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The worst possible antitrust outcome

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Re: The worst possible antitrust outcome

#201

Post by Yizahi »

pdonis wrote: post #182
Yizahi wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants. So, what do you think would happen when the biggest market participant makes a choice incompatible with choices of the smaller participants? I can tell you - the biggest player would win. Or it would slowly destroy competitors (slowly mean just a few years), and then start imposing it's rules. Basically any free market would turn to feudalism, whic…

> because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control. No, that's even worse, because, as you admit, humans are shit at governing--and the "external control" is just more humans being shit at governing, but with a much bigger negative impact because the scope of their shitty governing covers many more people. Advocates of free markets, like me, don't adv…

My point was not that government is better or worse than corporate oligarchy in a question of governing. It's all the same people, same humans, just with different labels.

My point was that free market is kinda like unstable isotope, it can't exist for any significant length of time and will decay into a government. As soon as some corporation starts dictating its rules to an unrelated people, we can call it a proto-government. The department responsible for those unrelated people would be a proto-executive branch, the law department would be a proto-legislative branch etc.

And to address your second comment, about competition:

Competition can't work in the free market. The instant external control ceases to exist, the most shrewd and smart players would start employing all kinds of currently illegal shit. They will buy out all media and platform to blast their ads 24/7 and disallow all competition. They will swithch to currently banned practices and materials to save costs and undercut competitors. They will switch to slave work to save costs etc. As soon as one player becomes relatively bigger the rules of free market will allow him to accumulate more and more benefits of the kind I've described. Any competition would be woefully behind, outdated and overpriced relative to the bigger player. And that's assuming elastic market. As soon as market for some goods becomes inelastic, bigger player can do even more damage. For example they can completely buy out some resource or manufacturing capacity of a crucial component or resource and completely deny it to the competitors.

Basically the whole human history and law corpus is a list of examples how free market failed and how humans had to fix it via restrictions.

Re: The worst possible antitrust outcome

#202

Post by lucyjojo »

bpt3 wrote: post #153
idopmstuff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you even have to go to the extreme of compelling someone to do something through the legal system. I can use money to get someone to clean my house or walk my dog - they don't have to do it, but the fact that I have money does give me the power to get them to do what I want.

Can you compel someone to walk your dog because you have enough money to pay someone to do it, or are they choosing to do it to earn some money?

i mean... if people don't get money they die so....

Re: The worst possible antitrust outcome

#203

Post by lucyjojo »

pdonis wrote: post #180
majewsky wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So we're back to square one then, and came to agree on the original premise: Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action.

No, not money. The problem is not that Google, Amazon, etc. can buy special privileges from the government; the problem is that the government has them for sale. It's government power that's the root of the problem, not money. If the government didn't have the power to give out such special privileges (which comes from the power to issue regulations that all businesses must obey), it wouldn't matter how much money Go…

the alternative being that there is no entity able to regulate, a direct path to a living hell.

Re: The worst possible antitrust outcome

#204

Post by lucyjojo »

branko_d wrote: post #198
idle_zealot wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I understand what distinction you're drawing between ideological opposition to rich people existing and opposition to disproportionately powerful people existing. In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power…

Can Elon Musk confiscate your property, limit your freedom of movement, or outright kill you? There were times in history where having a lot of money was correlated to having all those powers. There are places in this world where that’s still the case.

if he wanted to he very probably de-facto could.

Re: The worst possible antitrust outcome

#205

Post by bpt3 »

lucyjojo wrote: post #202
bpt3 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you compel someone to walk your dog because you have enough money to pay someone to do it, or are they choosing to do it to earn some money?

i mean... if people don't get money they die so....

So if they want to live, they are compelled to do some sort of work somewhere at some point, which is the nature of the human condition (along with all other living beings).

That doesn't mean you can force them to work for you specifically because you have the amount of money you deem sufficient for a specific task.

It feels like a lot of people have forgotten that this is how nature works, not that all of your needs are the responsibility of everyone around you.

Re: The worst possible antitrust outcome

#206

Post by dctoedt »

rayiner wrote: post #196
dctoedt wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bork believed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which his party got through Congress) was unconstitutional. Um: You're massively overstating the case for GOP involvement in the Civil Rights Act. The Act was muscled through by President Lyndon Johnson — a Democrat and protégé of LBJ; liberal congressional Democrats; and a few (and now-extinct) liberal Republicans. The racist, segregation-forever southern Democrats, who…

> The racist, segregation-forever southern Democrats, who as powerful committee chairs had blocked civil-rights legislation for decades — mostly died off or became Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to the GOP's "Southern Strategy." Why would racists mad about Democrats supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 respond by switching to the party that had pushed through every other Civil Rights Act before it? Of c…

> Why would racists mad about Democrats supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 respond by switching to the party that had pushed through every other Civil Rights Act before it? Of course, they didn't.

