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Comment by btmiller | Hacker News Reader

Some acquisitions make sense, some don't, but the propensity for founders and investors to push for an exit depresses the free market consumer in me. I want lots and lots of choices for anything I consider buying, yet nearly every acquisition making headlines lately seems like it falls into 1 of 2 categories: 1) a marketshare power grab, or 2) a mechanism to gather more customer data to an already massive empire.

Somewhat related: are there any viable open source mesh network solutions for home use?

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This is precisely why large concentrations of wealth are harmful to the (free-market) economy. They distort the market entirely. A wealth cap / much stronger taxation on individuals and businesses funding a basic income would be a good way to fix this without breaking the market mechanism.

A concentration of wealth is nothing other than a concentration of (economic) power, and it's bad for exactly the same reasons that other concentrations of power are.

It boggles my mind that people who argue against large governments because their incentives aren't correctly aligned don't see that precisely the same argument applies to private individual/businesses with large amounts of wealth.

Maybe a cap on how big and diversified in its portfolio a company can be. I don’t so much buy the idea of taxing people excessively more just because they have more.

Why not?

If nothing else, it should depend on how they got it.

Because it’s only a matter of time until the taxman comes for you. Soaking the rich sounds great in theory (hey, who doesn’t want free stuff), but it’s the middle class who always foots the bill for big government spending in the end. The rich have more resources to shelter their money or just move to another country. The poor don’t have any more to give. So that leaves you and I. And frankly, I don’t trust that the politicians will spend additional tax money any more wisely than they spend the tax money we give them now. Just look at San Francisco’s $10 billion budget for how effectively we can waste tax payer money.

I'm not sure I understand the leap from "I don't like taxing people excessively because they have more" to "I don't like the middle class being taxed."

Doesn't the "because they have more" bit exclude the middle class by definition? If the taxman comes for me, then we're no longer following the initial plan.

If you're suggesting that a country will run out of wealthy people to tax... I'm not sure how that would work logistically. Is that a thing that could happen?

The reason to try and tax wealthy people more is to support additional spending on social programs. The cost of these new programs will quickly exceed any additional money we can squeeze out of the wealthy (again, the wealthy have enough resources to shelter most of their money from taxes). But at that point we’ve already promised people all of these great new social benefits and we can’t walk that back now. It’s the middle class who have enough money to go after, but not so much money that they can effectively shelter their wealth, so that’s who ends up paying in the long run.

If we get rid of mountain-sized tax breaks and stop underfunding the IRS then we're fully able to collect from the wealthy.

So sure I'll complain if they "come for me" because they decided not to tax the people they promised to tax. But the solution ain't giving up on taxes. It's enforcement.

The US has global powers of taxation, ironically brought by the GOP framework of war on terror laws. There has never been a time where the US has had more ability to tax the mega-rich.

It is still difficult to get away form Uncle Sam and will be for some time.

The premise was how we can ensure greater diversity in the free market and protection from big conglomerates. Taxing the rich even more doesn’t help with this in any way.

In general rich are taxed more, which is fair to a point in maintaining a functional and stable society but beyond that I think it’s immoral and theft. I also hold the opinion that rich shouldn’t have ways to circumvent the tax net. Everybody in the economy should pay their fair share.

Edit: I don’t know what’s up, this was a reply to acjohnson55

Basic income has nothing to do with this and can’t be funded by measly taxes on mega corps. The funding for basic income would require more money than all of the tax revenue the federal government brings in right now.

>It boggles my mind

It boggles my mind that you wouldn’t put any effort into understanding the view rather than sitting around pontificating about how boggled you are.

The key different between large governments and a large company is that only large governments wield the monopoly in violence and involuntary taxation. It’s still trivial in the grand scheme of things to avoid using Google/Amazon/Apple without breaking the laws. Good luck refusing to pay into the US government as a US citizen.

Once Amazon gains the power to garnish wages and imprison people for failing to subscribe to Amazon prime, then they will be on the same level as the government. Until then they are just another fish in the pond that can be avoided.

> The funding for basic income would require more money than all of the tax revenue the federal government brings in right now.

That's not true. We have $10k tax revenue per capita, an average household size of 2.6, and the bar to get out of poverty for households of 1-4 is $12k-25k.

UBI would be a big cost but you could have an enormous impact with a program that increases the federal budget 50%. And if you set your break-even point to something like $80k of income then half that money is immediately recaptured in taxes, so now you only have to source 25% more money.

Talking about households is no longer UBI. If you want to talk about UBI, give numbers per person and then tell yourself if that proposed number could allow a single person to live in the Bay Area without working.

You’ve conveniently made an arbitrary division of 2.6 to hide the fact that a doubling would be required if UBI were truly universal, allowed people to quit working, and didn’t place restrictions on household status (as you just did).

> It’s still trivial in the grand scheme of things to avoid using Google/Amazon/Apple without breaking the laws. Good luck refusing to pay into the US government as a US citizen.

I would find it easier to move countries and change citizenships than to avoid the tech giants.

> This is precisely why large concentrations of wealth are harmful to the (free-market) economy.

Large concentrations of wealth are necessary for scaling production, allowing lower costs and increasing standard of living. Moreover, large concentrations of wealth are usually not very concentrated in the first place: the wealth of the wealthy is spread across the economy and the wealth of associations is spread across the world.

