation.
Your phrasing suggests that you think someone like me who believes in the strong regulation approach is just "virtue signaling," but I would suggest that it's because I've looked back at the US in the last century and couldn't help but observe that there's a strong and consistent correlation between market regulation and the economic success of the lower-to-middle class. Income inequality dropped dramatically with the New Deal, the notional "American Dream" largely came about in the post-WWII economy -- and the move toward radical deregulation and trickle-down economics in the 1980s coincides with a sharp rise in income inequality, a concentration of wealth at the highest ends, and dramatic fraying of safety nets for the lowest ends. It is not unreasonable to look at all that and say, "Hey, maybe there was something to that whole 'market regulation' thing after all."
Your stereotype seems directly opposite to the one of tech workers being right-leaning libertarians. If people opposite to you on the political spectrum hate them for opposite reasons, maybe people just envy the money and influence they have and everything else is an excuse.
I don't get why this is so shocking. The future of the company I work at is not the most important political issue to me. I don't want to have a good job in a bad country.
I'll happily vote for Elizabeth Warren and if she does break up the company I work at I'll deal with that when it happens.
Breaking up big tech companies is undoubtedly good for the workers, create more competition in hiring. It would probably send money downwards and be a huge boon to innovation tbh.
Big tech companies are able to try 100 things out instead of 1 because they can rely on their stable revenue streams to pay the bills. I’m not sure how it would be a boon to innovation but am open to learning why you think that.
The major damage big tech is doing is in my opinion dodging regulations or inventing business streams that have no regulation, moving as fast as possible to get a solid footing, and then asking the government to regulate them. Therefore, they lock the smaller guys out. Therefore, there’s little to no competition.
> Big tech companies are able to try 100 things out instead of 1 because they can rely on their stable revenue streams to pay the bills. I’m not sure how it would be a boon to innovation but am open to learning why you think that.
Is Apple trying 100 things out or are they hoarding insane amounts of cash in Ireland?
Say you write some code that increases conversions by 0.01%. Thats worth 10 bucks to momandpop.com compared with millions to Amazon. No wonder that programmers can make more at Amazon.
Analogy doesn't really hold up. Increasing conversions by 0.01% probably takes an hour at momandpop.com and maybe a year or more at Amazon. Not to mention low-hanging fruit already being picked at large corps.
A lot of things at big companies aren't ever going to be worth doing at little companies. In cloud companies they spend tens of millions of dollars going after 1-2% efficiency gains that really make a big difference when many of these little gains are all stacked and applied to billions of dollars of equipment. Maybe if these companies got broken up, several little companies could sell these little gains, but that seems much less likely than one of the broken up companies naturally becoming big again and doing it themselves.
This field has a ton of natural incentives to scale as big as possible. I feel like the main beneficiaries of breaking up big tech companies are business people and lawyers getting to insert themselves everywhere to interface between groups that used to be the same company.
I think you've proved my point. Working for momandpop.com produces value at $10 an hour. Working for Amazon and assuming 2000 working hours in a year produces value at $500 an hour. And that's if that 0.01% improvement is worth only one million dollars.
Also, if you need the best database developer, they might find their own lucrative vertical and/or disruptive passion project. It makes great sense to counter the potentially hypertensive corporate rigamarole with a fat paycheck. Similarly, if it would have convinced Elon Musk to forget about this EV thing and take a well funded engineering department at Daimler, well that might've felt like winning the hiring lottery.
I have a mathematical model that would explain this behavior, but I have no idea how much it corresponds to reality.
Imagine that there is a psychological line that most bosses want to reach, for example "to become a millionaire". This desire is the same whether you live in a richer or poorer country, and whether you have twenty or two thousand employees. The word "millionaire" is simply a magical word which does not automatically adjust to e.g. "3.2-million-aire" just because you have more employees or live in a different country. Also, "millionaire" these days in Eastern Europe refers to million euro, just like in Western Europe, and not much different from million dollars in USA, i.e. it is country-independent.
Now if we assume that the million is a fixed psychological goal, this is easier to reach in a large company than in a small one. If you have two thousand employees, you need to make 500 euro per employee. If you are okay with becoming a millionaire in five years, that's 100 euro per employee per year, which is barely noticable. But if you have twenty employees, during five years it makes 10 000 euro per employee per year. They are going to feel that. (Also, the higher the costs and average salaries in a country, the less the employees will feel those 100 or 10 000 euro per year.)
According to this model, employees in small companies in Eastern Europe should be paid very little. But their bosses should still become rich.
> Breaking up big tech companies is undoubtedly good for the workers, create more competition in hiring.
Many of the largest tech companies are only large because of their cost centers. If we split up google what would likely happen is that youtube and gmail would simply die.
If we split up google what would likely happen is that youtube and gmail would simply die
Or compete on a level playing field with Vimeo, Fastmail and so on. Everyone wins if Google is split up. Even Google shareholders, who will finally get some nice dividends when the ad business money isn't being diverted to prop up the rest of it.
Google recently announced a 25 billion dollar stock buyback so investors are definitely getting some returns. Also, I'm pretty sure most investors are happy with their investments in waymo considering it has been valued by some analysts at over a hundred billion dollars despite not making any revenue yet as far as I know and I've read they have invested over 5 billion dollars into it which is pretty much out of the realm of what even SoftBank would invest in a company with no revenue yet.
A decade of working in Bay Area tech meant watching kids of rich parents get rich off dubious business plans by creating a startup in San Francisco while their parents buy them a house, pay their expenses and tap into their networks for seed funding all the while the company loses money for over a decade while they become millionaires from selling shares during rounds of fundraising. Then I go for the big guy where they are profitable, but then we are chasing the quarterly earning report because we are scared of what Jim Cramer will say about us instead of the everyday impact on the people who use our products. Yeah, I'm disillusioned with it all. I just want to practice my craft to build useful software for people and live a nice life.
> we are scared of what Jim Cramer will say about us instead of the everyday impact on the people who use our products
Reminds me of a thing I read by someone that worked Broadway for at that time 40 years. He said the best thing for Broadway would be to take the NYT art critics out for a ride in the country. Because no one was making plays for the regulars or the tourists, they were making plays for the critics. Same complaints have been made about the wine industry.
Guy made a comment about that, said they've been running cats for the last 1 years because they are afraid to try anything new. If they put on a new play and the critics don't give it a top rating no one comes and they lose money.
I'm not entirely convinced breaking up Big Tech will be a net benefit, in fact that position weakened my support for Warren.
But then again, I also don't work for a FAANG (I do work for a big corporation, and they don't need broken up, they're imploding just fine on their own), so I wouldn't be included in that statistic anyway.
- US short sellers dream: will truly and finally cripple the US and its dominant IT companies; long overdue as US is at most a medium level country
- huge rise in Chinese IT companies; left without competitors assume the Chinese giants will simply control everything and everyone; a new era of Chinese world dominance begins
Are "we" backing these candidates because of their social policies, or because they're going to be the best leaders at this critical point in the fight against the climate collapse?
As a group tech workers are highly educated in the STEM fields. We understand the science and accept the conclusions. So we know what we need to do.
That and Warren in particular is positioned as being so fantastically competent that it's very easy to see our group getting behind her.
To some degree I agree that some of these companies have too much control over users and collect too much information and give users too little control in that.
With that said, I feel there’s some irony in this. These companies essentially have encouraged and enabled these attitudes in their workforce thinking this would make the employers look like they shared the same goals and had to good of workers in mind. Essentially they thought coöpting the workforce was possible without negative outcomes. History shows this doesn’t work, unless you are a tyrant and have absolute control and have real ways to control them outside of work.
For example Mao could have his PLA and could have his Red Guards and use them to achieve whatever policy he wanted, no matter how ill advised.
Technology really does have the power to change the world and the lives of the people in it profoundly. It is important to recognize that some of those changes are areas of public interest, public concern, and even public policy. The government will-- and rightly should-- demand that such changes be shaped not to cause unnecessary harm.
There’s nothing wrong with voting against your own (direct) interest. In fact what goes against your direct interest can be more than made up for indirectly by making a fairer or generally better society.
Obvious example: green energy, generally speaking, is less economically efficient than fossil fuels (yes, it’s getting better everyday, that’s not the point). We are probably all going to be slightly worse off economically while we transition to green energy. But that doesn’t mean the transition is not worth doing to avoid all the long lasting, externalized negative side effects of fossil fuels.
I'm sorry but this article is beyond stupid. It is a narrative in search of data.
Opening line:
>Silicon Valley software engineers seem more loyal to the left wing of the Democratic Party than to their own employers.
Then proceeds to include no data that any donations are actually from software engineers.
Then the actual amounts:
>Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, who has called for breaking up Facebook, Amazon and Google, raised more than $173,000 from tech industry employees in the third quarter, according to Bloomberg News’s analysis of public data on political contributions from employees at 10 large tech companies.
