Comment by themafia | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themafia | Hacker News Reader

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> the federal government intervened to stabilize a critical industry

They intervened to maintain the status quo. Industries are neither stable or unstable for a long period of time without external influences forcing that outcome. Short term turbulence is to be expected and is beneficial for the market as a whole.

They destroy markets and then lie to your face about it.

> industries remained solvent.

How does an _industry_ become insolvent? Only when it's nearly fully monopolized and when there is no difference between an industry and a single entity. This is where we are currently.

> more shares at their current market price to the government in exchange for cash to continue business operations.

Couldn't they just offer those shares to _any investor at all_? Why is the government special here?

> https://chicagopolicyreview.org/2022/08/23/piece-of-the-acti...

Of course. Chicago school thinking. It's infected our country for decades now. Certainly not to the benefit of it's citizens.

CPU manufacturing without any intervention is likely leading towards a monopoly. Every latest generation fabrication facility costs much more than the previous one. Eventually we’ve reached the point where only three companies (Intel, TSMC, Samsung) are interested in making such a large investment.

Could it be that Chicago school thinking has worked but greed & profiteering elsewhere have stolen benefits from the citizens?

> Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? … What is greed? Of course none of us are greedy. It’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests.

Milton Friedman when asked about combating greed.

Yes, and altruism doesn't exist, everyone is political, and a whole slew of other nonsense banalizations that pretend that distinctions cannot be made.

> Greed: a selfish and excessive desire for more of something (such as money) than is needed

This definition is quite easy to distinguish ordinary desire from greed. Otherwise you need to render selfish and excessive banal and meaningless as well.

How is "needed" determined? 3 of my 4 grandparents made it around 100 years old with way, way less than what I "need" for my kids.

They did not need doctors, daycare, helmets, cars (they sat 5+ to a motorcycle), air conditioning, avocados, bedrooms, computers, etc.

Getting more than needed does not imply that something is needed at all. You can live your whole life without needing to eat a Lychee, but if you eat 1000 of those that is clearly more than needed. A person who never ate a lychee maybe cannot put it into perspective and might suggest that wanting a single lychee is greed, but most people wouldn't find it difficult to see that perspective as extreme. Change lychee for cocaine and you suddenly start getting a different balance.

Context and our norms is what determines it.

I know. Per your definition, anyone who desires a vacation to a tropical island is greedy. Or eating at restaurants. Playing video games, renting a movie, eating dessert, etc. How about living on the California coast? People who want to earn more so they can move there are greedy? Or do they simply desire it?

One of my cousins' parents immigrated to the Bay Area, but mine went to the midwest. Am I greedy for desiring to earn income more than a couple standard deviations above the mean so that I could buy land in the Bay Area? Is my cousin not greedy because they were born there?

>Context and our norms is what determines it.

Exactly, which is the problem with trying to distinguish "desire" and "greed". "We" don't have norms. I was lambasted growing up by my grandparents for wanting things that any 1990s kid had in the US, but they didn't have in their poorer country from 1920 to 1940.

> Per your definition, anyone who desires a vacation to a tropical island is greedy. Or eating at restaurants.

It isn't my definition, it's Merriam-Webster dictionary, and I suggest reading the definition more carefully, it really isn't that hard to understand. That is how the word is used.

All of your examples are not selfish or excessive. So not greedy. That it isn't a clear bright line isn't a problem, most judgements in life are not clear cut.

Milton Friedman is wrong.

The human emotion that drives free market capitalism optimally isn't greed, it's competition.

People compete to produce better goods at a lower price to win acclaim and profit.

Greedy people mess that all up by amassing wealth and then using that wealth to change the rules of the game so that they can amass more wealth.

"Winning profit" is greed. That's how you amass wealth.

It's like you're arguing that overeating isn't how you gain weight, it's just having an unbalanced caloric ratio.

Profit seeking through competition isn’t the same as greed. Greed is the impulse to rig the game once you’ve won a little, so you can keep extracting more without competing. And that tendency from some kinds of people corrodes free market capitalism and its ability to drive innovation and reduce prices. Competition only works if players play by the rules.