> It boggles my mind that people who argue against large governments because their incentives aren't correctly aligned don't see that precisely the same argument applies to private individual/businesses with large amounts of wealth.

The same arguments RE power/monopoly/unaccountability that apply to corporations in the market apply to the government much more in every case. Additionally, the government has the authority to coerce everyone into doing what they want to be done. It also has the ability to steal your money and spend it on things that you might somewhat benefit from at the best or are absolutely morally reprehensible at the worst.

And no, the existence of voting does not make any of that less of a problem.

Economies of scale taper off: truly large concentrations of wealth are not needed for this, and oligopolies can free large companies from the kind of competition that drives the search for efficiency.

I am not sure about how large concentrations of wealth are supposed to increase the standard of living across the population.

> Large concentrations of wealth are necessary for scaling production, allowing lower costs and increasing standard of living

Communist planned economies were chasing those same sweet scaling benefits as well. Scaling does not scale.

> the wealth of the wealthy is spread across the economy

So I keep being told, but it's pretty hard to see any evidence of this.

Similarly, it fascinates me that people who advocate for free market measures never consider the labor market to be a place where freedom of the market participants to make rational choices should be improved with e.g. better welfare, higher minimum wages or even unions.

There seems to be a general pattern that "creating a freer market" always only seems to matter in the places where rich people would benefit from it.

Those things might improve life for a lot of people. But "freeing them to make rational choices"?

If the alternative to staying in your current job is starving and/or getting evicted, your labor agreement isn't a voluntary, mutually beneficial transaction anymore. For example, a lot of the population works unfulfilling, abusive, underpaid jobs which they only go to because they can't afford to miss a paycheck. Since in a free market, voluntary and mutual transactions are an underlying assumption, labor markets without comprehensive welfare hence aren't free.

> A wealth cap / much stronger taxation on individuals and businesses funding a basic income would be a good way to fix this without breaking the market mechanism.

How is this at all relevant to the issue at hand?! There's many public companies that have much more dispersed ownership than Amazon/Google yet have massive amounts of money/market cap (e.g. oil majors, older tech companies, ...). Wealth can and will concentrate in businesses regardless of what kind of wealth tax on individuals or income tax on businesses you impose (unless of course if all business become unviable and unable to make money).

I sometimes explain to my customers that a self-funded long-term stable business is more viable than a VC-funded startup. I run a SaaS app for electronic parts inventory and production (https://partsbox.io/). In discussions, I ask customers to imagine which of the possible outcomes of a VC-funded startup would be good for them as customers (hint: none of the possible outcomes are good for customers, with the possible exception of a rare unicorn IPO).

The problem with this type of business is that the business is typically in a position where the loss of one or two key people will basically kill it. What if you get board and decide to move on with your life?

The bottom line is that a niche product is always going to be at risk regardless of the structure of the business that produces it.

You escrow your code and your customers get it if the business doesn't work out (built into their paid plan/tier). You get to eat and grow the business, their business doesn't stop if you get bored, die, or run out of money.

That’s assuming the customer is capable of sustaining what they bought, which is almost never the case with consumer products like in this case.

In case of a SaaS, it takes just one.

And that's still just a "plan B" for when just selling the business to someone more interested in continuing it doesn't pan out.

> The bottom line is that a niche product is always going to be at risk regardless of the structure of the business that produces it.

Isn't venture capital pretty much incompatible with niche product businesses? So, if it turns out to be a truly niche product, avoiding VC funding means the customers at least have a chance that it will be long-lasting.

There are many, many solutions to that problem. But in general the risk you describe is still smaller than the nearly certain future of VC-funded businesses, which either a) go bankrupt and get shut down, b) get acqui-hired and get shut down, c) get strategically acquired and get shut down or reoganized completely.

If you think about it, your goals as a customer of a business and the goals of a VC investor in that business are not aligned.

If you need a proper mobile front-end. Hit me up!

There's already very little choice in the marketplace. The world's top brands are owned by just a handful of multinational conglomerates. This Gizmodo article has a lot of examples [1]:

* Among supermarket goods, almost everything is sold by just 10 companies, including Nestlé, Unilever, Kraft, P&G and Johnson & Johnson.

* 54% of all financial assets in the US are owned by just 10 companies (JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and a few others).

* Same thing is happening to media conglomerates (Disney is a good example), airlines, alcoholic beverage companies, and everything else.

There's an increasing proliferation of brands, but an decreasing number of brand owners, resulting in an illusion of consumer choice. Even Amazon itself is a good example: An increasing number of products on Amazon are "secret" brands [2] owned by Amazon itself.

[1] https://gizmodo.com/fascinating-graphic-shows-who-owns-all-t...

[2] https://qz.com/1039381/amazon-owns-a-whole-collection-of-sec...

Yes, but it’s a hassle: https://wiki.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Linking_Routers

Relax. Each time an exit happens, an entrepreneur out there hears about it and sees an opportunity. He knows that large companies are seldom able the manage the purchase. And then a VC jumps to fund her and others like her, dreaming of his own exit.

Soon you'll have even more choice as a consumer. Just the free market at work.

Playbook propaganda from micro economics 101. Nice.

> Soon you'll have even more choice as a consumer.

And when will this start happening? It looks to me like the trend over at least the last 20 years has been the opposite of this.

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