$173,000? Candidates raising money is usually discussed in terms of millions raised. so 173k? how is that newsworthy? that could be 173 ppl giving 1k.
I wonder what the support is after Warren revealed her tax plans?
I would think that increasing the capital gains taxes and requiring taxes on stock appreciation regardless of they are sold would affect Silicon Valley workers who often have a large part of their competition as stocks/equity.
For that reason, big Wallstreet banks have threatened not to support Warren if she becomes the Democratic candidate. But apparently plenty of employees of those Wallstreet banks do support her for exactly that reason: they know better than anyone that the situation at the top of their employer is unhealthy.
It is odd that so many otherwise tech savvy people are supportive of 20th century solutions to 21st century problems (to borrow Andrew Yang's phrase).
People don't want to use the 4th best search engine or twitter or airbnb. We all know this. These kind of things are naturally winner take all and will pop up elsewhere on the global stage if we push them down here.
Instead, apply a VAT. This would be a productive and holistic solution to a 21st century problem.
Honestly, in a way, it is almost two sides of the same coin. Warren knows that breaking up a company will not pass muster through Congress, and we will settle on a compromise which is a VAT. On the other hand, if you start with a VAT, the compromise will be nothing
I prefer Andrew Yang's method of adding on a general value added tax in addition to providing a basic income. This ensures a distribution of wealth that guarantees a minimum base while not discouraging people from aiming higher by forcing a cap on income.
I support basic income, but I'm not a big fan of value added tax. It's a corporate tax that ends up being paid by consumers. Investments and buying abroad is often except, so it ends up as a somewhat regressive tax.
Let’s take the industry out of the equation: if you asked someone who studies political demographics what the likely politics of someone who is under-40, urban-dwelling with a STEM education, who generally work with (and/or for) immigrants... they wouldn’t hesitate to say left-leaning.
The industry’s youth and location alone are going to skew political demographics leftward no matter what.
And purely anecdotal... but I’ve noticed younger right wingers to be less enthralled by capitalism and market economics.
Disregard your SV stereotypes and think about San Francisco stereotypes. Or Oakland stereotypes. Or SF stereotypes from a generation back. They're still here. The bay area, despite being an insulated bubble, is still really not homogeneous. The media loves to portray it as homogeneous, but that's really not the case.
Libertarianism started on the far left - The "original libertarian", the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque, attacked Proudhon, the "original anarchist" for being a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian" for his regressive views on women.
Right-libertarianism was an attempt to unite the libertarian parts of the left with socially liberal elements on the right against authoritarian ideologies; their main distinction are views on property rights and on whether or not de jure vs. de facto rights matter most.
As such it is often hard to place people with libertarian views firmly on a traditional left-right axis. You'll find a variety ranging from the far left seeing private property as illegitimate restrictions on liberty (Dejacque applauded Proudhon's famous "property is theft"), to right wing libertarians who see private property as fundamental to liberty (often invoking e.g. Ayn Rand, Hayek and von Mises), to people in between who want various trade-offs (e.g. mostly protecting property rights but seeing a need for some level of welfare provisions)
My experience is that engineering in general tends to have a lot of socially liberal people, many of whom could probably be described as libertarian, but that the left/right position of their views is often a lot more ambiguous.
> Right-libertarianism was an attempt to unite the libertarian parts of the left with socially liberal elements on the right against authoritarian ideologies; their main distinction are views on property rights
I don't think this is correct at all. What's called right libertarianism or laissez-faire capitalism emerged in the mid 20th century (e.g. Ayn Rand). It stole the term which had historically been a left term and simply cleansed it of its critique of corporate power.
Corporations are authoritarian, anti-democratic organizations that exercise a great deal of control over our economic lives. Laissez-faire capitalists saw an opportunity to use Left anti-authoritarian concepts to attack democratic state controls and regulations on corporate power. Often they will employ some mental gymnastics to redefine corporations as extensions of individual rights, hence the John Galt cult of personality stuff. This is akin to calling feudalism "liberty" because, think of the rights of kings. As such we have entered an era of unparalleled corporate power, control and concentration of wealth.
What exposes the sheer fraud of "right libertarianism" in Silicon Valley is that much of SV was created by the state and continues to be subsidized to the tune of billions annually. Look up DARPA.[1] So they're not even against state capitalism.
It was Murray Rothbard that popularised the use of the term libertarian on the right. Rand very explicitly rejected the label when faced with it. You're right that she is an important figure for right-libertarians, but she was highly critical of them. The use of the term on the right somewhat predates Rothbard - e.g. Mencken used it, but never pushed the term publicly.
Rothbard, while highly critical of the left, did very explicitly seek some sort of rapprochement with left-libertarians. E.g. see "Left and Right: A Journal of Liberterian Thought" [1]. Here's a retrospective at the Mises institute[2] (with the caveat that it's the Mises Institute..).
While I sympathise with some of your criticism of right-libertarianism; I find their fetishistic approach to property rights highly flawed, for example, at the same time there are a lot of right-libertarians who are much more moderate and accept and understand the need for trade-offs rather than the kind of absolutist approach to property rights that e.g. Rand pushes.
Imagine if the mafia went around to collect protection money from business owners and then spent tiny percentage of that money funding various projects, many of which went nowhere and there are some projects that benefit their victims.
This is the setup you're in with the government. Wealthy people pay most of the taxes and support the government system. Tiny percentage of their confiscated wealth was apparently used to create the internet. Government was simply a middleman just like they are a middleman between people and construction companies when it comes to building roads.
People could have come together to create a non-profit that would do some basic research into various things. They could've pooled their money and paid for it collectively. However, you are already taxed, so why not use those funds to create an agency inside the government and do the same thing?
Free markets only work if transaction costs are reasonable.
I actually agree with you that the fundamental purpose of government is to be a middleman, but that is the most important thing in the world!
All the time people want to talk about negative externalities - lowering transaction costs is the ultimate positive externality, and it doesn't get accounted for on anyone's books, so people get deluded into thinking there is no return on tax money.
the term "Libertarianism" was leftist in the 19th century. Nowadays it refers to laisez-faire capitalism and the austrian school. Get on with the times people
Antitrust concerns are reasonably bipartisan. The democratic candidates are getting traction with antitrust platforms because the time is right and they’re the presidential challengers. If Obama was still president, Josh Hawley (for example) would be running a similar primary campaign, with similar success.
I doubt it. As someone outside the US looking in, real rage towards companies like Facebook/Google only really became a mainstream topic after Trump won.
The rage induced by that event got directed at Facebook initially and has now broadened to include all the big tech companies that profit from data collection.
If Hillary had won or in a theoretical world where Obama was still president then talk of breaking up Facebook/Google would still be a niche murmur.
Hi, I'm likely the only person here who has read the 1200 page book "Human Action" by Ludwig Von Mises on which libertarianism is based.
The book was published in 1949, and the premise which is exhaustively laid out is, if you CAN work, you should, and the government should interfere with its citizens the least amount possible.
These are reasonable principles, but two things happened.
One, the Republicans captured the Ron Paul/Tea Pary (Libertarian) movement of the early 2000s and tried to fold it into their party. Many of us left (including me), but it effectively dismantled the movement.
Second, it was less evident in the early 2000s, but, the premise of libertarianism becomes less and less valid every day. When Human Action was written, the need for physical labor was high, it was probably true that anyone who was able to work, could have found some job doing physical labor or menial jobs.
That's simply not true anymore. Physical labor is largely done by machines and SV is actively eating low skill jobs, such that the invariant of libertarinism--that there is always work-- is broken.
It's too late to edit; I'd like to add that another fundamental flaw of libertarianism is it always blames the job seeker. Despite macro-economic conditions, despite corruption, despite oppression, it always places the burden of economic problems on the lowest person with the least power. Your job was outsourced? It's your fault for not providing more value. The system is corrupt? Let's just ignore that; it's your fault for not providing more value.
In this way, Libertarians (of which I once was) are "useful idiots" for the ruling class-- it's always your fault for not serving the upper classes well enough.
(anecdotal insight here): Many people at tech companies are not software engineers. I believe they are more often to the left of the general tech workers. Tech workers can be pretty left still, but I have found to tend more libertarian/a-political.
In general though, many people employed at tech companies are young, coastal (by virtue of where they work), and work in cities. All those factors tend to skew more left.
I’ve seen a couple comments saying that it’s the non-SWE’s that are the liberal ones.
That’s a very different experience than my own, and that of my friends.
My experience: Designers tend to be pretty liberal. Product managers and other managers tend to be moderate (tend to be Biden and Buttigieg fans). Salespeople tend to be extremely conservative. Support is kind of all over the place. Engineers tend to be either diehard socialists or (and this is the minority) libertarian.
"diehard" seems like a stretch when you consider how much support there tends to be for unionisation (and most of us could get by on way less than we make, so it's not like we don't have to power to take some stands)... Lot of social democrats in my neck of the woods for sure but in US terms it'd be way more Warren than Sanders, and she is absolutely not a socialist from what I can see.
