101–110 of 263 posts
Most rent-seekers are at least operating within the boundaries of law and physics, if not ethics. Compare that to scam-preneurs behind startups like Theranos or uBeam, or vc-hustle-preneurs behind is-this-satire startups like Juicero, June, etc.
https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/22335/are-there...
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Although privileges granted by the State to "crony capitalists" excarberates issues, I do not consider it the root of issues, and to me, capitalism would have the same issues even without a government, or with minimal government. I think we're fixing the wrong part of the bottleneck by arguing for a completely free market.
we don't have capitalism in US we have corporationism. free market would have been a good thing before automation and AI, but it won't work for the future. but you can't convince people to go toward socialism in this country. but left and right agree that problem is crony capitalism ! let's start from there and do something!!!
Can you elaborate on this? I am curious to hear why those two things - a free market and AI are mutually exclusive.
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>Does it seem to anyone else that the finance industry is increasingly distracted from actually matching up capital to fundamentally productive companies, especially new companies? This is somewhat controversial to posit, but I believe the corruption in the financial industry is extraordinarily entrenched because of the Fed. Before you call me a lunatic, smart and good people from Aaron Schwartz to Sanders have said…
Corruption in the financial industry is extraordinarily entrenched because of deregulation, not because of the Fed. Allowing banks to merge and become huge conglomerates, the elimination of Glass-Stegal (which eliminated the distinction between normal banks and investment banks), and lax regulation of derivatives / dark money are all very direct causes.
However while you may not agree the Fed is a problem, unfortunately the Fed and central banking has an aura of group think around it that is usually only available for religious groups. I mean the fundamental concept of the fed's mandate: price stability and employment targeting--yea they sound great, but at what point do you question the ability to create value out of thin air just by playing with money. It is by definition financial alchemy.
And yes, I'm already familiar with Keynes' arguments in his General Theory, which is the historical work that set the precedent for this.
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This is about right. Think of the F35 as welfare, a big ugly mistake isolated from consequences yet employing and profiting a professional welfare class.
The F35 is indeed welfare, but it's not the most damaging kind. Things like that represent waste but do little in the way of active harm, and sometimes they can even have side benefits like funding the development of advanced technologies that can find more productive use elsewhere. The real active harm comes when you get a professional class that does very bad things. These can be mistakes, like the total collapse o…
[1] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
Uber is going to fail. The F35 is going to fail. Throwing good money after bad will stave off that day of reckoning but then only make it a worse accounting.
> Sometimes the government allows companies to get a certain amount of rent -- for example, the royalties from patents, which we protect in an attempt to encourage innovation. This is the classic, maybe the reason given to justify patents. The implication being that no one would bother innovating if patents didn't grant them rent for a time. But I wonder if the reality is merely that different people, and different k…
Patents started out as a 20 year protection on mechanical mechanisms or chemical processes as long as what was protected was publicly documented in full. Thus once the patent had run out, anyone could replicate it from the patent document.
But then the chemical process side used to argue for a quasi-software patent in court, because the patent described a computer monitored mixing process. And thus the ball got rolling.
Thing is though that 20 years is a very long time when we are talking software. By the time the RSA patent ran out, the algorithm described was largely obsolete.
On top of that we have gotten a mass of patents that are so generic in terminology, that even if they describe something mechanical they can potentially be applied to something done in software.
Not that patents have not been a problem even before computers. Serious refinements of the steam engine for example didn't happen until after the initial patent ran out.
Similarly Smith and Weston sat on their refinements for the Colt revolver until the patent ran out.
And focusing on the financial industry might make you feel good because it's easy to say "wall street..." and everyone joins in on the bitch fest. It's a ton of conjecture and hypothesizing as to why business is failing, but to make it sound like one industry is just banking cash while providing nothing, is a disservice to all the people that work in that industry.
I think that these issues are getting a lot of attention recently. A lot of people feel that their jobs are not meaningful anymore and that they cannot find any meaningful work that pays well. Most of the jobs that pay well are zero-sum games. Finance, tech, law. Even medicine and pharmaceuticals are becoming zero-sum games (e.g companies boosting drug prices because it's easier than inventing new ones). People have…
Thats why we need space colonization. We as a species are programmed to expand. We have become stagnant in the last 100 years.
There is a theory that all above market profits are generated by government granted monopolies. So, for instance, software is protected by patents, oil and gas is protected by mineral rights, drugs are protected by patent law, entertainment is protected by IP rights, and so on. In so far as there is competition, it often arises when the rent-seeking motivates people to disrupt the government protection by making it u…
The concept of "crony capitalism" is a misnomer. "Crony" is not a type of capitalism, it's the antithesis of capitalism. It's enabled by giving too much power to government. For example. When insurance companies jack-up rates or impose customer "unfriendly" terms, they are not acting within the "free market." They are exploiting "crony'esque" rules that limit competition by restricting insurance companies from compet…
I think the biggest mistake of the last 30 years was putting any kind of trust in the ruling class to do anything but enrich their own.