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Comment by zeroonetwothree | Hacker News Reader

The car dealer model is extremely bad for consumers. It seems weird to herald it as some kind of achievement.

I think you're missing my point. I hate dealing with car dealers, and I would much prefer a direct-from-the-manufacturer car buying experience. But that inevitably leads to a much greater consolidation and concentration of wealth, where consumer dollars get drained from most locales and end up in far fewer locales.

My point is that it's trivially easy to understand the negatives of things like car dealers and real estate agents (pretty much everyone I know hates dealing with them), but I think we're just starting to come to terms with the potential negatives of having huge, geographically broad, open markets where there are very few winners.

Enlightenment comes when you realize that being a consumer is not a 24/7 occupation.

The same people who consume also need to be either small business owners, freelancers, or employees. In fact without the money from that, they couldn't be consumers in the first place.

So what's bad for a consumer role can balance out or be very good if it helps keep more people making money as opposed to the "efficient single corporation with the minimal workforce" selling everything". Such corporations are how many small towns in America turned into wastelands...

You need middlemen, even if it's not the most efficient productivity wise, because it helps make more money go around, stay local, and keep communities livable.

The alternative is a future with a 20% working, a 0.01% corporate overlords with the top end having Bezos style riches, and 80% barely making ends meet, living in slums, and we're getting there...

Nearly every law in the US is a weaponized corporate action to prevent competition and secure market hold. That already happened. That is the root cause of the wealth disparity. You argue for more of the same. The government will not be able to fix problems it created. It will only make them worse.

This Friedman-like thinking and cute propaganda sound bytes just doesn't work tho

Chile during the Pinochet Regime is an excellent example of the Neoliberal system not delivering on the promises, as hn_throwaway_99 mentioned, economies of scale simply take over any benefit of low gov friction "free markets", and any small advantage over time becomes an overwhelming one. At which point it simply becomes a mathematical snowball effect, reducing or removing government barriers of entry won't make your particular gadget or doodad be able to compete in quality nor cost against one produced by a huge mega-conglomerate, if anything that mega-conglomerate will see if it can steal your idea or buy the patent (gov!) so it can improve its own. It is the same thing that happens in South Korea with the Chaebols

Anyhow, point being, the Kansas Experiment failed[1], Chilean Chicago Boys Experiment failed to deliver after ~17 years of authoritarian rule(When Pinochet left power country had a ~40% poverty rate)[2]

This leads to the simple idea that the less friction your system has to accrue wealth the higher wealth inequality will be, and then the goal should be to make it as easy as possible for everybody to make their own start ups, but to create as much friction as possible for said startups to gain too much economy of scale momentum. Where the threshold of where that line would be, be left to policy makers, and ideally something politically independent, akin to the central bank

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/10/25/560040131/as-trump-proposes-t...

[2] https://imgur.com/BpwMlBy

Pg17 United Nations Document https://www.undp.org/content/dam/chile/docs/pobreza/undp_cl_...

In a just society the only possible way to get rich is through helping people. We want rich people. The more rich people the better off everyone is. Capitalism is beautiful. If a company is able to sustain market share through healthy competition then wonderful, that is great. Every law in the US right now is to ensure those corporations don't lose market share, edging everyone else out. It is basic economics. It is the government intervention that insures competition is reduced every single time, literally, not figuratively.

The issue with the current set of laws regulating corporations is that those laws were made with intervention from lobbyist groups, which changed legislation to benefit those lobbying groups. In reality, the way to do this fairly is to repeal these laws, remove power from corporations giving it back to the state (possibly through actually taxing corporations and the rich properly, along the lines of what Huey Long proposed a long time ago) and removing the capacity for corporations to lobby at all. The problem is not regulation, it is that corporations have the power to change that regulation. An unregulated market would be just as unfair as regulation enforced monopolies and monosonies.

If such changes were brought about, the increased taxes could go towards things like infrastructure and social welfare, which would actually help people, unlike what billionaires pretend is fair compensation to their harms upon society, when in reality they give back very little. Bezos and Musk for example, both got into the space industry instead of putting a lot of their wealth back into philanthropy. The seeming odd one out is those who are like Bill Gates, who do actually give back a massive portion of their wealth.

The regulation is what allows the problems by design. Take Wall Street, most the big names would have been shut down and liquidated to cover crime restitution... if it weren't for regulation. The EPA regulations shield companies from liability if they have an accident but were following the regulations they lobbied for. I worked for a megacorp that passed safety laws to hurt competitors. The airport TSA regs are specifically for shielding the airlines from liability in the case of a security incident. All regulations are a fraud. Every problem they purport to solve would already be covered by existing law, serious law. Either you are liable for damages or you are not. With any regulations the big players never are. Pollution is already covered through property and violence laws (poisoning my air is a violent act). Removing the regulations is what would remove power from the corporations. If it is already covered under existing law then the regs are to bypass them.