I meant socialist in the same way that Bernie Sanders seems to use it, which I have trouble distinguishing from Warren’s states policies. (I do agree that the traditional definition of word applies to neither Warren’s or Sanders’ policies for the most part. Except for the health insurance industry, where the proposal is nationalization.)
I should have said social democrat. Indeed, now that I think about it, few engineers would label themselves socialist. I don’t, though I am a Warren/Sanders supporter.
Left-wing views tend to be highly agreeable views and there's almost no discomfort or backlash in expressing them. IMO, it starts at the top with CEOS who do things like banning firearms sales after a mass shooting for huge PR gain, and propagates throughout the company.
Oh and if multiple execs call a meeting and were almost tearing up over an election loss (Google), I highly doubt i'd be comfortable even mentioning my political views, so the stats probably fail to mention people lying about their political views to avoid trouble.
In principle I agree with your point but imho our current president is an exception to that rule.
How often does a self-confessed sexual abuser get elected president?
And the sad thing is that comment of mine is not even slander - it’s a statement of fact, since the “Grab ‘em by the pussy” comment === admitting to being sexually abusive.
If I was a woman, and an exec, I would certainly be tearing up regardless of my political views.
You would need to look into the history of the Bay Area going back to at least the 1960's, and probably one or two decades further.
It's more a case of counter-culture vs. mainstream; with the tech scene appearing Left-leaning only to the extent that the Right tries to portray their agenda as the mainstream in the media. (The Left does that too, it's just that the Right has been more successful since about the 80's when the pols roped in the Christians. Before then, Christians mostly stayed out of politics. Mostly. E.g. "liberal" becoming a "dirty word", etc.)
That's why you see e.g. Left-wing sentiment and Libertarian sentiment (as well as Furry sentiment; pro-gun sentiment; anti-gun sentiment; weird-sex sentiment; non-binary-gender sentiment; ... I could go on at length. CA is a weird place, and SF is the weirdest place in CA (except for Berkeley)) in SV. Really, it's a political and social kaleidoscope out here. If it looks Blue or Red it's the tinted filter.
I think it's generational. SV in the Gen X era was highly libertarian. The Millenials in SV seem to be mostly left wing or even socialist. Broadly speaking that is, exceptions abound.
"Meritocracy is not as good an idea as it seems to be in practice"
Why not just consider that it is a label which may not apply to the reality you observe? Have we gotten to the point where considering that any X is not Y is considered a "no true Scotsman" fallacy?
The only problem with meritocracy is that it's unattainable in a society with inherited power differences. Other than that it would be a great idea. Just one that hasn't truly been tried outside limited organisations yet.
That definition was used for a very short time in the 90s. It's long since settled into "was a teenager in the new millennium", which means born early 80s to late 90s.
Gen Z, also known as iGen, was born in the new millennium.
The first time I heard the word millenial was 2017.
This world is weird. But in a world were people can choose their gender freely I think I can have the choice to use that word as I see fit. Feel free to do the same. ;)
In the 2004 presidential election, the San Jose districts had the highest turnout for the Libertarian candidate nationwide.
San Jose is still fairly Libertarian (the San Jose newspaper is still the most conservative in the Bay Area with a very Libertarian slant).
But the nexus of SIlicon Valley has been migrating north for a long time. SF has always been very liberal, and as the nexus of tech moves towards SF, so does it’s politics.
Both parties make strategic decisions about which voters they'll particularly target, and which they'll worry less about attracting.
In recent decades the Republican party has had some quite big successes taking a fairly anti-science stance - if a politician thinks creationism should be taught in school, or that climate change is a hoax, chances are they're republican rather than democrat. Neither GW Bush nor Trump marketed themselves as intelligent men, and they were successful despite that.
I think it's fairly understandable how that would sit poorly with STEM workers - even if many of them would naturally be conservative on fiscal issues.
I would need to find data to back this up, but my sense is that much of the political difference can be accounted for with demographics.
Tech workers as a group are younger than the population at large. Tautologically, the group excludes retirees, and as the industry has expanded over the past decades, it's growth has been fueled by hiring recent college graduates. Lower ages and higher levels of education are correlated with left-wing views in polling results.
If you controlled for age and education, I don't think you would see any ideological distinctions between tech workers and the rest of the population.
Are they? Or are left-wing SV tech workers just disproportionally cited in the press?
I know plenty of SV tech workers I'd call Libertarian, and even a few Trumpists, though the latter tend not to make a big show of it.
Maybe that's because of my age. But I think among the younger workers there's a much higher percentage of immigrants and I really doubt the "SV lefties" narrative holds for a majority of them (because they tend to come from pretty conservative societies and sought out the US for economic benefit).
I could, of course, be wrong in my hunches. In which case I'd love to see some sources.
1. Being in extremely left-wing Bay area with historic ties to the free speech movement. 2. They're not, it just benefits both the tech companies and the media to portray them that way.
Add in the visa/immigration issues. A large percentage of the workforce in SV is imported from outside the country. While the business wing of the Republican Party loves cheap labor, there are other wings that oppose it. Once upon a time the labor wing of the Democratic Party would have been against importing labor but the influence of that wing has waned considerably while the business wing has established itself in both major parties. If you're not a native born US citizen, a label that describes quite a few tech workers in the Valley, the left seems more aligned with your continued existence in the United States.
> "A large percentage of the workforce in SV is imported from outside the country."
Imported mostly from East and South Asia, from very socially conservative cultures. I wouldn't be so quick to assume that they're necessarily aligned with the Democrats.
They mostly are, although this is a recent phenomenon. Growing up in the 1990s, Indians/etc. in my area we heavily republican, consistent with their higher income levels and general social conservatism. In the 1996 election Asians went for Dole by a slightly larger margin than white people. But today, Asians vote Democrat at a higher rate than Hispanics.
Worth noting that the difference between neoliberal and left-wing wasn't really brought into focus until a few years ago. Also worth noting that Pelosi advocated for single-payer in the 90s then made a rightward turn.
In the current political landscape in the us, the left wing tends to be more science based, while the right wing is more religious based. For example the base position in the right wing party is to deny climate change exists. To put superstition and dogma over reason and evidence is the antithesis of the enlightenment.
There are taboos on the left, but there's no right wing alternative to the science. I mean, if there was some viable insight into biology that required eschewing leftish ideology, why couldn't it be monetized with startups?
> I mean, if there was some viable insight into biology that required eschewing leftish ideology, why couldn't it be monetized with startups?
Startups do this all the time by hiring mostly asian and white men instead of trying to match population levels. We can't say for sure if that strategy helped or hurt them, but I haven't seen any investor trying to force startups to diversify their workforce.
I was talking about science/scientists, not HR policies. Like at a biotech startup. From the point of view of an investor, who is doing the science differently because of ideology, and why is it better?
Sorry, but the left wing is not "science based" at all when it comes to the social sciences - their attitude to social issues is very much religious in nature (see any mention of "socialism" and "wealth taxes" as perhaps the clearest and least controversial example) and "the antithesis of the enlightenment". Both sides are playing this game.
Agreed, but in my personal view social sciences are not really sciences at all. They have a largely ideological component. I expect there to be disagreements there. On the other hand denying hard sciences seems much worse.
> Agreed, but in my personal view social sciences are not really sciences at all.
That's quite wrong. Even as we speak, hundreds of millions of people are being lifted out of poverty, thanks in no small part to the gradual adoption of saner policies based in the social sciences. That's not "ideology", it's real results.
Agree, I am having trouble expressing my thoughts correctly here. Maybe what I mean to say is describing a physical properties of our universe is much simpler than understanding social systems. Therefore these ideas tend to get simplified and you hear things like "communism is good" or "capitalism is good". It becomes more about tribal identity than scientific inquiry.
But I concede that in other instances better policies based on social sciences are helping us tremendously.
I work at one of the companies often cited as having very left-wing employees, and my impression is that the media heavily overplays this.
I would instead say there is a small but very active group of employees that push a left-leaning political agenda, and most of these people tend to have non-STEM backgrounds (I don’t know why this is the case, but it is what I have observed). Most of the software engineers and data scientists that I work with do not really enjoy discussing politics (at least at work) and have views that lean more libertarian. Four of the people I work with are closet conservatives, and there are some issues I would say I am conservative on as well, but no one ever really brings these topics up at work.
Not to poke too much fun but a non-STEM background could mean significant coursework in history, political science / theory, philosophy, and sociology or anthropology (which although sciences are usually mor colloquially implied by STEM).
So maybe non-STEM folks tend to lean left because they are better educated on the issues ;)
I’m a bit tongue-in cheek here, but, couldn’t resist :)
> So maybe non-STEM folks tend to lean left because they are better educated on the issues ;)
I totally agree with you, but would add the caveat that more education on social issues doesn’t mean more likely to be correct ;) (poking fun back haha)
As a left-leaning tech worker, I don't have a more satisfying answer for you than that I think the left-wing position is correct (realistic, just, etc.)
