Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What's free market about total state regulatory capture, calling the President when your bids get rejected, or setting up wars and domestic police actions to enrich yourself with contracts using taxpayer funds?

There are legitimate criticisms of a pure free market, but this is "state capitalism" not a free market.

The Trump administration is absolutely not pro free market. They're putting fingers on the scale all over the place, taking Federal positions in private companies, taking literal bribes for regulatory favors, influencing the selection of executives and board members, and using the power of the state to attack privately owned companies for platforming speech they don't like (like this 60 Minutes segment, made by a private company). Trump/MAGA looks a lot more like the CCP than anything else.

Of course if you pay attention to the discourse, MAGA and national conservatism are an explicit repudiation of Reagan/Clinton "neoliberalism" and "libertarian conservatism." They explicitly support a large administrative state that centrally plans the economy and culture, just one they run and use to push right wing and nationalist agendas.

I remember saying back during the Bush years: if the right is forced to choose between liberty and cultural conservatism, they will throw out liberty. The right only supports the freedom to do what they think people should be doing. (Yes, there are similar attitudes in some parts of the left too. There are not many principled defenders of individual liberty.)

Edit: I'm really just arguing that we should call things what they are. Calling MAGA's CCP-like state capitalism a free market is like calling Bernie Sanders or Mamdani communism (they're socialists, not communists, these are not the same) or calling old school conservative republicans fascists. Words mean things.

The tariffs are at least partially about crony capitalism if you look how they have repeatedly played out. Announce big, broad, sweeping industry & country level tariffs. Talk to Big Tech execs, quietly delay/rescind specific sub-components or even companies from said tariffs. Rinse & repeat.

The companies left fully paying tariffs are the ones that aren't big enough to have the orange mans ear / "donate" to the ballroom construction.

Tariffs are not free market. A true free market would have zero tariffs.

Tariffs, as with taxes, may serve positive, market-favourable functions, particularly in addressing market failures, uneven regulation (e.g., higher pension, safety, environmental, and/or medical-care burdens in the importing country), as well as anti-dumping or anti-interference actions. British-Korean economist Ha-Joon Chang writes of this, particularly in Kicking Away the Ladder:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang#Kicking_Away_the...>

Recent US tariffs fall rather short on most of these points, of course.

It is still not a free market thing.

And it would quickly be destroyed by competing governments that don’t believe in free markets and actively subsidize their industries to capture market share.

The US has been largely tariff free since the 1900s and it's the largest economy in the world.

Remind me where I can buy a Chinese EV?

And I assume there’s no government subsidies to allow US private sectors to compete globally because free market right?

Right?

I forgot to put in my comment "until recently". And the US auto industry does such so using that as your argument in favor of tariffs doesn't really work.

The 1960s+ chicken tax would like a word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

Yes, trucks are one of the few areas where there have been tariffs. And unsurprisingly American automakers are now completely uncompetitive.

You and your downvote brigade can continue to hit my posts but it won’t change the fact the US has been subsidizing our agriculture sectors and oil and gas to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars for a LONG time.

Anyone claiming the US is a completely free market is either uninformed or a delusional nationalist.

I didn't downvote you once, I don't do it to people I'm discussing things with out of principle.

Can you give an example of a zero tariff country being destroyed by a super high tariff country? I can give you examples of the opposite. For example Argentina tried to build up domestic industries with high tariffs.

Trump forced the UAE to buy $2 billion of his stable coin in order to avoid tariffs. He is making $80 million a year farming yields off that. The tariff nonsense was 100% just a backdoor for corruption.

Edit: and I forgot he pardoned the binance guy for facilitating this corruption too. Trumps pardons are the most corrupt in american history but MAGA is still yelling about the hunter biden pardon even though Joe was absolutely right that trump would maliciously prosecute him

It’s actually a lot of small to midsize manufacturers importing subcomponents that are getting hurt in the heartland. They can’t lobby for exemptions & don’t have the supplier negotiating power of the megacaps.

