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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

Then eventually things implode, society collapses, a dictator takes over after claiming they will help the starving masses and so on. Starving masses who have lost their life savings do not make for a good place to live even if you avoid being one of them. Society should be protected from the fallout of capitalism to a reasonable degree.

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I don’t know what the alternative is are you in favour of propping up private companies and keeping this status quo? That’s alternative of free markets. Right now they aren’t free. AOC and Ben Shapiro of all people agree for once. This is a stage 7 brundlefly economic system.

"Free markets" are never perfectly free or even close to it. Only the writers of utopian libertarian science fiction think that.

The question is how you manage that lack of freedom and to whose benefit you try to manage it. I prefer it be managed towards the general stability of society. Of course it will be managed in an imperfect way but I prefer the goal be a stable society.

edit: The government intervening will never really make the market more free but it wasn't free to begin with (see robinhood today). So you lose a bit more freedom but you shift the benefit of the overall loss of freedom from "a bunch of rich people get richer" to "society as a whole get's richer and more stable." Not fully but a bit further.

While i agree with you in principle, there's a difference between "this market is regulated" and "this market will be bailed out at random on the whims of politicians, while this other market or firm won't" in which case we start to have issues.

My argument is government intervention is the problem. You can’t fix the problem with more of the problem. Say your house was on fire do you add more fire until it burns down and call that problem solved.

Protected by people with lofty ideals like yourself? Where are these high minded incorruptible individuals?

Governments are the cause of mass starvation and murders, please see China, USSR, Germany, and on and on.

>Governments are the cause of mass starvation and murders, please see China, USSR, Germany, and on and on.

All caused by revolutions caused by massive economic issues and societal issues. In other words, capitalistic collapse of society leads to dictatorship which leads to horrible things. Like I said in the post you replied to. So thank you for making my argument for me.

Governments also commit mass murder on behalf of the interests of private capital, ranging from feudal land enclosures, to the United Fruit Company in Honduras [0], to modern oil interests and the military-industrial complex.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Is_a_Racket

> Governments are the cause of mass starvation and murders, please see China, USSR, Germany, and on and on.

Organised groups of people do these things, governmental or not - private corporations are responsible for plenty of similar occurrences, and so are NGOs (e.g. religious groups). Centralisation of power is bad, absence of checks and balances is bad, lack of accountability is bad - but insisting that limited-liability corporations be allowed to grow arbitrarily large is the opposite of avoiding those problems.

actually, it has shown time and time again that unregulated capitalism is just not working for a majority of the population.

The myth of the "free market" is in the same vein as the centrally planned economy of a socialist state.

If you lost your life savings on GME, you deserve to starve

edit: the only way you could be losing your life savings on GME is with a dumb, arrogant short position. yes, you should starve...isn't this what a short sale is anyway? A bet that someone else will starve?

Personally I prefer to not be stabbed to death by a starving person who lost their life savings on GME so they can steal $10 from my wallet. Massive societal implosions tend to have a large blast radius.

So basically, “heads I win, tails you lose” for the institutional investors because you’re worried about the possible fall out?

The comment I replied to was "Good free markets should be free. No government bailouts no problem." Not "no bailouts for hedge funds doing shorts." See the distinction?

I think you don't appreciate how angry people on WSB are. It's pure distilled anger. They want to relieve that anger somewhere and do it nonviolently. A handful of people losing money is the perfect pressure valve.

If you deny them this opportunity to vent their anger then they are highly likely to stab you, not because they wanted $10 from your wallet, nah it's because they are still angry and want someone to pay for it and going by the events that lead to WW2 a lot of them considered a life to be an equally valid price.

People on WSB tell you these things all the time:

Never use margin trading.

Only invest what you can lose.

Remember, they have grown thick skin and know what losing money is like. It only takes one lesson to learn that.

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