Part of why it's surprising, I suppose, is the presumption that those making lots of money would tend to be libertarian, since libertarian principles (lower taxes, lower regulation, etc.) would yield higher profits. But I believe tech workers (myself included) make too much money. I don't work harder than, say, the in-house chef at my employer, the construction worker building our new buildings, the folks digging new subway tunnels, etc. I'm self-serving (i.e., a rational agent) in that I'll take the highest-paying job available to me, but I don't have it in me to be self-serving to the extent of saying, this state of affairs is good and we should support it long-term. It often feels like the only reason I need this much money is to keep up with people making even more money than me driving inflation in housing etc. prices, and I have no inherent interest in playing that game. (To be clear, there are reasonable arguments that I should be making as much money as I do, that my contribution to society is greater, etc. I don't think someone who holds such beliefs is a bad person - I'm just reporting on my beliefs and those of many of my peers.)
I also see that making more money is how you get leverage to influence society, so I optimize for putting money into my hands - which is unrelated to whether the direction I want to take society ends up with more money in my hands.
I also suspect a lot of tech workers, by being at profitable and highly-automated business, are more likely to believe in the feasibility of a highly-automated society that puts money in everyone's hands regardless of how hard they work (think Star Trek, or the "fully automated luxury space capitalism" meme, or whatever). We see huge profits coming from collectives without an individual profit motive (aka "the engineering department") and not as much from rugged individualism, so we're more skeptical of the necessity of right-wing market-based solutions to improve society.
As a moderate Libertarian tech worker I would have to give the same answer. I hold my position not just because I don't want to pay too many taxes, but because I find the position to be the correct one.
I think that pay has very little to do with effort of the worker. As you mentioned, lot of people work harder and put more effort while making less money than others. IMO the argument that effort should be used as a measure for pay can easily be invalidated with this reductio ad absurdum:
If you pay me for the effort I put on my work I would make more money by carrying a heavy rock back and forth all day than to work on most of the jobs available today.
As economy theory goes, labor is a commodity and, as such, subject to the law of supply and demand. That's really it, there is no other way at the moment to assign salaries. Yes you can reduce inequality with taxation. But there is an inverse correlation between taxation an economic growth, even though there are some exceptions.
My thoughts on automation are that, yes, automation displaces jobs, but it also reduce prices (not just of the final products but those of capital goods used to produce them too), so, while I don't know how a close-to fully automated society will look like I'm sure resources will still need be allocated based on demand from consumers and the economic output will be limited, hence there will still be a concept of markets and currencies. My guess is that Capitalism will be partially automated itself. We will probably need some limited redistribution for those that initially own no shares in automated companies, allowing them to live and invest in these, or to buy automation capital goods to create new automated companies.
Standard Oil, Bell, etc. Anti-trust breakups have a history of being good for employees and share holders. I'm fairly confident the same would happen here.
What a surprise. I'd love to be a billionaire, but I like Sanders opinions about whether they should exist. I'd love to be worth enough for it to hurt me, but I like Warren's wealth tax idea. I'd love to pay lower taxes, or less progressive taxes, but I'm happy to support those less fortunate. As a matter of fact, I'm not even a single-issue voter! Perhaps most controversially, I think altruism is good for society. Shocking, I know.
What a crazy idea, voting against your own interest. gasp!
>”What a crazy idea, voting against your own interest. gasp!”
I know you mean it differently but people in the middle class get accused of voting against their interests and it’s said as something negative in their political choices.
Only in the same sense that's happening here, though. I assume you're talking about takes like "Why don't working class white voters vote for democrats?", which isn't fundamentally any different as I see it. It's a legitimate question, and the answers (in both cases) tell us things about how politics work in a way that simple analysis doesn't.
And FWIW: as far as tone, this one seems more "accusatory" to me. There's a clear hypocrisy angle being teased in that headline, where the lefty takes tend to be more about exasperation on the part of the author.
The tone is accusatory because usually there is a classist dimension to the question. Why does a high income tech worker vote Democrat when that would cause her own taxes to go up? The question implies noble intent on the part of the tech worked: because it’s better for society as a whole. We don’t extend that charitable interpretation to the blue collar worker in Iowa. Why do they vote Republican even though Democrats are promising them government benefits? We don’t charitably assume it’s because they believe it’s better for the country in the long run. We assume it’s because they’re easily manipulated or too dumb to understand what’s in their own interest.
OK, agreed, both sides have ample ability to manufacture outrage (I mean, come on: no one serious actually expresses the outrageous contempt you're imagining, that's 100% interpretation) over takes like this. I just don't see why it's remotely as asymmetric as you think it is. You don't think lefty folks get offended too?
"I know there are only 60 days left to make our case – and don't get complacent; don't see the latest outrageous, offensive, inappropriate comment and think, "Well, he's done this time." We are living in a volatile political environment.
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic – Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
But the "other" basket – the other basket – and I know because I look at this crowd I see friends from all over America here: I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas and — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that "other" basket of people are people who feel the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures; and they're just desperate for change. It doesn't really even matter where it comes from. They don't buy everything he says, but — he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won't wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they're in a dead-end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well."
According to the quote I've seen, she called "half" of Trump's supporters deplorable. I think it's clear in hindsight that essentially all of them supported the things she was deploring, which is why it was a bad move, but she wasn't claiming that.
No, it's clear in hindsight that the statement was false then and is still false now.
You have demonized anyone who doesn't support left wing ideology to the point that nobody wants to talk to you about it anymore. There are probably many trump supporters working with you that you'll never know about.
I'm working for state government, and every one of my co-workers is a woman, and my boss, and my bosses' boss. Also, they're union members, and some of them belong to a coven.
Also also, nobody wants to talk to me about right wing ideology? Well, https://xkcd.com/810/
...but seriously, nobody I know wants to talk about the president, practically since the election, but it's obvious when someone is following the latest talking point of the right. Like right now in NY with the bail reform.
I mean, I've heard blue collar workers ranting about how they finally got someone like Trump in to clean up Washington and now that "bitch Nancy Pelosi" is all over him.
That's not a nuanced "better for the country" discussion.
It was a real discussion, in a real factory, not a fake discussion in a fake coffee shop.
“Better for the country” doesn’t have to be “nuanced.” “The best thing for America is god, guns, and capitalism” is not nuanced. It is, ultimately, an expression of values based on a belief about what will enhance national prosperity.
(I could recount “real discussions” with folks in northern Virginia growing up, where they express sneering contempt for the folks in the “rest of Virginia.” I don’t think that’s relevant. Obviously race and class play a role in political disputes in the US. That doesn’t excuse making assumptions about why entire groups of people vote the way they do.)
Wealth taxes are actually bad for society, and especially bad for altruistic people who care about the less fortunate. A wealth tax is a tax on capital, period - and making capital more expensive hurts everyone, but it hugely hurts those who need capital the most. If you care about lowering inequality without hurting folks more than you have to, what you want is a mildly-progressive consumption tax. (I.e. an income tax which exempts most savings and investments from counting as income.)
(Oh, and perhaps get rid of assorted insanity such as Prop 13 in CA, so that the real estate market can become functional, and those who own lots of expensive real estate pay their fair share.)
> Wealth taxes are actually bad for society, and especially bad for altruistic people who care about the less fortunate.
Maybe instead of depending on the sporadic largesse of billionaires and all the awful political and economic consequences that come along with that kind of wealth concentration, we can have a functioning safety net, like the rest of the developed world.
You can have a functioning safety net and pay for it via a progressive consumption tax. That's actually what most Western countries outside of the U.S. seem to do, broadly speaking. Some countries even tried out a wealth tax, like France - they had to reverse it real quick because the unintended effects were so dismal.
France/EU is not the United States. There are structural reasons that make a wealth tax virtually impossible to implement in the EU, but aren't present in the US.
You can easily do this in the U.S. (See, e.g., the wave of corporate inversions that caused U.S. companies to re-incorporate in Canada and the U.K., which often required executive teams to move to those countries.)
The Canadian corporate tax rate is just 15%, and even Trudeau is pursuing aggressive neo-liberal policies. Canada would happily take our billionaires. (So would other English-speaking countries. Ireland, the U.K., and Canada have been the destination for dozens of corporate inversions over the last couple of decades.)
Especially when it's unnecessary? Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax, even on paper, will raise a fraction of the revenue that a VAT would. (Which Ireland, Canada, New Zealand, the U.K., and Australia all have, unlike the wealth tax.)
America subjects you to tax as long as you remain a US citizen, and we have an exit tax. Simply moving to another country does not absolve one of their burden unlike in the EU.
I don't know what economic freedom means, but the last time I checked, the US is doing just fine in the Capital department.
Giving up US citizenship is pretty easy. “Economic freedom” means a legal and regulatory environment that encourages relatively unfettered economic development. It generally means low taxes on corporations and capital, strong enforcement of property rights, and streamlined regulations. While the US is doing well on that front relative to say Bangladesh, it’s falling behind the other Anglosphere countries (U.K., Canada, New Zealand, Australia).