But... Like... Economies of scale are literally what gave the capitalist West it's unthinkably high standard of living.

Can't tell if sarcasm or not, but the US doesn't have some "unthinkably high standard of living".

It's actually below most western European countries in most global metrics, including such basics as infant mortality. It trumps most in gun deaths and incarceration rates though, so there's that...

E.g.

http://premieroffshore.com/usa-is-best-country-in-the-world/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_the_...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180924190303.h...

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-student...

And those countries have much less megacorps and "economies of scale"....

The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K. That seems like a huge difference to me and I don't think anybody really understands why it exists - American or not. It's salient not because it disproves your judgment (and that of many others) that the US is a dysfunctional hellhole, but because it is what people are compelled to rationalize away and obviously don't succeed on their own terms.

[1]https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

EU includes some poor countries that were recently under Soviet occupation.

And before that WW2 levelled entire cities, like capital of Poland was obliterated as it was bombed once when Germans took it, once when the Polish rose up, then again as Soviets took it.

At the dawn of computer era there was a wall, landmines and machine gun nests going though the centre of Berlin.

Isolate your comparison to northern Europe, spared by war and Soviets, and the difference in GDP is no longer in US favour.

1) You can cherry-pick US states too, and;

2) Just look at the chart I linked to - on decadal timescales, the EU was catching up to the US rapidly and then plateaued, in more than one cycle. No idea why, but something significant was happening and then stalling. Obviously history wasn't retroactively occurring and being eradicated.

2) It's good data, the graph shows 2008 as an inflection point. I think that's the disastrous austerity programme chosen by political leadership throughout europe. Instead of investing they decided to cut spending in a recession. That's my take anyway.

1) You can't brush off foreign occupation 29 years ago as cherry picking. This dataset starts in 1960s, when all of Eastern Europe were soviet puppets. There is nothing comparable in recent US history.

"There is nothing comparable in recent US history."

Of course there is. What transition happened in the US in the 60s, that the country is still not completely out of? You'd know instantly if an American was using it as an excuse (as is quite common) for not matching various European metrics.

I actually don't know what you could be alluding to. Civil right movement?

>The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K. That seems like a huge difference to me and I don't think anybody really understands why it exists

For one, the EU has dozens of ex Eastern Bloc communist countries (including areas of ex-USSR) which still play catch up and wages are still much lower.

Second, money is not everything. If the state, every day life, cost of living, etc is set up in a good way, you can get 2x or more the quality of life for half the money.

>The World Bank[1] says in 2018, US GDP per capita was over $62K while the EU was under $37K

This is meaningless because it is not normalized, the EU has a higher purchasing power parity than the US which is what your average citizen truly cares about

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/08/09/few-see-eu-...

Post-Hard Brexit it will probably change, EU PPP has already been damaged by the current Brexit scandals, and the last few years of increased US Dollar interest rate has increased relative US PPP, but because of income inequality those financial changes aren't really transferred to the everyday US citizen

Also, the difference in raw incomes is mostly based of the so called "Exorbitant Privilege" the US has for having its currency be the default world reserve currency, it is quite easy to understand when one comprehends that the US central bank basically "prints gold", and that like ~60% of all international transactions are done abroad but with the US dollar as transaction medium

"This is meaningless because it is not normalized, the EU has a higher purchasing power parity than the US"

I find it rather unbelievable that things are cheaper in Europe. A few years back, I used to work for a multinational, which opened an office there, and some people I knew went and at least one or two stayed, which lead me to idly consider the idea of being an expat, and my cursory research indicated salaries are lower and the cost of living is higher.

I mean, from my perspective, just the fact that you had the chance to work abroad for a multinational would put you way ahead of the wage the median US citizen has to survive on, so your experience is not representative of the median, let alone PPP stats

I'm certain we're talking about two different things. I'm talking about the West's distance from the depravation of the state of nature (capitalism certainly causes), and you're talking about some cherry picked metrics that make some countries in the West look better than others.

Or perhaps it's mostly down to modern technology, and corruption being kept in check.

It's not the government that created the problem, it's the big corporations, getting too powerful, and buying laws to stifle competition and enjoy market hold.

What I proposed is the opposite: laws working against those mega-corporations in favor of many smaller corporations.

Only the people, through law, have the power to do that. The big corporate overlords, left to their own devices, wont be able to fix the problems they created. They will only make them worse.

I agree with most of your comment, but I disagree that law is the only avenue. One can imagine other structures like co-ops.

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