Sorry widgetCo. Shoulda been a billionaire!

I've said this before, but Trump's form of tariffs are basically a firewall and paying tribute opens specific ports and addresses.

Bribe knocking?

The recent defense bill is evidence of this. Who has access to these contracts and massive spending increases? Is it any random startup that is building a good product? Nope. It’s the incumbent companies that are big donors and the various defense tech companies from the Peter Thiel and Joe Lonsdale ecosystem, who are ideologically aligned to the administration and support them vocally. Same with the new ICE and border agency funding. They’re tripling these agencies budgets. Who’s getting contracts to hire thousands of new agents or to build software profiling the millions they want to deport in 2026? Their friends like Palantir probably.

> There are legitimate criticisms of a pure free market, but this is "state capitalism" not a free market.

Yeah, that's what OP said. I hate these sort of comments where the poster acts like they vehemently disagree with what was said, but then just restate what was said in a slightly different way.

Yeah, that's what OP said.

No, OP lectured us about the evils of free markets and how they need to be regulated... presumably by the same corrupt, captured government he's complaining about. The one who's giving Ellison his orders to pass along to Weiss. Because that's who'll do the regulating, in the world OP is implicitly asking for.

The problem isn't the money or the market. The problem is the power.

Money is power.

Trump's and the Republican party's whole shtick is deregulation. The financial tumors in the economy love it when the white blood cells look the other way. That's why folks like Ellison and Elon bought this election. These are the types of orders they are happy to comply with for favorable treatment.

If you don't regulate, you're just opening the door for the free market to birth a tyrant or cabal that makes up their own power structures.

If you don't regulate, you're just opening the door for the free market to birth a tyrant or cabal that makes up their own power structures.

Perhaps, but right now the only tyrants and cabals I see around me were elected democratically. I don't have to use Facebook or Amazon, but I have to pay taxes to Trump's treasury department.

The fact that stupid people can be easily herded into voting against almost everyone's best interests, including their own, is not an indictment of the free market. If anything, it speaks to the apparently-unresolvable incompatibility of social media and democracy. I'm pretty sure we'll have to give up one or the other before long.

Democracy is not the problem, it's a deliberately misinformed populace shaped by undeserved money that's the core issue. Folks who pollute the information in the market or the political field steer the market away from a symmetrical information equilibrium -- they are huge drains on human potential. Trump did both and evaded trial for sedition because of how much he cheated in business and engaged the law in bad faith, and due to favors he promised to others like Elon and Ellison who had more money. Before he was a "democratically elected tyrant" he was a regular free market one.

Before he was a "democratically elected tyrant" he was a regular free market one.

Whatever. He wasn't bothering me until the deliberately-misinformed populace gave him power over me... twice.

Again: the problem isn't the money, the problem is the power.

Money is power. High concentrations of money controlled by few people serve the whims of those people, who use that power to influence politics, in 2024 through one of the most dishonest campaign trails and propaganda operations in my living memory of American politics. I'm surprised you don't see the connection.

Money is power the way religion is power. Traditionally, religion is what the American right wing has used to herd its supporters, but it wasn't enough by itself to capture the entire electorate. More recently they've found that leveraging social media such as Facebook and friendly "news" outlets such as Fox gives them enough influence to take over national politics completely. If such immense power wasn't up for grabs, the money wouldn't matter.

If I said the problem was religion, I'd rightfully be taken to task. But if I were to call out the effects of evangelical subversion and abuse of protestant Christianity in America, you'd probably find room to agree. It's exactly the same with money.

We aren't going to get rid of either money or religion, but we can say that the Federal government -- and yes, the billionaires behind it -- shouldn't have anything close to this level of power.

This should be higher, absolutely right

In a free and unregulated market, you will see cronyism by the wealthiest players who have captured it. The payoff of capture is enormous and therefore investors have incentive to offer up capital to accelerate the capture. Tyrants emerge from anarchy. A corrupt MAGA administration bought by private money is the product of a poorly regulated market.