As to VAT being “unpopular”—that’s a very odd statement. The US is the only OECD country without a VAT. (By contrast, a dozen OECD countries have no taxes at all on long term capital gains.)
Considering that Hong Kong is at the top of that list, it tells me that maybe "economic freedom" is not necessarily the thing to optimize for.
Or to put it in other terms, I don't believe that any singular -ism is the solution.
> As to VAT being “unpopular”—that’s a very odd statement.
How is that odd? We have an economy driven heavily by consumption, a VAT would make everything more expensive and would be seen as a tax on the poor and middle class.
> Considering that Hong Kong is at the top of that list, it tells me that maybe "economic freedom" is not necessarily the thing to optimize for.
It certainly seems like one of the dimensions to optimize for, considering that also ahead of the U.S. on that list are pretty great places like Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand. Also Singapore and Taiwan, places that went from poverty to prosperity in a couple of generations thanks to economic freedom.
> How is that odd? We have an economy driven heavily by consumption, a VAT would make everything more expensive and would be seen as a tax on the poor and middle class.
It's odd to say that something that has been universally adopted by the liberal democracies of every other OECD country is "unpopular."
> A wealth tax is a tax on capital, period - and making capital more expensive hurts everyone, but it hugely hurts those who need capital the most.
This is some weird ideological bullshit. There is plenty of evidence that capital hurts markets and therefore society with those lacking capital ending up competitive and beneficial for society providing cheap high quality products and services, and those influenced by capital ending up monopolistic rent seeking monsters used against society to protect wealth.
> A wealth tax is a tax on capital, period - and making capital more expensive hurts everyone, but it hugely hurts those who need capital the most.
This doesn't really follow at all, and is directly in contradiction with your desire to get rid of Prop 13. Property taxes are the most common wealth tax!
Wrong. Property taxes mostly bear on land, not capital. Especially in heavily urbanized areas with lots of land value, as we see in CA. Landed property is not "wealth", it's just undue appropriation of something that is created by the community. Land taxes reverse this undue appropriation and let the community that actually created that wealth benefit from it, as it should. It's like the opposite of a wealth tax!
I mean, lots of billionaires also essentially got lucky.
DOS and Windows weren't the most glorious software to ever stalk the Earth, they were the operating systems that happened to get popular on cheap hardware. Arguing that Bill Gates created all that wealth that comes with the network effect inherent in software and a homeowner is unduly appropriating community value is really something or other.
Some nobody told Gates exactly how to get rich with computers. I read it (the specific advice) in an old issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia. The key is that out of millions of people saying millions of things, Gates was the one to pick up on the important one.
So, sure, he was lucky in a way, to be around and read it, but it seems unfair to say he merely appropriated value that belonged to everyone. The advice was worthless to the person giving it away, and everyone else.
Well said. The taxes on the value created by the labor of those involved in the production and consumption of the product of said labor(s) is indeed a fair and just re-appropriation.
Likewise, the results of hoarding the vast wealth in the forms of property, land, legal entities that operate and depend on these same communities which generated them is damagingly extractive.
We should, too, somewhat reverse the hoarding of vast wealth and let our communities reap some benefit from the treasures they are capable of producing.
Capital being slightly more expensive for individuals worth $50M or more, is a far cry from "capital is more expensive." Capital being cheaper for the 99.9% of people at the bottom than it is for the 0.01% at the top actually seems like a good thing.
Government spending in capitalist countries creates returns to capital. Financing that spending almost entirely through taxes on labor, as the US does today, means that government spending is (in part) a direct transfer from labor to capital.
Also, capital is not a scarce resource in the US today. For firms that would be worth investing in but don't have access to capital on reasonable terms, the reason for their lack of access is a combination of incentive problems and inefficiency on the part of e.g. VC firms, not because the capital isn't out there. It's true that a wealth tax would increase the cost of equity, but the Finance 101 strategy of "only initiate a project if the IRR of the expected cashflows is greater than the cost of equity" isn't really meaningful for startups since the future cashflows are so uncertain.
If by "those who need capital the most" you mean charities and not startups, a wealth tax would just incentivize giving more to charities and doing it sooner.
> Government spending in capitalist countries creates returns to capital.
Mostly, it doesn't. It boosts the value of specific, scarce assets. The increase in e.g. land values that's directly attributable to government spending is a lot more tangible than any fuzzy effect on rates of return for capital. This makes most government spending basically a transfer from the productive (labor and capital) to the rent-seekers, but that has nothing to do with capital per se.
> isn't really meaningful for startups since the future cashflows are so uncertain.
Uncertain cashflows make the effect more meaningful, not less. Few investors will be well-positioned to fund a firm with hard-to-assess future cashflow, so capital is meaningfully scarce for those firms.
> Government spending in capitalist countries creates returns to capital. Financing that spending almost entirely through taxes on labor, as the US does today, means that government spending is (in part) a direct transfer from labor to capital.
You’re engaging in a slight of hand. Leaving aside capital gains taxes, returns on capital are taxed as income when companies pay dividends. So the income tax covers both returns to labor and returns to capital.
There's brutal capitalists that want to maintain the current set of winners and losers, there's brutal capitalists that want to become the kings of the hill, and then there are those who want to enable creativity throughout society and enable all those with a vision for a better future to have the tools to make it happen.
I think HN has almost zero of the first category, and some mixture of categories two and three.
In re: "Silicon Valley software engineers seem more loyal to the left wing of the Democratic Party than to their own employers." Specifically, loyalty to my "own employers."
These are the folks ("dozens" of companies) who colluded to cheat their own developers of est. $8 billion dollars:
FWIW, "anecdata": I worked at one of the FAANG companies for about two years, and, yeah, hell yeah, the one I worked at should be broken up IMO.
An "exploded view" form would introduce buffers and breaks in very (IMO) appropriate places while still permitting the innovation and economic growth.
Put another way, I don't think the economics of scale apply as cleanly to tech industry as they do to mass production. You want more communication rather than less, and that takes time/energy/attention.
Agree. Hence, the government should acquire Google et al, fix salaries at government wages (1/5th of Googlers' 350K take home) and run these companies like the utilities they are. We need a socialist takeover, and deliver to googlers that sweet sweet Castroism that their Democratic socialist heroes recently ratified [1]
The only reason anyone in the US supports these people is because they have never lived in the socialist big government utopia these politicians champion. In fact, not even the politicians themselves have lived in the society they propose! How is that for a brilliant starting point.
Ask anyone who has experienced these ideas in the flesh and you’ll find someone absolutely perplexed that US voters don’t laugh these people out of office.
As the saying goes: In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.
All US voters really know about these ideas are the promises and a distorted theory and history that conveniently leaves out the horror, the reality, of these ideas. They have been implemented time and time again in various forms across continents and time. And they have laid to waste everything they touch.
You’d think people would have learned better by now. Sadly, that required an educational system rooted in fair historical exposure rather than one that pushes a single ideology at every level. This ignorance of history leads to repeating mistakes.
Here is the other fact that absolutely floors me: Nobody can name a single nation —not one— which, after adopting these policies, has elevated itself to a level even remotely resembling the success and accomplishments that can be attributed to free market capitalism.
Sure, capitalism isn’t perfect, nothing ever will be, yet it has elevated more people out of poverty, cured more disease and improved the lives of more people than anything else in recorded history.
The allure of these twisted ideas comes at the intersection of a badly educated public and the promise of solving all problems by taking from those who have more. Easy proposition.
Reality is that it never solves anything and often creates more problems. The $15/hr minimum wage “solution” is one of the best modern examples of this effects.
The other element naive supporters miss is that the politicians proposing these ideas never live the reality they want you to live. They never live it before or after they are elected. See if you can name even a single politician who has, anywhere in the world and across modern history. That should tell you something.
Antitrust law isn't a socialist idea; it's a capitalist one. The idea behind it is the standard neoclassical principle that markets achieve maximum efficiency, and therefore consumer welfare is maximized, when they are competitive. No less a capitalist than Adam Smith articulated these ideas when he wrote "people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."
Friend, the extremists who have taken over the narrative and soul of the Democratic party are not talking about antitrust. They are talking about remaking the US in the image of a demented ideology NONE OF THEM have ever lived under or have any experience managing in any imaginable way. They are in love with an ideology that has laid waste to entire nations across nearly every continent on this planet.
As a Classical Liberal/Libertarian myself I find these people to be absolutely repugnant. They are selling the masses on ideas that will cause incredible damage. I mean, Bernie himself is on video during a debate talking about creating, if I remember correctly, 40 million government jobs. We know EXACTLY how something like that would end, because it has been done in many nations at different scales. The short answer is: Not well at all.
This discussion isn't a matter of opinion, this is a matter of historical fact across nations and time. Nobody who pushes these ideologies can name a single nation on any continent in the last hundred years that has experienced good outcomes from their adoption. And by this I mean, to include raising people out of poverty and generating economic growth at a minimum.