And your food analogy works against you. If we extend your analogy, profit is like eating, greed is like overeating. Saying profit = greed is like saying every person who eats three meals a day is a glutton. Competition rewards healthy eating -- efficiency, balance, discipline. Greed is scarfing down the pantry and locking the fridge so nobody else can eat.

> Greed is the impulse to rig the game once you’ve won a little, so you can keep extracting more without competing.

You're making up your own novel definition of greed there, which is certainly cheating when you're saying Milton Friedman is wrong. He was using greed in a more generally accepted sense, ie, a desire for more than one has right now.

There are a lot of greedy people out there who are scrupulously honest. As far as I can tell, the average greedy person should be modelling scrupulous honesty, advocating fair systems and enforcing rule-following behaviours - that is creating the best environment for acquiring capital and maintaining property rights. Greedy people who white-ant the systems sustaining their capital are generally more stupid than greedy.

Economists really should read more Adam Smith: for every word he wrote on free markets, he wrote five more on ethics and morality.

Newton wrote more about alchemy and theology than he did on physics too. There's a reason why Newton and Smith are primarily remembered in a subset of the fields they worked in.

And, boy, has he got opinions on landlords!

Give me your definition of greed.

I did. "a desire for more than one has right now"

If you want a dictionary definition, search suggests "An excessive desire to acquire or possess more than what one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth".

On their own neither of those implies any desire to rig games or to avoid competition. Some greedy people do that, but since pretty much everyone is greedy to some extent you find greedy people with every combination of human characteristics.

It's hilarious to watch people try to pretend that "crony capitalism" and "capitalism" are different things, as if the greed to rig the system once you've won is fundamentally different from the greed that pushes you to compete in an un-rigged system.

No, sorry, it's not only the same emotion, it's the same system and the same rules: if greed is good, why shouldn't one seek network effects, platform effects, last-mile dynamics, vertical and horizontal integration that block competition, engage in FUD and dumping and regulatory capture and so on and so on? The answer that the entire business community and an increasing fraction of the general population seems to agree to is that one should, and this has prevented the sort of gardening that can keep the system actually competitive and working for the people, rather than working for the people on top, which is what it overwhelmingly wants to do when left to its own devices.

A typical example here might be something like chess. The primary reason people play it is competition and enjoyment of the game. But there are some who a distorted mentality and simply want to win, even if they're not the one's doing anything, and so you get things like people using computers to cheat. And online chess sites (and increasingly even major over the board events) only work so well by making sure that these sort of people are completely removed from the game.

The desire to compete is somehow not really the same as the desire to win. This is overtly apparent in things like body building. 99.9% of body builders will never compete in a body building show, let alone win, but enjoy the journey that's mostly full of years of self inflicted pain, occasional injury, and endless dedication - largely for the sake of competition and of course what it does to your body. And that latter part isn't really about showing off or sex or whatever, but simply about pride in what you've accomplished - much in the same way one might take pride in their ability to play chess well, or manage a healthy business.

You're splitting stupid hairs here over the exact implication of words in a setting where they don't exactly matter. Whether you call it greed, self interest, a desire to amass wealth, etc, doesn't really matter because for the fat part of the bell curve it's all the same.

No.

Greed and competitiveness are two different motivators, and free market capitalism is driven by competition and not greed.

People compete for many reasons and the collection of material wealth is only one of them.

since some of the criticisms of Chicago style thinking include blindness to greed and profiteering, or actively promoting them, it would seem more reasonable to argue the criticisms of Chicago school thinking were correct, that Chicago school thinking worked as planned, and this is what we got out of it.

Were those vulnerabilities particularly obscure or might they have been obvious from the outset?

“The purpose of a system is what it does.”

If it just weren’t for that darn greed and profiteering that the Chicago school endorses.

Sounds a bit like all those no true Scotsman defenses of communism

- Communism is awesome!

- What about countries X, Y, and Z?

- Oh, that wasn't "real" communism!

Given that communism is a sci-fi imagining of what the world will look like in the age of post-scarcity, the last point is unquestionably true. We have never achieved post-scarcity. It remains science fiction.

Most imagine post-scarcity will be awesome. While one can never know for sure, for all intents and purposes, the first point is also true. To the best of our knowledge, achieving post-scarcity will be awesome. It is why everyone, even (and in particular!) the USA, is striving to get there someday.

