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We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards

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Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards

#41
post #17
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

remember that time GE paid basically 0% in taxes? the 30% number is only in theory (there is the salary breakdown but I don't think 30% is the number that ends up hitting)

I'm not an expert in taxation, but corporate taxes are just one piece of the pie. There is no way for employees to avoid income tax, and as far as I know, no way for US based shareholders to avoid paying capital gains/dividends taxes.

In fact, some economists argue that corporate taxes are fundamentally inefficient, because corporations are just a mechanism for producing either individual income or capital gains for their shareholders, so it would be better and fairer to tax the actual humans profiting from the business rather than the corporate straw man itself.

Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards

#42
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert in taxation, but corporate taxes are just one piece of the pie. There is no way for employees to avoid income tax, and as far as I know, no way for US based shareholders to avoid paying capital gains/dividends taxes.

In fact, some economists argue that corporate taxes are fundamentally inefficient, because corporations are just a mechanism for producing either individual income or capital gains for their shareholders, so it would be better and fairer to tax the actual humans profiting from the business rather than the corporate straw man itself.

I'm familiar with the theory, however I've never seen a good treatment of how this works with multiple countries. The income and capital gains taxes only apply to shareholders residing in the US. Maybe some of the corporate tax could be considered a fair "rent" price for using the nations resources? But I'd have to see a real model to be sure. It's still unclear to me whether (a) nations have conflicting goals when it comes to taxation (they don't when it comes to free trade, so maybe they don't with tax either) and (b) what the optimal corporate tax rate is.

Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards

#44

I so very much hate socialism. The state, with the money it took from all of us through taxes is presented as a benefactor because it gives small amounts of those money back to research. And she wants the state to have more share from successful research. The state, any state, is a very bad administrator of funds, because the so called state are basically a bunch of people spending other peoples money on things that…

"a bunch of people spending other peoples money on things that they dont understand and they dont really care about"...

That sounds like it describes the purchasing department in any big corporation, or the got-the-job-through-nepotism nephew or cousin of the owner in a small business.

You know what they say, right? Capitalism works...in theory.

Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards

#45

I so very much hate socialism. The state, with the money it took from all of us through taxes is presented as a benefactor because it gives small amounts of those money back to research. And she wants the state to have more share from successful research. The state, any state, is a very bad administrator of funds, because the so called state are basically a bunch of people spending other peoples money on things that…

I'd feel less comfortable without NASA, NIH, and DARPA, since I have benefitted a great deal from the work they sponsored. I doubt very much I would have had those benefits so soon without these grossly inefficient agencies that have no idea what they are doing carelessly spending other people's money on creating the space age, the Internet age, and the age of genomics respectively. I don't believe for a second that…

>I'd feel less comfortable without NASA, NIH, and DARPA, since I have benefitted a great deal from the work they sponsored. I doubt very much I would have had those benefits so soon without these grossly inefficient agencies... I don't believe for a second that private investment would have done these earlier.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” -Upton Sinclair

Interestingly, one of your examples, genomics, is exactly contradicted by Celera. At the time of inception the human genome project was slated to take 20 years! (We'd only be halfway done with it now). Say what you want about their idiotic and immoral business model - patenting and licensing human genes - the "private arm" of the human genomics project pushed for shotgun sequencing and got the genome sequenced in 3 years; and the hapmap shortly thereafter.

Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're getting at. Could you clarify?

Just pointing out that the reality is more complicated. The research wasn't "publicly available", rather it was licensed (exclusively) from Stanford. There is legislation that applies to the ownership of federally funded research, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act It's also worth pointing out that before this was passed in 1980 federally funded research was typically owned by the gov't.

The research is publicly available. You can go read it right now and learn from it. You're confusing the difference between the research they did being publicly available, and Stanford holding a patent on PageRank.

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/1/1999-66.pdf

Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards

#47

I so very much hate socialism. The state, with the money it took from all of us through taxes is presented as a benefactor because it gives small amounts of those money back to research. And she wants the state to have more share from successful research. The state, any state, is a very bad administrator of funds, because the so called state are basically a bunch of people spending other peoples money on things that…

I completely agree. Let's get rid of taxes, disband the military and the police.

We'll see who owns your "money" after that.

Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards

#48

I so very much hate socialism. The state, with the money it took from all of us through taxes is presented as a benefactor because it gives small amounts of those money back to research. And she wants the state to have more share from successful research. The state, any state, is a very bad administrator of funds, because the so called state are basically a bunch of people spending other peoples money on things that…

This reads as little more than pure emotion coupled with sweeping universalizing--the state is universally evil, private capital is universally good. Absolutely nothing about states or capital investors can be so easily reduced to such a binary conclusion.

Private capital, and the humans who administer it, has repeatedly mismanaged funds, and been responsible for enormous fuck-ups that have far-reaching and devastating social, environmental, political, economic, material, and global impacts. Private investors routinely make bad investments. They also rather frequently are found to prioritize the extraction of value from their investments in spite of the potential or realized impacts of such extraction.

The state does not take money. We no longer live under feudalism, friend. We no longer labor under the unquestionable divine right of kings. The modern democratic state is, by the free association and choice of its underlying organizational units, and the continued consent of its citizens, asked to assume the role and responsibilities, at least in the US, of the following:

- form a more perfect union

- establish justice

- insure domestic tranquility

- provide for the common defense

- promote the general welfare

- secure the blessing of liberty to its citizens and their posterity

Private capital could never fulfill these obligations, because its focus is most definitely on extracting value from that which it invests in. I doubt very much you'd enjoy living in a world where its investment in you was dependent on extracting value from you (well, actually, you already do, but you don't feel the full brunt of that burden thanks to ... you guessed it ... the state).

Now, if you'd much rather live under feudalism, serfdom, obedience to divine kings, etc., well cool. But those are sociopolitical conditions under which people lived for centuries where they definitely were able to "pay lower taxes and let the private investors do the investment". Those are the systems under which money/property was actually taken from people, because people had no methods or institutions by which they can seek to protect themselves from the arbitrary whims of value extraction, or engage in political action that can bring change. That's why most now-democratic states saw revolutions in their past--it was the only way to make change happen, the only way to abolish systems of unfettered value extraction and replace them with something that protected the masses.

At least in the US, even the revered and worshipped founders realized pretty quickly after becoming an independent nation that taxes were unavoidable, because without public funds, the state could not fulfill the obligations for which it was instituted.

I shudder at the thought of living in a world where people trust VCs to provide that which the state, even in its dysfunction, works to provide.

Re: We have socialised the risk of innovation but privatised the rewards

#49
Socialised risk and privatised reward is how government should work. Universal health care is a good example: I am the most obvious benefactor of my own good health, but society also benefits from having healthy citizens.

Revenue generation is only the goal of government so that it can support its citizens.

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