These conversations are like the people who promote coffee enemas to cure cancer, or the flat-earth-ers. Lot's of passion and even followers, but not one of them can back up what they are saying with any semblance of a reality that approaches confirmation of their promises in any way that would not caused them to be laughed out of the room.
The fact that a society like that of the US doesn't laugh these people right out of the political sphere is of great concern. It means, at a minimum, that our educational system is severely damaged. No educated society would elevate these ideas.
Most developing nations in the world aspire to be like the United States of America, and here we have a bunch of politicians and their followers wanting the US to be like most failed nations of the world. This is a bad episode of The Twilight Zone, to say the least.
I have no idea what you just said. I personally, have lived in Denmark, Netherlands, and Germany - quite socialist, and big government places, with public healthcare, education, childcare, strong safety nets, unions, worker protections, so on and so forth. And life was freaking great. In fact, in Netherlands, you only needed to work for 36 hours. Those were the happiest times of my life.
Those are not socialist nations, not even close. This is a common response that has no basis in reality.
For example: Have any of those nations taken over and nationalized large businesses? Have any of those nations grown government so large that a massive percentage of the population depends on it to survive?
Those countries are as capitalist as you can get in practice. They just happen to have one or more well developed social programs that compare favorably to the US. This is commendable, BTW, and there is no reason for which the US should not actually do better than all of these nations put together on these fronts. The reason we do not is because our politicians, well, suck.
When people point at just a handful of European nations and claim them to be examples of socialism doing well, the usually point at Nordic countries and even places like Germany and the Netherlands, as you did.
This false assertion is always based on a single data point: Healthcare. Or, by extension, high taxes and healthcare and maybe education. Nothing else.
Well folks, universal healthcare does not make a country socialist. Show me where Karl Marx explained this was the goal of socialism and you might have a point.
It's even worse when you truly look a the economies in these countries and understand how it is they are able to do as they do. For example, having an oil-based economy that supports great social programs --which is like winning the lottery at a national level and using the money intelligently.
The reason the US does not have an equivalent healthcare system is because politicians, on both sides of the ideological divide, have been focusing on the wrong variable in this complex multivariate equation: Insurance.
The US does not have a health insurance problem, it has a health costs problem. Until that side of the equation is balanced the situation will not improve, whether you go to Medicare for all or do something else. This is a business, and you have to balance costs if you want to improve outcomes.
What are the cost drivers?
The first layer might be a heavy regulatory framework that makes everything more expensive. Regulation is important and necessary. Over-regulation, to the point where the cost of doing business is negatively affected, is bad for everyone. Just try to develop a medical device or drug in the US and see what happens.
I have been wanting to develop a specialized hearing aid for what is known as "Single Side Deafness" for quite some time. It's impossible without a massive amount of money and likely not a large enough market to make it worth investor's funding such an effort. The impediment isn't in technology, it's in the onerous and extremely expensive (in time and money) regulatory framework. We end-up with investors and intelligent folks devoting their money and smarts to figuring out how to get more people to click on links than devoting their time and money to solving important problems.
Why is it that Europe and others pay so much less for the same drugs and devices that are so expensive in the US. Because we develop them here and the US bares 100% of the cost of the US regulatory burden. In other words, we, in the US, pay for what it cost to do business here. The rest of the world pays for the basic COGS on these products plus some profit. The difference is massive. If the various European nations had to pay for the actual cost of developing anything sourced from US companies their medical systems would crack and crumble. The UK's NHS is and has been in trouble for some times precisely due to the cost side of the equation, something that is unsustainable [0]. In 2017 the NHS's budget represented over 30% of public spending. Something like that is not sustainable. The net result is that care goes to hell, people have to wait months for care and others who are able to end-up paying for private care (negating the entire concept of these systems being the solution to healthcare).
That's just ONE of the cost drivers in the US. Next you have to look at tort reform. For those not familiar with the term, it means lawsuits, doctors, clinics, hospitals, medical device and drug manufacturers exposure to being sued.
This is a problem in the US that permeates almost every aspect of life to varying degrees. For example, if you run a website today you can be sued any time if you don't implement ADA accessibility guidelines. I am NOT saying the ADA guidelines are a bad thing, what I am saying is that in the US we use a sledge-hammer in the form of lawsuits or the threat of lawsuits rather than a more rational and less socially costly process.
In the medical field, the cost of lawsuits is massive. Which also means insurance costs are large. Doctors, depending on specialization, have to pay for very expensive protection (insurance) against predatory attorneys looking to make a buck from any mistake they might make when treating a patient. The cost for hospitals and medical device and drug manufacturers is equally massive.
There are repercussions to this structure. A simple example is that doctors will order and perform a battery of sometimes unnecessary tests on patients simply because of the threat. Nobody wants to go to court and have to face severe career-ending penalties, so they order tons of tests to cover their behinds. Medicine ceases to be about the patient when doctors are worried about lawyers.
Yet another cost driver is the high cost of university education in the US, and, in particular, medical education. When a doctor graduates with US $300K in debt they cannot earn below a certain threshold. Their lives will soon include added costs for a house, car and eventually a growing family with their own cost structures. They will also need insurance for their home, cars, healthcare and practice. Without charging enough for their services they become enslaved to the cost of their education. As it is, most will require decades to pay off these loans.
The cost of our education is out of control precisely due to government intervention. When a government guarantees loans as they do universities charge massive amounts of money for their degrees. The result is a chain reaction of costs at every level that affect the competitiveness of our medical industry in more ways than one.
It's easy to point at a few countries in Europe and, just because they have "socialized" medicine and high taxes conclude that's utopia and the US's problems are due to evil capitalism. A more intellectually honest dive into the realities behind these issues reveals a completely different scenario, a truth where most of the failings in the US are easily attributable to failures in policy and politics and government becoming far more involved than they should.
And then there's the "life is great" assertion and yet we don't see hundreds of millions of people wanting to move into any of these nations. In fact, if they don't control immigration tightly they would crumble in short order. Interestingly enough, if the US made immigration free and open we would probably easily double our population in a very short period of time. Everyone wants to come here, including people from the countries you mentioned. I also presume from your comment you no longer live in any of those countries. If life was so great, why not? The most common answer to that question is, lack of opportunity. Everything comes at a cost.
Those are overwhelmingly described as socialist nations in conservative media and is the north star of 99% of democratic policies
Edit: rest of your response. Where do I even start. Hundreds of millions of people are not looking to move to Europe ? Do you even read the news ? Have you heard about the refugee crisis in Europe ? Have you read about the divide between immigrant community in Europe ? Have you read about boats crossing the Mediterranean every day ?
What media says, conservative or otherwise, has no relevance here. These are not socialist nations, period. This isn't even debatable. And, frankly, it is amazing anyone would believe this in a day and age when it is easy to google stuff and learn.
Get this, Denmark doesn't have a minimum wage! How socialist is that?
You are truly confused about a ton of stuff here. Of course I know about what's going on in Europe. I've only been going there for nearly thirty years with great regularity. I have watched as these uncontrolled migrations have devastated entire areas and the culture in some locations. Terrible stuff.
I digress. You are comparing things that have nothing to do with each other. For example, these migrants are escaping war and, in some cases, genocide. They could not care less where they go so long as it isn't where their feet happen to be during the war.
As a descendant of genocide survivors and one who had extensive conversations with my grandparents, I can tell you that they didn't get out their World Almanac and Political Science books along with world economic reports to figure out where to go; they got on the first ship, train, cart or horse that got them the hell out of there.
Please, stop and do a little reading. I'm sure you are an excellent person and one of great intelligence, you are simply operating with the wrong information and, as a result, have reached very flawed conclusions. The good news is this can be fixed if you are willing to consider things might not be as you have grown to believe.
All of the major candidates have endorsed the Green New Deal, which espouses a massive economic program where the "public receives" "ownership stakes." It also calls for a WWII-level economic mobilization premised on wide-scale central planning.
"Socialism as a concept is open to many interpretations. Gallup was describing socialism in questions asked in the 1940s in terms of government ownership of businesses -- something that Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and most other left-leaning Democratic candidates have not advocated. Instead, socialism today seems to embody sets of programs by which the government helps regulate and in some instances run and pay for social programs focused on basic population needs in health, education, housing and employment."
So not destroying capitalism but rather trying to blunt some of the sharp edges of capitalism. Nobody is trying to replace Google, GM, or JP Morgan with a government run company.
As a purely technical matter socialism--especially when juxtaposed with capitalism, as in the Pew Gallup poll--means government ownership of businesses and central planning of economic activity. The DSA, which Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are affiliated with, do advocate for public ownership of businesses: https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism...
> Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives.
> "I favor the public ownership of utilities, banks and major industries," Sanders told the Burlington Free Press in October 1976, at age 35
Given that socialism has been utterly discredited in Europe over the last couple of decades, groups like DSA try to obscure their views by equating socialism with the capitalist welfare states of Europe. But: https://mises.org/power-market/swedish-ex-prime-minister-reb...
