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Comment by wildmusings | Hacker News Reader

It's depressing that the idea at the core of our prosperity is dismissed by some as an extreme view indistinguishable from parody. Thankfully, people like Friedman and Hayek have laid down a rock-solid intellectual defense of capitalism. We ignore their wisdom at our own peril.

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That's because the laissez-faire market forces you invoke are not the core of our prosperity, just one of the factors leading to it, so your comment did sound as an extreme parody of a right wing position (which may be more or less reasonable depending on how strongly you support it).

Friedman and Hayek wrote their work before we had a thorough understanding of how complex systems are optimized. Thanks to more powerful computers, we now know that search guided by purely local improvements gets stuck in local minimum (in Economics, those are the Pareto points). Those local minima can be incredibly far away from a true global optimum, but can't be improved by "consensual and mutually beneficial transactions".

Sometimes you do need to take actions that temporarily inconvenience one actor to achieve a point that will benefit all them in the long term; see the prisoner's dilemma for a simple example. The GP post mentioned 40-hours work weeks; those weren't brought by laissez-faire economics nor individual negotiation either, 60 or 80 hours a week were the norm before socialism.

Capitalism tends to create immense concentrations of power without checks and balances on the hands of tycoons, of the kind that should make any true libertarian be very afraid of those holding it. The system that really works best is one where wealth is created for a few years through capitalism, and then that wealth is redistributed by government's welfare politics to the wider population. This is what has been going on in Western countries in the last century, bringing us stability and avoiding the frequent revolutions that plagued Europe and the Americas in all its previous history.

Interestingly, Friedman, and I think Hayek as well, supported a universal basic income. Friedman called it a negative income tax, but its the same premise. I think a lot of laissez-faire capitalists would get behind that idea, if it was coupled by the permanent abolition of all other welfare programs and most labor regulations. It's definitely an idea I can get behind.

It would require some constitutional amendment for both sides to trust each other enough.

One reason why many such characters would support basic income is that it would ostensibly remove the provision of benefits from the overview of the bureaucracy. That's the same reason that many others would not support it.

I'm very tempted to throw in with the former, except that I worry about the follow-on effects of basic income. Would a basic income just be a windfall for landlords, as they all increased rents by some large percentage of the average basic income? Or would the formerly-urban formerly-poor head for the hills, now that they could budget over the long term without relying on urban amenities? This would be a windfall for a different set of landlords and real estate investors, but it would drastically change the nature of 80% of the communities in the nation. That's not even to consider the wealth effects on markets more elastic than housing. It would be a grand experiment, but somebody would start crying.

I think a gradual phase-in of the basic income, and a corresponding phase-out of existing programs, would avoid the pains of a sudden change.

Great string of comments, interesting that Friedman supports basic income. If anyone wants to read my comment far down below and answer any points you disagree with that'd be super welcome! (it starts with "With this comment I'm answering both PG's post and an answer to his post that can be read here: http://cryoshon.co/2016/01/02/a-response-to-paul-grahams-art...)

>Capitalist wealth comes from repeated consensual and mutually beneficial transactions.

Tech hiring collusion, 2008 financial crisis, environment degradation and global warming, slavery-like conditions at suppliers of multinational corporations, medical bankruptcies in US and lack of guaranteed holidays, ghettos, plundering of natural resources, monopolies everywhere (as prescribed by Thiel btw).

Such a wonderful, mutually beneficial, ethical system with so many positive externalities! /s

You may claim that capitalism is the "best" system at this point, but to state that's wonderful is indeed indistinguishable from parody.

The free-marketeer response is that many of those problems have actually been caused by a lack of adherence to capitalist/free-market principles - eg. a policy of bailing out banks since Continental Illinois, preventing market discipline and leading to riskier behavior; heavy involvement of public policy distorting markets (both through laws pushing cheap housing mortgages, and through government-sponsored institution like Fannie Mae); land expropriations in China that force people to accept those slavery-like jobs (obviously not in accordance to strong property rights as defended by free-marketers); government-granted monopolies (including patents), and many more.

rock-solid my ass. The situation is less about ignoring Friedman and Hayek as about ignoring their critics (which is obviously what you're doing or you wouldn't have made the absurd "rock-solid" claim)

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