alt Hacker NewsAs a committed market-socialist, the extent that the HN commentariat has turned into a reflexively nihilistic anti-free-enterprise is a fairly astonishing turn. It’s like my belief system turned into the maximally idiotic version of itself.
“Externality” is thrown about as a term almost completely disconnected from any economic grounding of the term. If you make externality mean “anything I find aesthetically displeasing”, then yeah, sure, billionaires create and benefit from externalities, if your aesthetic is egalitarian comity.
But if you mean “legitimate societal goals, legislated and agreed on by a representative body” are being violated left and right by billionaires, gimme a break.
Go ahead and tax capital gains way more. Ending the estate step up in basis sounds great. Break up the “borrow” part of buy-borrow-die, while you’re at it, and treat encumbrance on capital as a taxable event, we could probably make that work, too, although the middle class might foam at the mouth if that was applied broadly.
But, man. The cynicism, confiscatory and controlling instincts on display are enough to make me upgrade Ayn Rand from “hypocritical nut” to “maybe she was on to something when the general population gets tall poppy syndrome.”
Markets work. There are externalities, but we can, and should, legislate fixes for social goals that we actually agree on. But stiflingly heavy regulation is really bad for incentivizing creation of new knowledge and wealth. You can still believe in caring about people, and building (incentive aligned) social safety nets without destroying people’s incentive, and thus, because intellectual capital formation depends heavily on network effects, people’s ability, to create many kinds of value in the world.
Actual socialists recognize that capital is incredibly useful, and incredibly valuable. Leveraging capital is incredibly beneficial to the world. Pretending that the people leveraging that capital are somehow guilty of an original sin just by leveraging capital markets, which is really what these screeds against anyone holding controlling interests in companies they were instrumental in creating, seem to be about, leads down a terrible path.
Demonizing people creating things is petty and unbecoming for a political movement.
> Demonizing people creating things is petty and unbecoming for a political movement.
i think a more rational argument would claim that this isn't about demonizing people who create, it's about societal inequality. i don't think mark zuckerberg, elon musk or larry page and sergey brin got demonized for creating their products in the first 10-15 years after launch, it's what happened after, the accumulation of wealth, the extension of power, that get's any rational person believing in a free market socialist economy nervous.
> Pretending that the people leveraging that capital are somehow guilty of an original sin just by leveraging capital markets, which is really what these screeds against anyone holding controlling interests in companies they were instrumental in creating, seem to be about, leads down a terrible path.
do you think that they should still be forced to leverage their capital within democratic boundaries? because from what i've heard most founders carry significant power due to their wealth and share increasingly anti-libertarian values, to secure their wealth.
if those democratic boundaries prove to be innovation stiffling, fair, that is definitely an issue, but wouldn't it make sense to argue to then try to adjust those boundaries from within the democratic framework?
one could also make the claim that one popular strategy for securing the gains of a succesful innovation is regulatory capture - a strategy that is increasingly employed by large companies to close of markets and secure market monopolies or duopolies.
in a sense, they are stifling innovation themselves by closing a market to competitors, via instrumentalizing what they usually critize: regulation, no?
it's like you said, these can coexist, but from my perception it's as if these billionaires don't want them to coexist.
and im not thinking about regulatory drama involving diesel generators for AI datacenters or anything specific, just the mere power accumulation and general radical tendencies you find with these ultra wealthy interest groups.