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Comment by duelingjello | Hacker News Reader

Public-private partnerships allow this sort of vulture capitalism without resigning. Or, have your friends do it.

Public-private organizations, but capitalism takes all the blame naturally. It's the perfect material for selling people on pure state-run businesses to less informed citizens IMO.

Don't get me wrong though, the public/private trend of the last two decades really has been a cancer on society. I wish more market-leaning people realized this, since a ton of conservatives push it as some half-baked solution to "big government". We're all sold these benefits of "free" markets when the organization looks or operates nothing like a marketplace with legitimate competition nor with the transparency or responsibility towards externalities that public organizations bring.

It really is an opaque proxy for politicians and corrupt business leaders in the community whose only skill is working gov contract systems to have even less transparency and plunder public money. It's a worse-worse solution, gift wrapped as some more efficient pseudo-market.

We need a stronger divide between either private or public. These compromised middle grounds are a disaster. The US health market is the obvious example but there are a thousands of smaller ones in every municipality.

I wish more people would realize this _this_ is the crux of the problem. It's not Socialism or Capitalism, it's corruption.

And what drives this neither "socialism or capitalism" corruption? Not the hunt for extracting profit by any means?

One might argue that it is simple greed, which is enabled by the concentration of power, which happens both with economic power and regulatory power.

And on top of that, one might argue that humanity is highly self-interested by nature, and people with the greatest self-interest will be much more likely to obtain power.

While there is an aspect of self-interest in humans, I find that we are often a lot more altruistic than we are generally given credit for.

In this article dedicated to cooperation between drivers, it says that around half of them are quite cooperative: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/giving-autonomous-ca...

That behaviour split definitely sounds like an exploratory algorithm at work.

How self-interested someone is highly depends on the individual and their culture. Glorifying egoism, as common in capitalism, makes things worse than they have to be.

For this reason, we must glorify not-egoism and those selfless luminaries of Communism such as Stalin and Mao who would otherwise be forgotten. Indeed, the cult of personality where the middle class seeks anonymous salaryman status is the true danger.

Actually, we must glorify Stalin and Mao because literally the only other alternative is an Ancap dystopia in which homosexuality is <s>illegal</s> against the proprietors' covenant and children are traded on the free market.

Could also be power itself. Not sure if you've experienced this. I've seen it in the military and in my current workplace where people seek power over other people and don't care as much about the compensation. There's something about controlling others that is intoxicating for some.

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