Communism imagines that statehood will come to end, so "countries", in the context of communism, doesn't make sense. It is likely confusing "communism" with "Communist Party".

I mean it really wasn't. Every time a country has tried communism it's fallen straight down the despotism rabbit hole or had the government taken over by officials who wanted a much bigger piece of the pie at the cost of the constituents if you catch my drift.

> Every time a country has tried communism

At what point do you decide that's an inevitable outcome, rather than an unfortunate unexpected outcome that happens every single time?

Once a country that isn’t already prone to dictatorships has tried it.

I'm not sure there's very many of those.

Communism gives politicians 100% control over the country instead of roughly half like they have in capitalist democracies, So people wont vote for communism because its autocratic.

You never want all power to be in the hands of a single group of people, capitalist democracies separates private from public, so politicians regulating companies are not the same people who are owning those companies. Communism can never work since its an autocratic system with a single player, you need multiple actors.

And yes, in some capitalist democracies company leaders are close bedfellows with politicians, we call that corruption, it isn't like that in all countries.

> Communism gives politicians 100% control over the country

Impossible. Communism has no concept of state (nor money, nor class). That's, like, its defining feature.

Of course, you can't just wish for class, state, and money to go away. They are necessary features of our current world. Communism is the imagined outcome of what happens after we achieve post-scarcity. It is a work of science fiction. Star Trek is a more modern adaptation on the same idea.

> Communism can never work since its an autocratic system

If it were more than science fiction, it is literally the opposite, but, again, depends on post-scarcity. You are likely confusing communism with the Communist Party, who believe in an autocratic system being necessary to pave the way to achieving post-scarcity, with, on paper, a desire to get there.

Maybe a little pedantic. Socialism then, or any existing embodiment of the first stages of Communism. Imposed by force on a population accustomed to another way. Usually accompanied by state confiscation of large businesses, the accompanied corruption, waste and ultimate food riots that often occur. Then a military takeover that's decried as crushing the utopian communist ideal! But actually, just getting everybody fed again.

> Socialism then

While the Communist Party does believe in socialism, that does not sum it up either. That would be like trying to tie the Republican Party up in a capitalism bow. They do believe in capitalism, but so does the Democratic Party. Yet they are clearly different parties with some very different ideas.

> or any existing embodiment of the first stages of Communism.

The USA is the country most in the first stages of communism. Its technical innovation has nearly pushed food into post-scarcity territory (some argue it is already there), and it is working hard, harder than any other country, to do the same in other areas of production.

While some of your points resonate with what Trump is doing, for the most part he is an aberration and there isn't yet much indication that he — or anyone in the future — will get away with it.

Can you list any such countries where a communist state would not result in oppression and dictatorship?

Chile once democratically elected a marxist to lead the country, and while not technically a member of the Communist Party himself, the Communist Party was part of his coalition. For all intents and purposes, I expect this meets what the previous commenter was talking about. It did not become a dictatorship during that time.

Ironically, it did become a dictatorship after the USA staged a military coup and overthrew said government, but anyway...

And Chile was a communistic paradise and everyone had everything communism promises?

You seem mighty confused. Communism is impossible without achieving post-scarcity, and you know full well we haven't achieved that yet.

Communism doesn't exactly promise anything. It is a sci-fi imagining of what the world will look like in a post-scarcity world. Star Trek is a more modern adaptation on the same idea. Would you say Star Trek promises us something? Notably what communism does imagine, though, is that there is no state.

If you read back in the comments, you'll see we're not talking talking about communism at all, rather "communist state". As before, communism rejects the concept of having a state, so you know we cannot possibly be talking about communism. Instead, "communist state" usually refers to a country under rule by the Communist Party. As Chile was ruled by a Marxist inside a Communist Party coalition we said that was likely close enough for what the earlier commenter was trying to convey.

Chile was a technocratic democracy then. Is that paradise? That is in the eye of the beholder, I suppose, but it must have been pretty good else why would the USA have wanted it to dismantle it so badly, undoing what was, at the time, one of the most stable democracies around?

Norway or Sweden, maybe?

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