I think you're missing the implied cause and effect here. Lighthanded regulations allow for ridiculous amounts of wealth to be acquired in the U.S. Larry Ellison, Elon Musk, etc. are so unfathomably rich (and therefore powerful), they can now trivially bend government to their will.

Peel it back even more: how does any State not fall victim to monied interests? This is usually handwaved away by socalists in the sense that everything is handled by "independent commissions" that can totally not be corrupted.

The solution is really to keep the scope of government small so that any corruption isn't detrimental to the populace, and they can handle it in the next election.

> Peel it back even more: how does any State not fall victim to monied interests?

Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate), or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high).

Edit: if the above are too extreme, another approach would be firm and consistent application of anti-competitive laws, resurrecting the fairness doctrine, and stop pretending that artificial constructs have human rights.

> or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high).

This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.

> Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate)

The reason why this worked is because FDR oversaw the US during a period of incredible change and after the Great Depression. It's not like the tax rate was responsible for his successes.

> > or the CCP route (clip the wings of the Icaruses who fly too high). > This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.

They already do in the US, so this is a non-response.

> > Go with either the FDR route (94% tax rate)

> The reason why this worked is because FDR oversaw the US during a period of incredible change and after the Great Depression. It's not like the tax rate was responsible for his successes.

Once again, this is a vacuous response. If the claim was “high taxes caused the change during FDR’s time,” “There was change” is not an alternative explanation to that claim. If we took the counter-factual claim, do you think the period would have been as transformative if the tax rates weren’t high?

> This seems like a great way for the monied interests from WITHIN the party to just take full control.

Politicians already have political power in every country and political system. The blatantly corrupt ones get the death sentence if their provincial or central committee patron can't save them, and those get culled every decade or so, so you can't go overboard.

That's not a solution, that just removes an opponent of monied interests from the table entirely, it's exactly what they want. The only thing these people want more than a government they can capture is a government so small they can replace it entirely.

But theres a balance to be struck there — keep the government too small and weak and it is susceptible to corruptive forces from domestic and foreign enemies alike.

So imho it isn’t enough to simply keep government ‘small’ —it is also important to keep it the size proportionate to other potential threats.

It’s also important to keep in mind that size is but one dimension and is only being used as a proxy for power which is the ultimate factor that matters — a government of one person with control of WMDs can be much more of a threat than a large government without WMDs.

Small government leads to big capitalism which is its own kind of tyranny. Our current problems are not because government is too big.

Powerful regulation which answers to the people is the answer.

Small government goes against the original and deepest Capitalist thinkers, who all pushed that strong government oversight was a REQUIRED part of Capitalism to keep it healthy and in balance.

That's a solution. Another would be to enshrine in law independent watchdog agencies whose goal is to win trophies for rooting out corruption, reducing waste, preventing or breaking up harmful monopolies, etc.

> win trophies for rooting out corruption

Many a corrupt government has touted their anti-corruption activities that inexplicably seem to snare almost exclusively their political opponents.

How valuable are those trophies compared to bribes, or the tacit bribes of cushy "consultancy" roles? How do you stop lobbyists from gutting those regulators - what use is a fiercely independent regulator that has no resources?

Good governance is hard.

Getting money out of politics is the hardest part.

I am not sure how the US will find the political will short of getting burned badly enough for partisans to align on reform. How bad does it have to get?

The apt question is 'How bad for whom does it have to get?'

Because the 00s+ US government is in no way propped up by all stakeholding groups in equal amounts.

That's no solution, since once someone has corrupted said small government, the obvious next step is to use the influence to increase its size and power.

This solution is anti-capitalist.

Capitalism by it's design, and as outlined by it's original and deepest thought leaders requires strong and decisive government oversight to keep it in check and keep it healthy. Being against strong government oversight is to be against a working, Capitalist system and against traditional Capitalist thought.