Your revisionism is pretty glaring to anyone who was paying attention during the mid-1960s, as I was — my USAF dad was stationed in east Texas then, which was more deep South than Old West.

Let's just say we have very different takes on what can motivate humans, individually and in groups. At the risk of sounding condescending: I used to feel somewhat the way you seem to. My naively-rationalist and very-judgmental views evolved as the years went on. The evolution was driven largely by life experience, which drove home the brute facts of human inadequacy, irrationality, and just plain fuck-ups — principally my own, along with those of friends and loved ones — along with the pervasive role of random chance. It took quite a while to figure out how my rationalist, judgmental worldview could accommodate those brute facts (spoiler: it couldn't).

Re: The worst possible antitrust outcome

#207

Post by bpt3 »

1718627440 wrote: post #200
bpt3 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I thought "taxes" is the English equivalent to the German "Steuern". A "Steuer" is definitely a thing to regulate inefficiencies due to external costs. They are equivalent, but your English description of the definition of Steuern is not accurate, so I'm not sure what to tell you. Your English is good enough that I wasn't 100% sure you weren't a native speaker, but there are a number of misunderstandings in the res…

Seams like I'm wrong about the general term, which is weird since they tell that definition in several courses in my university. Part of the confusion is maybe that "Steuern" literally means "steerings". I've found the term that I'm looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_tax . It's a bit weird, that most examples there seem to be from Germany or Switzerland. Maybe we just like that concept. But Piguo was…

There are many Pigouvian taxes, but not all taxes are Pigouvian.

The concept of taxation predates the concept of equality or economic influence in society, and there is no "official" reasoning for things like property taxes or income taxes in the US (or anywhere else I'm aware of).

Originally, the government decided how much revenue it needed, and told the subjects of its rule how much they owed, and that was it.

Re: The worst possible antitrust outcome

#208

Post by ameister14 »

rayiner wrote: post #196
dctoedt wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bork believed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which his party got through Congress) was unconstitutional. Um: You're massively overstating the case for GOP involvement in the Civil Rights Act. The Act was muscled through by President Lyndon Johnson — a Democrat and protégé of LBJ; liberal congressional Democrats; and a few (and now-extinct) liberal Republicans. The racist, segregation-forever southern Democrats, who…

> The racist, segregation-forever southern Democrats, who as powerful committee chairs had blocked civil-rights legislation for decades — mostly died off or became Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to the GOP's "Southern Strategy." Why would racists mad about Democrats supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 respond by switching to the party that had pushed through every other Civil Rights Act before it? Of c…

While I generally agree with your foundation of the political switch, I just want to point out that elections in the 1970's through 1990's were still very regional. Southern candidates tended to do well in the South against candidates from California or the North, despite policy differences that would seem to strike the other way. The JFK/Nixon election was much more of an urbanization/rural divide as both candidates were from away.

Carter being a Georgia peanut farmer made a huge difference in GA, AL, and SC voting in the 1976 and 1980 elections. You have to remember, he was the first deep south president since the civil war - white voters especially really cared about that. He was just also a disaster of a president, which is a big reason he lost anyway.

Re: The worst possible antitrust outcome

#209

Post by tomComb »

gleenn wrote: post #199
tomComb wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> using the data they have harvested from you and selling ad placements You changed what you wrote to make it accurate now, but refused to admit that and instead just prepended it with "literally"! Wonderfully ironic given that we are talking about being accurate in your writing!

Can you please be specific what I changed? I meant every single word exactly in the first post as in the second. Both are completely accurate. What exactly did I change with any substance?

You said the fact was sold to the highest bidder, which implies that they sell your data. Which is something that most people believe because people use language like you have. But it isn’t true.

The second time you were much more accurate. You wouldn’t have even had to restate it differently if the first time had been accurate.

Re: The worst possible antitrust outcome

#210

Post by nielsbot »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #178
actionfromafar wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should we do? Where do we go from here?

Stop trying to pretend that higher taxes on Larry Page or the estate of Steve Jobs would change the size of Google or Apple and instead break them up.

We can (in theory) do both.
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