11–20 of 73 posts
Why does he list Bitcoin as an American innovation? Or did I miss read that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...
America: Good for innovation! except for the predatory patent lawsuits which as a small business you won't be able to afford the legal bill to defend against.
> First, it confuses technological innovation (impressive to engineers) and economic innovation (valuable to consumers). Second, it confuses gross and net benefit — of course, when government does X, we get more X, but is that more valuable than the Y we could otherwise have had?
[...]
> And don’t forget Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain technology that has the potential to decentralize everything from web apps to logistics.
The latter here seems like a rather good example of the former. EU is about to introduces the revised payment services directive (PSD2) which is set to force banks to interface with third parties. I would expect this action to have far greater value to people than the blockchain.
But, market forces should not be heralded as panacea of there being no-waste.
Every private sector bankruptcy is wasteful for its investors.
Yahoo, HP, Former Dell, Anderson
Ton of examples of failed efforts, pure waste, nepotism, bribery and downright illegal (civil/criminal) behavior in private sector.
I look at it this way... The will of the people also acts as a market force. I think most would agree with that.
Whether there is waste or if it is most efficient, is immaterial. Will of the people, in terms of government's willingness to legislate, will always be a market force. Push and pull is given and is to be expected. Let the battle rage on.
I don't like the binary view of "Give all power to corporations, with no government intervention" and "Let the state control all means of research and access"
The ideal is clearly in between, where the state should break up monopolies and punish companies that have detrimental externalities to their functioning(like polluting the environment).
That's not to dismiss government funded research either. We have Computers and The Internet in large part due to US Government research. Once an idea becomes marketable and profitable, private companies can swoop in, like Microsoft or Apple with Computers.
But decades of unprofitable research is not feasible in a corporation. You would need the government to fund that.
> When the government floods the economy with cheap money printed out of thin air, it distorts market indicators, making many unprofitable projects appear profitable. Oh, is that a new one? It's the first time I read someone stating that when VCs get high on drugs and spend their money on stupid ideas, it's because of something the government did.
Not at all. We dealt with a similar collusion between the government and private banking industry in the housing collapse of 2008. Cheap money along with bad policy is problematic no matter where it occurs because the cheap money ends up in the stock market/speculation market eventually.
> The truth is government and the public sector is where innovation, and the money that fuels it, comes from. Bell labs? Xerox Parc?
That said, both of those are good examples that I don't even mention in the article.
> When the government floods the economy with cheap money printed out of thin air, it distorts market indicators, making many unprofitable projects appear profitable. Oh, is that a new one? It's the first time I read someone stating that when VCs get high on drugs and spend their money on stupid ideas, it's because of something the government did.
The quick hit is this: A. US Monetary policy provides large banks with extremely cheap capital B. Large banks competing with each other in the free market must make use of that capital C. Only so many investments are good investments, because in the end, there's only so much consumption, but the unnatural levels of capital driven by US monetary policy push banks to make bad investments (see every financial crisis since the Fed was founded). D. Those bad investments fail, and mass margin calls lead to an economy-wide de-leveraging that destroys economic growth for months or years.
Systemic financial crises can't happen without cheap, printed money.
It's also reasonable to question whether giant companies could exist at all without US monetary policy. Companies of that size are almost completely dependent on the financial industry, which is completely dependent on the Fed's cheap currency.
[0][PDF]https://mises.org/files/americas-great-depressionpdf-0/downl...
Edit: added PDF label
America: Good for innovation! except for the predatory patent lawsuits which as a small business you won't be able to afford the legal bill to defend against.
A good topic for a future article!
Someone should look at wisdom of making the Patent office self funding, seemingly incentivizing them to give out more patents (if they're valid or not), and having them being seeming immune to penalties for issuing bad patents.
> When the government floods the economy with cheap money printed out of thin air, it distorts market indicators, making many unprofitable projects appear profitable. Oh, is that a new one? It's the first time I read someone stating that when VCs get high on drugs and spend their money on stupid ideas, it's because of something the government did.
>Oh, is that a new one? Not at all. We dealt with a similar collusion between the government and private banking industry in the housing collapse of 2008. Cheap money along with bad policy is problematic no matter where it occurs because the cheap money ends up in the stock market/speculation market eventually.
The main cause you get by reading the research on 2008 is that bank managers were incentivized by their shareholders to take excessive risks. This is because 1) shareholders are pretty shortsighted and 2) managers suffer comparatively little personal consequences by crashing a bank (clearly they don't go to jail; they still get the massive bonuses in the years where they pumped returns with excessive risks, etc.)