A question I shouldn’t have to ask
enfranchisedmind.com
enfranchisedmind.com
I've always liked this quote. The incentives inside corporations and the way things are organized is totally different than the surrounding free market. It's all centrally-controlled, five-year-plan stuff. Sometimes that makes the corporation really efficient, sometimes not (in the case of giant companies who get whooped by small startups).
I guess when we have "the high res society", free markets populated by smaller and smaller companies will replace intra-company politics in places where it's more efficient.
Another is that even if most people choose hierarchy because it works, you remain free to try something else. (Within reason. I notice publicly traded companies do have some constraints on their organizational structure which do tend to force you towards hierarchy whether you like it or not.)
In a truly socialist society, there is only one unit: The government. This unit can not be replaced when it fails, because it will admit no replacements. It can not be punished, because it is the punisher. All units grow old and decrepit, the government is no exception, and when it happens, you just get stuck.
The problem is not socialism, hierarchy, or "any" centralization. It's in promoting one unit to the top (be it "government" or "corporation") and breaking all mechanisms for replacing it in the misguided impression that the system has attained and will forever keep perfection. (When the real trick to creating a sustainable government and maintaining freedom is in concentrating on how to make it easy for a certain amount of replenisment, renewal, and change to occur without the whole thing breaking.)
Following up on this and indirectly replying to some other threads, it is rather disgusting to pin "fascism" on some social conservatives at the very moment that social liberals are trying to convert our medical system to fascism, have taken a lot of steps to make our automotive industry fascist, and are generally favoring huge centralized financial systems with all the power located in companies where the line between "company" and "government" is increasingly hard to find. If the conservatives are calling for fascism of various stripes, which for the sake of argument I'll accept without question, the liberals are doing it. Right now.
Maybe it'll get undone once the crisis is past... but what are the odds?
I don't want to insult your intelligence (and perhaps you're using a different definition of socialism to most people in Europe) but you do realise that socialism is not incompatible with democracy, right?
Most Western European countries have had at least one socialist government in the past few decades, which has been punished (elected out of office) when the citizens considered it to be failing.
Nothing stops you from democratically electing a government that gathers more power to itself. The US just did, after all.
I find the above a bit odd. Take the U.S. as an example. We have 50 states which can operate somewhat independently. They get to copy each other's successes and avoid each other's failures when run correctly. We get to vote to replace government leadership: that is, helping it run more correctly. So it is replaceable, including changes to constitutions.
There is vastly more evidence than that, but that is just the latest, most flagrant example. Some people disbelieve it out of self-interest (or they want to be one of the fat cats), but that doesn't make it false.
It takes self-control to not object when a cause you, or any reasonable person, supports is labeled propaganda. But if the label fits and we want to think rationally, we must use it.
For the record: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/propaganda
And to call the Federalist society, the editorial board of the WSJ, and basically all conservatives "fascists" is just obscene.
If the shoe fits.
Suppose that someone were to hook you up bodily to 220 volts. Would it make a difference to your subjective experience whether said voltage were coming out of a mains socket, an auto inverter, or a generator turned by a team of mules?
Likewise, many of us languish under the thumb of arbitrary authority, and don't give a rat's ass whether it is of state or corporate origin. Unlike the inhabitants of traditional autocracies, we are allowed some degree of choice regarding which miniature dictatorial hell we are to be imprisoned in from 9 to 5 - but the difference ends there.
I reject the notion that evil is a scalar, with Nazi Germany as a permanent and unbeatable record-holder, and that the only measure of a society's evil is the rate at which it fills up mass graves.
Godwin's Law, I piss on thee. The popular preoccupation with the most picturesque Nazi atrocity has prevented any lessons from being learned from their lesser crimes. Crimes which continue to be committed, by people who do not speak German. Crimes which are unforgivable though they may fall short of murder.
Wish I could unflag.
I don't know what you see in this post.
It has a thesis, buried in the 5th? graf, which is that Fascism means "a dictatorship of corporations". Then it uses a rhetorical sleight of hand to tar all corporations with the brush of syndicalism, equating Mussolini's psuedo-nationalized sham companies with (I guess) the S&P 500, and pronouncing the WSJ Editorial Page as a bastion of fascist thought.
It concludes by suggesting that people who disagree with the author are --- well here I'll just quote: "you support dictatorship in any form, and oppose democracy, you are anti-american, a traitor, and scum. Period."
I'm a socialist-leaning liberal (and an entrepreneur), not a Mises Institute libertarian, and even I think this is over the top.
Can you either tell me how I'm misreading this, and what value this article adds, or can you flag the post too and acknowledge you did? Because I feel like right now all this post is doing is wasting people's time.
I'm also a left-leaning liberal -- in most areas -- but the value of the post was that it attempted to elucidate the links between the persistent corporatism of our society and the fact that the corporatists truly did intend at one time to take over the government.
I have no doubt that they would (and in many ways, already have, through direct purchase) attempt to do the same again.
All in all, the piece could use some more research and fewer ideas all jumbled together, but it rebuts pretty well the too-rosy view of corporations as beneficent angels that all too many here seem to have.
And also, I've had a problem lately as well with the attempted historical revisionism towards Nazism, and have been wondering what's responsible for this as well.
As for being intellectually interesting, I think that fits that particular criterion for HN pretty well.
It should be the case that when a political post on Hacker News survives flagging, that post is of exceptional quality.
Most of Nate Silver's 538 posts are like that: they're interesting not just because they advocate a sensible position, but because they use interesting methods to do that, methods that hackers find congenial.
Even though right-leaning libertarianism makes my skin crawl, a lot of libertarian posts find a good home here too. They advocate a vision of society that is nurtures entrepreneurialism, and even assigns it a central role in the social contract.
This post doesn't live up to either standard. It takes a viewpoint that any college freshman selected off the UMich campus at random could be expected to have, and articulates it using a rhetorical and logical style that any college freshman selected off the UMich campus at random could be expected to use.
Meanwhile, the post has managed to spark a vigorous debate on HN about whether it's fair to compare the WSJ to Nazis.
Posts like this suck the air out of Hacker News. It's one of the great features of HN that we tend to reject them. I hope you'll reconsider whether material like this has a place here. There are many other communities on the Internet that are better suited for it.
[edit no offense to college students --- I think my point is clear, if clumsily written]
Ouch. I think I just became collateral damage.