Comment by adsenseclient | Hacker News Reader

Comment by adsenseclient | Hacker News Reader

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Let's see how many downvotes I get. The capitalism is no longer what it used to be due to the separation of ownership from control. IBM and Ford started as family businesses, passed from father to son. Who owned IBM 100 years ago? Watson did, then his son was a CEO. Who owns it now? Nobody, "shareholders", with an affirmative action hire guiding this mess as a CEO. Toyota was a family business too, largely owned by Toyoda family.

Why did the separation of ownership from control happen? Primarily due to the widespread use of birth control among whites. Franchised women consistently vote for the big government, for regulation and for the safety net. Big government actually disfavors small and hereditary businesses, since they are harder to control than a few concentrated anonymous conglomerates without real owners. Plus there are fewer capable sons in a nuclear family to pass a business on than a 100 years ago (also think about single moms here).

Reduced white fertility also led to replacement of the bulk of white work force with a lower IQ non-asian minorities (NAM) workforce. In the age of hi tech and automation, such work force is largely useless. They are kept occupied however, to reduce crime rates (think of Detroit riots of the 60s).

Additionally, the overall effect of women in the workforce is also counterproductive- more workplace drama than actual creative work.

Now let the downvotes roll in!

I'm with you for the first paragraph but then what the fuck, man? Why present a worthwhile argumentative point and then supply cans of ammo for attacking it via your character?

It's interesting that the left has pretty much given up on ideas of economic equality and inclusiveness in favor of pointing and sputtering when people say things which are not politically correct. If I were a suspicious type, I'd wonder if political correctness had corporate sponsorship; it certainly seems to have paid off for the oligarchy...

To his first point, it's not really true. Many of the largest and scariest businesses are still family businesses. Louis Dreyfus Group (yes, Seinfeld girl is a scion of this $120b/yr "family business"), Cargill, Koch, Bechtel, Bloomberg, Mansfield, Kingston, Sungard, Dole, Bausch & Lomb, Deloitte, Hearst, Bosch, PWC, Aramco, Vitol, Continental grain, Scoular, Consolidated Grain & Barge, Safra Group, Armajaro. Most of these companies are deeply embedded in the power structure of their host countries and other countries. What's scary is how huge they are, and how little people are even aware of their existence. When you start looking at them, well, some of them look kind of like they are run by James Bond villains.

You must be joking. Any publically traded co these days is hardly family owned: the family members, in those rare example cases are by far the minority shareholders. Compare that with 100 years ago.

You evidently didn't read my comment. None of the companies I listed above are publicly traded: they are all family owned, and the families which own them have almost unfathomable power. Of course, many of the families which sold shares in their businesses also have considerable power.

I originally learned about these people by studying the grain and commodity markets.

I am curious to know the proportion of GDP generated by publically vs privately owned companies in the US and how it has changed in the last 150 years

I'm guessing the fellow who answered you is roughly correct, as small, privately owned businesses generate much wealth in America. I don't think this is the interesting question though, because I don't believe in the premises of your original comment. The interesting question is what is the distribution of total wealth in the world, mapped onto the country. Making heat maps of this, mapped onto various other things (inherited versus self made, yalevard versus everyone else, etc) will tell you how the world works. It's obvious to me that the world is run by a narrow self-serving oligarchy, and that we are in the extractive phase of history, such as was experienced by late Rome and 14th century Venice. It's not so obvious how to show this to other people, or what to do about it.

It's possible to estimate this using public, easily Googlable data:

http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=a7jenngfc4um7_

Total U.S. GDP is about $15T. Of that, $8T is compensation of employees, so roughly half accrues to wage-earners (this ranges from the janitor to the CEO, but is probably exhibits a bit less inequality than returns to capital. $5.6T is gross operating surplus: this is profit that accrues to incorporated businesses. GDP is defined as wages + profits + gross mixed income (effectively profits accruing to unincorporated businesses; things like sole proprietors and landlords) + taxes - subsidies. Subsidies is negligible (about $60B) and taxes are about $1T, so that leaves about $500B as GMI (this seems pretty low to me, but I guess most business owners choose to incorporate these days).

Now the question is how much of the $5.6T in profits accrues to publicly traded vs. privately traded companies. This isn't broken out by the government stats, but you can estimate it from financial data. The total market cap of the S&P 500 is about $18.5T:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%26P_500

The P/E of the S&P 500 is about 18.68:

http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/2_3021-peyield.html

Market cap divided by P/E gives earnings, by definition, so the total profit accrued by publicly-traded companies is roughly $1T. Similar math done on the Wilshire 5000 index gave the same result. So as a very rough ballpark estimate, the total value-add by privately-traded companies is roughly 5x that of publicly-traded companies.

It would likely be hard to find similar figures for 150 years ago, both because you can't just Google up 150-year-old data, and because 150 years ago the NYSE operated out of coffeehouses and the ticker symbol hadn't yet been invented.

Just a small correction. US GDP is closer to $17 trillion. Going by the IMF and World Bank.

The public data set I used goes only up to 2011. We've grown since, but since the numbers for other components also are c. 2011, it's better to compare them directly. (Actually, the financials are from present-day, so it's not an exact comparison, but if anything the error will be in favor of private companies being a greater portion of the economy.)

All of his comments are rants against women/minorities (including admitting not hiring a female programmer because her resume had too many mentions of "women") and complaints about google banning his adsense account for fraud.

I'm sympathetic to the "faceless shareholders are poisonous" argument as well, but...yeah. It's hard to differentiate neoreactionaries from trolls.

If you do not like an argument, factually refute it, rather than labelling its author. Otherwise your ad hominem style looks too much like Lenin's or Mao's

My intent wasn't to refute your argument (I can't imagine engaging here would be a productive use of time for any party) - I was just adding a bit of context to the above comment.

Cheers!

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