The stealth libertarianism of Silicon Valley bigwigs | Hacker News Reader

The stealth libertarianism of Silicon Valley bigwigs

salon.com

15 pointsaarghh17 comments

Uh oh! Gotta watch out for those stealth libertarians! They might secretly try to let you do things!

I think what's more amazing is that his opinions are so simple and undefended that they fit in all of 17 tweets.

This isn't the stealth libertarianism of Silicon Valley. This is its naked, obvious politicization.

Given how extraordinarily little substance his opinions have, we agree or disagree with him entirely based on whether or not we like him, not whether or not he is fundamentally right.

> Getting out of the way of Silicon Valley and ensuring a strong safety net add up to a political paradox. Because Silicon Valley doesn’t want to pay for the safety net.

> There is very little evidence that the people who are getting rich off technological innovation are eager to pay for a robust social welfare net, no matter how rich they get. Quite the opposite. Translated into a political program, the Andreessen solution has no constituency.

These statements are totally unsourced and contradict what Marc tweeted. I am in this allegedly non-existent constituency.

I am not sure either how he inferred from Andreessen's tweets that there was any paradox in Silicon Valley not paying for the safety net.

From a (n admittedly somewhat utopian) techno-libertarian POV, couldn't Andreessen mean that Silicon Valley will be providing that safety net itself by making it affordable through technology?

Silicon Valley won't "pay" for the safety net, it will get paid for it.

You feel like this sort of liberal should be asked: how much is enough? When will we know that the government is spending enough on the safety net, or is your answer always that we need to spend more, no matter how much we're spending already? Does evidence on spending effectiveness even matter to you?

The problem here is not that the US is spending too little on a safety net, it's that we don't get much effectiveness for what we do spend and we have all sorts of policies that work in the other direction to actively make things worse for the disadvantaged classes. Like the "war on drugs", the "war on terror", import protectionism, immigration restrictions, high minimum wages, and farming price supports - all issues where the libertarians are practically alone out there in trying to make things better.

Here's a nice series of video shorts describing some of the issues where libertarian economist-types differ from everybody else:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-89qFWVrrmc

This is about as silly as "The stealth liberalism of Salon"

Salon mastered the art of clickbait.

Measured in terms of individual income, inequality levels in the US have been surprisingly constant for the last 50 years.

The appearance of an upward trend is purely a demographic artifact - "household" and "family" sizes have changed since the 1970s so when you look at incomes collected into bundles based on those units it looks like there is greater diversity of income than before. But that sort of trend has a limit and isn't really something you can fix via income policies. So it's not worth the weight people like Piketty put on it.

http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/06/sorry-krugman-piketty-and-s...

That blog post looks highly suspect to me. The AEI is reposting the work of a blogger who has taken data from two different sources: a paper on the GINI of individuals, and GINI as calculated for households and families by the CBO. There are two big problems I see:

The data on families and households includes capital gains, but the data on individuals doesn't (it includes only regular income). He hand-waves that away by saying, without proof, that capital gains are proportional to income, so that part doesn't matter. Given the differences in how we tax income vs. capital gains, I think excluding them from a GINI calculation is a big deal. Frankly I could simply interpret his chart as showing that rich are increasingly moving their gains away from income and towards capital gains to avoid taxes.

Second, for his graph of GINI for individuals, he's picked the GINI only for people that have an income. So again we're not comparing the same kinds of numbers. In that same paper, the one that includes everyone (not just income earners) shows increasing inequality in the last 30 years.

The idea is an interesting one: is the way we're structuring our families and households leading to increased income inequality? But unfortunately, the data he has is not good enough to show us one way or the other.

You left off the other side of the equation. He says the CB income data understates income on the high end because it exclude the value of capital gains, but it ALSO understates income on the low end because it excludes the value of non-cash benefits. These effects work in opposite directions; it does thus seem plausible that the resulting Gini is in approximately the right ballpark. Furthermore, note that we don't actually care about the Gini AMOUNT here, we just care about the TREND. So unless the ratio of normal income to capital gains is changing quite a lot (and in the appropriate direction) it's not going to produce the result you want.

> Frankly I could simply interpret his chart as showing that rich are increasingly moving their gains away from income and towards capital gains to avoid taxes.

You are expressing a hunch. Got any data to back it up?

> Second, for his graph of GINI for individuals, he's picked the GINI only for people that have an income.

Isn't that the normal way of calculating it?

> In that same paper, the one that includes everyone (not just income earners) shows increasing inequality in the last 30 years.

Do you happen to have a link for that paper? (Or even just a chart showing that result?)

As lawtguy's response illustrates, you need to be careful before trusting anything relayed by a propaganda mill like AEI -- validity and truth aren't their touchstones, whether something can be pushed under a headline that fits the ideology that AEI is funded to promote is.

I don't like the way tech is being used as a false argument to paint the opposition as anti-tech.

Nobody is opposing technological innovation or suggesting it should be slowed down. It's the business models that leverage that tech people have a problem with.

With the same bull shit straw man arguments Andreessen uses you could claim that people opposed to governments excessive surveillance are "anti-tech". Or since guns are tech too, you could argue people in favor of gun control are anti-tech luddites.

Utter nonsenses. The ultra-libertarians are trying to prevent a real debate about ethics and social problems.

I used to be a libertarian. Then I moved out of the Silicon Valley.

A good indicator for the seriousness of an article is how quickly the corpse of Ayn Rand is draped over the subject's policy positions.

True. But on the bright side, Salon just managed to publish an entire article without claiming the Koch brothers are secretly behind every single view the writer dislikes. That's got to be some kind of record, right?

"Salon Article Bingo" needs to be a thing.

Has anyone ever attempted even the very roughest estimate of the indirect wealth created worldwide by communicative technologies like Google and Facebook - in other words, aside from that directly generated for those companies?

Stealthy like a parade float.

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