> Prime Minister of Sweden from 1991 to 1994, Carl Bildt, took to Twitter to warn Sanders that socialism is not the key to creating a great society as he and Ocasio-Cortez seem to think.
This is not just a matter of terminology and semantics. Over the last 20 years, Europeans have aggressively embraced market policies. They're all aggressively cutting corporate taxes and capital gains taxes. They've privatized state-owned businesses and deregulated industries. Sweden has had school vouchers for decades, and the subway in Stockholm is privately operated. The tax system in Sweden is remarkably flat, and the tax burden is borne primarily by the middle class. (I.e. the middle class pays for its own robust welfare system.)
Those are not the policies espoused by Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders. Whereas Sweden has school vouchers, they're proposing curbing charter schools. Neither are proposing to privatize operation of New York's or DC's failing subway systems, to match Stockholm's model. Whereas Sweden's taxes are already less progressive than the U.S.'s (Sweden's top tax rate starts at $70,000), Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez are proposing to shift even more of the tax burden to the rich, while Sweden is cutting taxes for the rich. While even Republicans, much less Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, are unwilling to touch Social Security, Sweden has moved to a partially privatized defined-contribution system. Whereas Sweden has a carbon tax, Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders are trying to address climate change through central planning. (The Green New Deal, for example, would involve taxing tens of trillions of dollars out of the private economy, and reallocating it to centrally-planned, government-directed economic activity.)
If you read through the Green New Deal, it doesn't resemble the market-oriented approaches of modern Scandinavia. It's all about government-directed economic activity, guaranteed jobs, etc. That's old-school socialism.
You moved from describing the Democrats to describing the Democratic Socialists of America. Those are two very different groups. As a Democrat, I find the DSA rather obnoxious, because they perpetually run NIMBY candidates here in San Francisco who favor the interests of rich homeowners over renters. (Even in SF, the DSA finds itself unable to win anything more than supervisor seats; the mayor and state representatives are mainstream social democrats.)
And I think you're reading way too much into those polls. If you were to ask me whether I like capitalism and whether I like socialism, as a social democrat I would probably say yes to both, I guess†? But I wouldn't favor wide-ranging nationalization of industries. I don't see how you can say "I like capitalism"--as a majority of Democrats do, according to Pew--and favor that. I mean, heck, more Democrats say they view conservatives positively (more than the reverse on the Republican side) than view socialism positively and capitalism negatively. The two Democratic front-runners are Biden, who represents a continuation of Obama's moderate economic policies, and Warren, who famously said she's a "capitalist to her bones".
† I also have to wonder how much tribalism there is in the socialism answer. Republicans have spent a lot of time applying the label to things that are obviously not socialist, like the ACA. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of Democrats are saying yes to the question about "socialism" really to express their support for Democratic policies that have been smeared as "socialist", rather than anything having to do with central planning. You see this tribalism frequently on the Republican side, with significant numbers of Republicans saying, for example, that they believe that Trump had larger inauguration crowd sizes than Obama did--which of course they don't really believe, but they say yes to such questions to express their support for Trump.
The Democratic party you think you belong to isn't the Democratic party that is today. Far from it. And that's the problem.
As a classical liberal I identified myself with the Democratic party far more so than the GOP on many layers. What is out there today has nothing to do with what this party was about 30 years ago. Today, they are dangerous. The ideas they are pushing are destructive. If they gain overwhelming power they will destroy this nation.
I've seen this playbook before in Latin America --many times-- it doesn't end well. It's about to be played yet again in Argentina with the new government that was just elected. There are people already trying to figure out how to get the hell out before the mutation into Venezuela sets in.
You say you are a Democrat. You are on HN. I somehow doubt the total lack of mathematical honesty in a ridiculous 52 trillion dollar disaster of a healthcare plan would not cause you projectile vomiting. These people are dangerous. They actually believe this stuff. And if they gain power we are all going to suffer for it.
The proper context is external to the US: China. They are laughing their asses off right now and just hoping people like Warren or Bernie ascend to power. If they get another eight years of unimpeded growth they will ascend to the first economy of the world and be unstoppable. There are very few industries left in the US and Europe that they can't absorb. They would love for the US to go full-tilt left and, as a result, cause severe damage to it's economy. It would clear the path to supremacy. And then we get the reality of a world led by China, with hooks into absolutely everyone.
> I've seen this playbook before in Latin America --many times-- it doesn't end well.
The good news for the US is that they don't have an imperialist neighbour who's going to crush their economy and support a coup to shut down any socialist threat to their imperialism. Because that's what happened all the times in Latin America.
> The proper context is external to the US: China. They are laughing their asses off right now and just hoping people like Warren or Bernie ascend to power. If they get another eight years of unimpeded growth they will ascend to the first economy of the world and be unstoppable […].
That's a really strange thing for a “classical liberal” to say. This is straight from the hardcore neoconservative narrative.
> The good news for the US is that they don't have an imperialist neighbour
I don't think you know the history of Latin America.
If you speak Spanish you should watch the many excellent videos out there with Gloria Alvarez. If you don't, she has been doing more and more work in English, here's one:
That's funny how people who don't understand history and facts always choose to attack the messenger rather than the arguments being presented.
I studied in Latin America and lived there for nearly 20 years in total. I KNOW THIS HISTORY because I both studied and lived some of it. She is telling the truth.
I'm not «attacking» anyone, but you wouldn't trust Lenin talking about the Russian history (and you'd be right) and you shouldn't trust a libertarian politician about history either.
Had you studied Philosophy and Logic in university you would have understood my comment.
This is what's colloquially known as "shooting the messenger" or attacking the source. You said:
> Gloria Alvarez is no historian, she is a politician with a libertarian agenda…
BTW, she is not a politician. She recently tried to run for President of Guatemala but didn't get very far. She was not a politician before that and is not a politician today.
The fallacy you are committing is "argumentum ad hominem". Here's a reference:
The simple explanation is to attack the person ("she is a politician with a libertarian agenda") rather than to address the argument she presents by offering-up evidence that proves your case and disproves hers. The implication, of course, being that nothing she says is valid because of who she is, regardless of the nature and content of her presentation.
> you wouldn't trust Lenin talking about the Russian history
Not true, you are attacking the messenger again. There is no reason to assume Lenin (or anyone else) is lying just because of who they are or what they did. You can be skeptical about it, sure, but the only LOGICAL approach --if what you seek is the truth-- is to listen (or read) and then confirm the validity and soundness (these are two different things) of the argument Lenin would be making. Only after confirming the validity and soundness of the argument can you conclude whether Lenin is telling the truth or not about a particular argument. He could be lying about one thing and telling the truth about another.
As Einstein said, paraphrasing, the solution to a problem requires a higher perspective than the one that created it in the first place.
Please be careful about what you believe and why you believe it.
It's much easier to accept a conclusions "don't listen to her, she is just a libertarian" than to actually take the time to listen to somebody, perhaps even engage with them in a respectful manner and consider the arguments being presented. This is the only way we move forward as a society. Politicians (notice I did not specify party affiliation) would prefer to herd us all like sheep with false promises and stuff that sounds great. Politicians hate it when we actually think and challenge what comes out of their mouths. That requires work and emotional separation from any affiliation, which isn't necessarily easy for a lot of people.
> The good news for the US is that they don't have an imperialist neighbour who's going to crush their economy and support a coup to shut down any socialist threat to their imperialism. Because that's what happened all the times in Latin America.
While U.S. intervention in Latin America is regrettable, this is a lame cop-out. One, many countries that embraced capitalism flourished economically despite U.S. intervention. E.g. Chile, South Korea, etc. Two, many countries that embraced socialism destroyed themselves economically despite the lack of foreign intervention. E.g. Venezuela under Chavez, India under Nehru.
> One, many countries that embraced capitalism flourished economically despite U.S. intervention.
I think you misunderstood my point: I said that leftist governements in South America failed because they were under massive pressure from the US. Chile is a good example, as Aliende was literally overthrown by a coup financed by CIA.
> many countries that embraced socialism destroyed themselves economically despite the lack of foreign intervention. E.g. Venezuela under Chavez, India under Nehru.
That's absolutely wrong about Venezuela. Chavez era is the golden age of the past 40 years in that country.
And about Nehru, the main criticism is not about destroying anything (because post-colonization didn't have an economy to destroy in the first place) and more about missed opportunity, but that's an easy thing to say afterwards (and many non-socialist countries didn't do any better).
> That's a really strange thing for a “classical liberal” to say. This is straight from the hardcore neoconservative narrative.
Not really. If China were playing with equal rules there would be no problems. They are not. From currency manipulation to intellectual property theft, not a care about the environment and the imprisonment of massive amounts of people and more, they are not equal participants in the economic realm.