Strong and decisive don't mean huge expenditures and picking winners. Our government does so much more than governing. Capitalism needs a government that sets and enforces rules in the face of market failures. It doesn't mean a government that redistributes trillions of dollars.

Which countries on the planet do you think are the least corrupt? What does their system of government look like?

There's a lot of these lists, but it's interesting the differences in who tops the list:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/least-cor...

There's more than one type of government that can resist corruption, since much that drives corruption is extra-governmental (populace education level, media environment, trust in institutions, wealth equality, etc).

So it's unsurprising there are different optimal anti-corruption government types for different combinations of those qualities.

Yes. But, I don’t think a single one of those “least corrupt” top contenders could be described as:

> The solution is really to keep the scope of government small so that any corruption isn't detrimental to the populace, and they can handle it in the next election.

Which was kind of my point. In reality, the least corruptible types of governments tend to be ones libertarian-skewing Americans would crassly describe as socialist.

I'm not an expert, but aren't Switzerland and Singapore pretty lightweight governments?

Singapore is strange place - aside from being a city-state. You'll get sent to the gulags for being in possession of a joint, but prostitution is legal. I know a guy who once got in a bar fight there, and he immediately packed up and went to the airport.

I wouldn't exactly call it lightweight government.

I have heard the policing is very strict, but I thought on the business side they were extremely laissez faire.

The graph here can get a bit wonky. And Switzerland is definitely the closest example of “limited government” working, I’d agree. But both of those countries, e.g., have universal healthcare. Switzerland through a more strict version of something like the ACA. Singapore, state-funded. Switzerland has compulsory military service, higher taxes, more gun regulations, etc. than the U.S. I think the U.S. beats these two on having a more conventionally “limited government” design.

> The solution is really to keep the scope of government small

Of course. Politically active billionaires are always famously lobbying for large government and more regulations.

I don't entirely disagree, but also note that the extreme wealth of both these guys is at least partly a result of state spending not pure private market forces.

Oracle has always had a huge presence in government. Large companies too, but Federal use has really helped keep them afloat as open source and competing products that are far cheaper have eaten their lunch.

For Musk the case is even more extreme. Tesla's early growth was bankrolled by EV credits and carbon offsets, which were state programs, and SpaceX is a result of both Federal funding and direct R&D transfer from NASA to SpaceX. The latter was mostly uncompensated. NASA just handed over decades of publicly funded R&D.

These two would probably be rich without the state, but would they be this rich?

The same was true back in the original Gilded Age. The "robber barons" were built by railroad and other infrastructure subsidies.

However I do agree that private wealth beyond a certain point begins to pose a risk to democracy and the rule of law. It's a major weakness in libertarian schemes that call for a "separation of economy and state." That's a much, much harder wall to maintain than separation of church and state. Enough money can buy politicians and elections.

As much as I don’t like Musk and think Tesla is overvalued meme stock and the cars suck compared to other EVs (I have driven a lot of EVs during the year that we went without a car on purpose - long story), SpaceX did something that the government couldn’t do - have a lot of failures before it had a success. Politics wouldn’t let it happen.

Let’s remember: Musk bought Tesla. He was already ridiculously wealthy in order to get himself into this position of basically robbing the U.S. government.

This is true but he was nowhere near as wealthy as he is now, not even close.

Of course. That was also my point, as I think it is yours. There is an event horizon after which an individual can corrupt government and really accelerate their wealth accumulation even faster.

What you see as “corrupt government” others see as a “virtuous cycle”…

The main problem with your thought process is that your conflating “wealth accumulation” with “wealth creation”!

Isn’t the cause that people just happened to elect someone who doesn’t care and is corrupt? Are you implying money decided the election? How do you reconcile this with the fact that trump was outspent?

"Outspent" is a nebulous concept, post-Citizens United.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com