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Crony capitalism may be cannibalizing productive capitalism in the U.S.

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Re: Crony capitalism may be cannibalizing productive capitalism in the U.S.

#141

Post by maxxxxx »

crpatino wrote: post #84
rm_-rf_slash wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or simply, our means of production have become so efficient that it didn't matter whether you were right or wrong, things would still hum along and the profits would continue. In the agricultural age, if you fucked up a harvest, you and your family could starve. Before agriculture, if you fucked up a hunt, your whole kin-clan could starve. Nowadays, if you fuck up the housing market, and millions of people go bankrup…

It is not that we are so efficient, but that a priviledged tiny cabal have learned how to push the consequences of their mistakes to the rest of the population. To borrow your example: In agricultural age, if you fucked up harvest your family starves. Today, if you fuck up the housing market, thousand of families end up in bankrupcy, and tens of thousands of small investors loose their savings... but you do not perso…

I agree with the first two paragraphs but Guillotin is not good example.

A better example would be the decision to go to war in Iraq. The people who made that decision didn't have to send their own children and they could enact large tax cuts for themselves in addition at the same time. So they got their war but didn't feel any consequence.

Re: Crony capitalism may be cannibalizing productive capitalism in the U.S.

#142

Post by rm_-rf_slash »

dmoy wrote: post #124
CalChris wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. However, in addition to viewing the F35 as welfare you can also see it as Too Big To Fail. I think there are side benefits to defense spending. Silicon Valley was built on that [1]. But there's tremendous risk with large (and doomed) projects when they fail (which they will). [1] https://steveblank.com/secret-history/ Uber is going to fail. The F35 is going to fail. Throwing good money after bad will stave of…

At some point though, if major world powers never go to war with each other, then the F35 can't really fail insofar as it will never actually see combat. It reminds me of the sci fi novels Dread Empire's Fall, in which the galactic civilization's ship fleet has never fought a battle in thousands of years, so nobody can actually know how to do it, and they don't know if a certain tactic, ship, etc is really a failure…

Historical anecdote: at the start of the U.S. Civil War, only two sitting Union generals had ever seen combat (back in the Mexican-American War 20 years back), and the top general had gotten so fat by then he couldn't even ride a horse.

Re: Crony capitalism may be cannibalizing productive capitalism in the U.S.

#143

Post by rorykoehler »

BFatts wrote: post #117
mowenz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

You're saying we should get rid of the financial industry? What, because we're all so good at managing our own money? Guaranteeing the big banks can't fail is how we keep the economy going. If a bank fails, everyone that is owed money by that bank fails too. Is that acceptable? Would you be fine with your employer going belly up because the bank they rely on can't pay out money?

The bailout money should be distributed as an equal dividend to each individual person in the country and the rest should be allowed play out.

Re: Crony capitalism may be cannibalizing productive capitalism in the U.S.

#144

Post by noonespecial »

leggomylibro wrote: post #19
metalliqaz wrote: post #8

> Crony capitalists seek to generate profits without producing anything of value. If they are generating profits, then they are doing something valuable. Are they sucking cash out of the government? Maybe, but it's valuable to somebody. You want to fix it? Don't try to fix the entrepreneurs, fix the goddamn government. Most of these Comcast-type rent-seekers are complete and total assholes, I agree, but I'm not about…

Kind of reminds me of that episode of Always Sunny in Philadelphia where Danny DeVito's character comes out of retirement to save his former company. "So what do we make here, Frank?" "What d'you mean? We make money." "Right, yes, but what do we actually create?" "We create wealth." "Okay, but like, what do we produce, what do we manufacture, what do we design?" "Manufacture? Leave that to the c&$%^s, we produce prof…

It takes 2.5 weeks minimum to get the product from Taobao in the USA. The extra money is for getting it in 2 days.

Also, remember that most of that "markup" is for shipping, Amazon fees, and taxes. You can't ship those items for less than $2 even with Amazon FBA (remember, with Prime its the seller whos paying for shipping, not magic Amazon elves). The Taobao guy paid $0.18 to ship the same from China (there's a long story about how that happened too).

After paying all that, the guy selling that stuff for $6 probably made $0.40 on the deal. A steal indeed.

Re: Crony capitalism may be cannibalizing productive capitalism in the U.S.

#145

Post by harryh »

zackmorris wrote: post #39

I think the great problem of our time is that the challenges get easier to solve every day but we mostly spend our time making rent. And not the kind of rent mentioned in the article - just plain old fashioned too-much-month-not-enough-money kind of rent. When we’re desperate, we grovel and do whatever work we need to to survive. This is akin to how researchers spend inordinate amounts of time applying for grants rat…

- There is plenty of free capital in the economy. More than ever really. To the point that the "capital glut" is a regular topic of discussion in economic news.

- I don't know how old you are but both Clinton and Obama significantly increased taxes on the rich. Federal tax receipts as a % of GDP are fairly constant going back to WW2.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

Re: Crony capitalism may be cannibalizing productive capitalism in the U.S.

#147

Post by refurb »

zackmorris wrote: post #39

I think the great problem of our time is that the challenges get easier to solve every day but we mostly spend our time making rent. And not the kind of rent mentioned in the article - just plain old fashioned too-much-month-not-enough-money kind of rent. When we’re desperate, we grovel and do whatever work we need to to survive. This is akin to how researchers spend inordinate amounts of time applying for grants rat…

any money paid by the very wealthy had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was the masses

What? The size of gov't has only increased over time. That's money being pulled out of the economy through taxes. If anything redistribution has drastically increased over time.

Re: Crony capitalism may be cannibalizing productive capitalism in the U.S.

#148

Post by Stryder »

I was 20, naively unaware of the ways of the real world, and nearly overnight, I lost everything and everyone I cherished in my life.

Over the next 6 months, it slowly dawned on me that those who survive and thrive are those willing to screw other people over for their own benefit without as much as blinking an eye, as long as it suits them.

"This is the way of the world", I thought to myself.

Over the next decade, I focused, and worked my ass off. On my way up, I encountered countless more rich, successful and morally bankrupt individuals, and the higher I go, the more sophisticated the moral bankruptcy gets.

To be fair, it's not the fault of a lot of these individuals. Some of them genuinely do not comprehend the consequences of their actions - it just doesn't cross their mind. Instead, the fault lies with a system that not only enables but promotes this kind of behavior to the very top, without an effective counter-balancing weight on the other end. And we are the custodians of the system, we are the ones who shape it on a daily basis, by the actions that we take, the investments that we make, and the kind of relationships that we build.

Re: Crony capitalism may be cannibalizing productive capitalism in the U.S.

#149

Post by mrchucklepants »

marcosdumay wrote: post #119
mowenz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

It's useful to stop and ask yourself what exactly do central banks do that is so harmful. The US situation of those bailouts and "too big to fail" is certainly problematic, but most people pushing that line are really against fractional reserves, but those don't really seem to have the effects people attribute to them. (And if they do have that effect, it's the central bank that sets their fraction, so it's entirely…

Most of the damage the Fed causes is due to artificial manipulation of interest rates, disrupting the time coordinating function they would serve when driven by natural market forces. This time discoordination is the source of the boom-bust cycle.

Re: Crony capitalism may be cannibalizing productive capitalism in the U.S.

#150

Post by vkou »

rtx wrote: post #81
jondubois wrote: post #65

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.

90% of our planet is currently uninhabited. If you want to expand, it's far closer, more hospitable, and economically useful then Mars.
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