Comment by blackhole | Hacker News Reader

Comment by blackhole | Hacker News Reader

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Given the number of corporate apologists floating around this site, I fully expect that the top voted comment here will be some form of "rent-seeking behavior isn't always bad". Someone will point at the GDP going up and say this justifies literally everything that corporations do. Someone will draw comparisons between two lines on a graph and say this is why Facebook never did anything wrong.

Is this really what we've sunk to? Is this really what everyone thinks? Are we so jaded by the failures of our economic system we can't even tell when it's falling apart?

Surely, even the most staunch supporter of the free market can admit that at a bare minimum, capitalism in this country is in desperate need of better anti-trust regulation to stop monopolies from crushing all competition. Surely we can admit that simply making a bunch of tech startups with weird website URLs is not going to fix the economy by themselves, and might even be making the problem worse.

Of course, given that we can't even agree that global warming is a problem as the arctic permafrost melts, I'm not particularly hopeful.

I marvel at those charts that show everything companies like Proctor and Gamble own - I cant believe it’s allowed. But yes you’re right too comment is already about how it’s unfair to criticize. So many apologists. Our economy is broken. It’s so dismaying.

> Someone will point at the GDP going up and say this justifies literally everything that corporations do. Someone will draw comparisons between two lines on a graph and say this is why Facebook never did anything wrong.

Except literally nobody will do that, except the caricatures in the fantasy of your own mind.

> Surely, even the most staunch supporter of the free market can admit that at a bare minimum, capitalism in this country is in desperate need of better anti-trust regulation to stop monopolies

Not taking the position, but free market supporters typically point to regulations as the main reason why monopolies exist.

And they're somewhere between wrong and disingenuous to do so, though it's an awfully common trope.

Contrast the treatment of monopoly in Marshall's Principles (the leading text from the 1880s through the 1940s) -- a full chapter, plus numerous other mentions -- with, say, Hazlitt's One Lesson, where it escapes mention entirely, save a note at the end. Hazlitt's book is corporate propaganda.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.217841/page/n5...

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.217841/page/n9...

https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/ 9full text in one page)

I think Martin Gardner when writing about bad science roughly said unless there are strong countervailing forces orthodoxy eventually becomes a reflection of cultural biases. I feel modern economics is if anything about generating obsequious corporate propaganda.

That tendency goes way back. To the point of coopting anticorporate texts as corporate propaganda, such as Wealth of Nations.

On the flip side regulations are in place to protect the ill-informed consumers (either due to mental capacity or lack of information). I figure consumers enjoy being in their position anyways, they just want something to work without having to worry about any of the details. i.e. Using Salesforce instead of rolling your own solution.

Free markets are free to have monopolies.

And except pure anarchy this mythical free market has never existed and probably never will.

I like to think that we are actually living in a pure anarchy. The current state is just where it leads to.

> Surely, even the most staunch supporter of the free market can admit that at a bare minimum, capitalism in this country is in desperate need of better anti-trust regulation to stop monopolies from crushing all competition.

Yes, I do agree. For example, we should stop threatening media platforms like Facebook and Google with regulations that would put any competitor out of business, either because the regulations are so onerous or because the regulations are so unimaginative that they accidentally rule out perfectly viable, and better, business models.

Perhaps we could enact a law that prevented regulation of most markets.

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