Classical Liberalism does not require me to ignore reality. China is playing to win, by whatever means necessary. Which means if we (the western world) create the opening they will go right through it. A world dominated economically and militarily by China is likely to result in a severe reduction in the standard of living of many nations doing well today. For a crystal-view into that today just look at nations with seriously degraded industrial ecosystems.
For those who might not be clear on what classical liberalism is about, here's a good explanation:
Please note there's nothing in these principles that would have one be comfortable with what's going on with China, both within and in the context of the world stage. In fact, classical liberalism would cause one to raise a serious alarm against a good deal of China's behavior, internally and externally.
Never mind what the man says. Judge him by the source of the video. Brilliant.
For those who have not seen the video, these are the ten core principles of Classical Liberalism he lists:
1) Liberty as the primary political value
2) Individualism
3) Skepticism about power
4) Rule of Law
5) Civil Society
6) Spontaneous Order
7) Free Markets
8) Toleration
9) Peace
10) Limited Government
In the video he gives a short explanation of each of the above.
> wouldn't be surprised if a lot of Democrats are saying yes to the question about "socialism" really to express their support for Democratic policies that have been smeared as "socialist", rather than anything having to do with central planning.
While most democrats aren't actually supporting socialism, interestingly enough, socialism doesn't necessarily have something to do with social planning either: socialism is about getting rid of capitalism, an economic system where a few people owns the means of production and “steal” the work of the working class (note that this has nothing to do with free market). You can achieve socialism by different mean. The Marxist-Leninist way, with all-powerful state and central planning is one, but the anarchist way with workers self-managing is another. The first kind dominated the 20th century (and they slayed thousands of anarchists in the process) but nowadays most socialists (in the western world at least) belong to the second category. Noam Chomsky is a good example of these people.
You can't "get rid" of capitalism without involving some sort of central planning. If anything, the original proponents of socialism including Marx never supposed that capitalism would be something to "get rid of" in any way; they thought socialism would only become viable when capitalism had reached its highest stage of development, and then the "transition" into socialism would be relatively natural and painless.
"Workers self-managing" industries works really well if the industries have low capital intensity. Law firms might be one example of that. Not so much otherwise, because workers at any one firm don't really want to deal with highly-uncertain capital investments in the first place (that would mean keeping all their eggs in one basket!); they'd much rather shed that risk to outsiders.
> You can't "get rid" of capitalism without involving some sort of central planning.
Of course you can. We even had a practical example in Syrian Kurdistan for several years in a row. Unfortunately, Rojava was destroyed by the Turkish invasion… It looks like the only thing you can't really do without some kind one central planning is war. Which would explain why every anarchist attempt have been crushed so far.
> when capitalism had reached its highest stage of development, and then the "transition" into socialism would be relatively natural and painless.
Natural (and according to Marx, it wasn't “relatively natural” but more like the obvious course of history) but in no way painless. Revolution and temporary dictatorship was part of Marx vision all along.
Also their is plenty of non-Marxist socialism, some being older than Marx and some modern.
> that would mean keeping all their eggs in one basket!
That may be an irrational choice, but humans do put all their eggs in one basket all the time! And BTW, this popular saying isn't that insightful: if you cannot afford to lose a single egg, you better put them in a single basket, because the probability of one basket failing is lower than multiple baskets ;).
> We even had a practical example in Syrian Kurdistan
That's getting rid of capital, in the physical sense; war will do that quite nicely indeed. It's not what's normally meant by socialism - even Marx knew better than that!
Not all capital was destroyed. So far Kurdistan was not the part of Syria where the war hurt most.
If you want an example where war isn't involved at all, you can have a look at Catalonia right after the fascist coup in 1936: anarchists and Communists workers just took the control of the whole industrial system and it was locally administered by workers (at least in the beginning, before the Communists allied with Republicans and massacred the anarchists).
OP asked me to name "the Democrats trying to replace capitalism." I think it's fair to say that Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and other DSA-affiliated Democrats are trying to do that. That is not an assertion that Democrats as a whole want to do that.
Only 47% of Democrats have a positive view of capitalism, versus 57% having a positive view of socialism. That's shocking for the party of Bill Clinton and Barak Obama. There was a time when socialism was a dirty word in America, and it was for a good reason. When my dad was born in what was then Pakistan, India had similar per-capita GDP to South Korea. Today, thanks to flirtations with socialism, India is still quite poor, while South Korea is as rich as France: https://reason.com/2006/06/06/the-rise-and-fall-of-indian-so....
> We need a smaller, more effective, more efficient, less bureaucratic government that reflects our time-honored values.
> We support government policies that encourage private sector investment and innovation to create a pro-growth economic climate, like a permanent research and development tax credit.
> Today's Democratic Party knows that the era of big government is over. Big bureaucracies and Washington solutions are not the real answers to today's challenges. We need a smaller government . . . and we must have a larger national spirit. Government's job should be to give people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives. Americans must take the responsibility to use them, to build good lives for themselves and their families. Personal responsibility is the most powerful force we have to meet our challenges and shape the future we want for ourselves, for our children, and for America.
> Welfare reform. Today's Democratic Party knows there is no greater gap between mainstream American values and modern American government than our failed welfare system. When Bill Clinton became President, the welfare system undermined the very values -- work, family, and personal responsibility -- that it should promote. The welfare system should reflect those values: we want to help people who want to help themselves and their children.
> We have worked hard over the last four years to rein in big government, slash burdensome regulations, eliminate wasteful programs, and shift problem-solving out of Washington and back to people and communities who understand their situations best.
> In the last four years, President Clinton, working with the National Performance Review chaired by Vice President Gore, has cut the federal government by almost 240,000 positions, making the smallest federal government in 30 years. We did it the right way, treating workers with respect. The federal government is eliminating 16,000 pages of outdated and unnecessary regulations, has abolished 179 programs and projects, and saved taxpayers billions of dollars.
Watching the debates it's impossible to see any hint of that party.
> The two Democratic front-runners are Biden, who represents a continuation of Obama's moderate economic policies, and Warren, who famously said she's a "capitalist to her bones".
Given how quickly the party has distanced itself from Obama's moderate-conservative economic policies, I'm not sure how great I feel about 76-year-old Joe Biden was the firewall between me and 1960s-style European socialism.
> Now name the Democrats trying to replace capitalism...I'll wait.
That's the wrong question or perspective. What they are trying to do is cause enough damage that the only option left will be for people to depend on government support, jobs, etc. That grows government large and ultimately fundamentally changes this nation to the core.
You can't say "let's replace capitalism"...because you just can't do it that way. California is a perfect example of the kind of planned manipulation I am talking about. We are paying incredible amounts of money for our fuel. Much more than in other parts of the nation. There's an agenda here to push everything related to climate change and "green", whether it makes sense or not. So our roads are not maintained, our fuel taxes go through the roof and politicians ignore cries for help. Their objective is to force everyone onto some mythical form of public transportation that can never work in CA, but that's not going to stop them. They close entire road lanes to create space for a few bikes and create massive traffic jams in the process. So it isn't about coming right out and saying "we want to replace capitalism", it's about having that as a plan and then plotting a series of measures that will cause so much damage that, over time, that will be the result.
Let's forget the socialist label for a moment.
Here's reality: Not one of the people proposing these extreme ideas has ever lived, and much less managed, anything even remotely close to what they are proposing to do.
Let's assume for a moment that they sincerely believe --not know, but believe-- these ideas are good. People like AOC have been indoctrinated by schooling into pretty much that world view. She and the others have never actually lived in the kind of society they so enthusiastically champion.
It stands to reason that, if one is going to push for certain ideas the sensible thing to do is look at history and try to understand if these ideas, when applied, produced results at least equivalent to and ideally superior to the status quo.
Well, we have history on these ideas. Lots of it. Across multiple continents, cultures, nations and time. And there isn't a single success story anyone can float to the surface. Quite to the contrary, the common denominator is that the result of adopting these ideologies is disastrous. Poverty and misery increase. Economic development collapses. Social inequality increases. Government grows large. Populations grow dependent. And darkness takes hold.
We have people pushing for the equivalent of coffee enemas to cure cancer. It might sound interesting, but there isn't one single bit of evidence that it does as promised and lots of evidence showing it causes harm. To make things even more interesting, those pushing for coffee enemas have never had one themselves and, instead, are the beneficiaries of everything they say is bad in our current system.
As I have said many times: This isn't a matter of opinion. It's a matter of history. These people are dangerous.
Turkeys voting for Christmas. If you break up the large companies, this system will collapse. The reason why Facebook and Google are allowed to light massive stacks of shareholder cash on fire (in pay and acquisitions) is because they have a monopoly which churns off cash, and are protected by supervoting shares.
Very good for investors though. They can buy the monopoly and sell all the OSS/moonshot bullshit.
I'm pretty sure that if the anti-trust litigation in 2001 hadn't battered microsoft then tech wages would not be as high today. Competition among employers is good for wages, and the fewer and bigger the employers, the less the competition.