America has a monopoly problem

https://www.thenation.com/article/america-has-a-monopoly-problem-and-its-huge/

by Futurebot • 9 years ago

214 184 9 years ago

thenation.com

pc86• 9 years ago

Web link doesn't work if you've already visited the site, including incognito.

autopoiesis• 9 years ago

Archive link: http://archive.is/02i6P

brndnmtthws• 9 years ago

Peter Thiel (who works with YC) will tell you that monopolies are good for the world.

hanklazard• 9 years ago

Any links you could recommend? I’d like to read more as I disagree strongly.

losteric3• 9 years ago

* Peter Thiel's WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-...

* Criticism: https://medium.com/@petersimsie/why-peter-thiel-is-dead-wron...

* Alternate interpretation of Thiel's intent: https://www.quora.com/Peter-Thiel-claims-that-competition-is...

rayiner6• 9 years ago

They often are, because companies in highly competitive industries don’t have the excess profits to reinvest in research. Computing as we know it is largely the story of monopolies. Bell Labs bankrolled by the AT&T monopoly. Xerox PARC bankrolled by the Xerox copier monopoly. The Internet bankrolled by the ultimate monopoly (the military). The modern web bankrolled by the Google/Apple duopoly.

wu-ikkyu3• 9 years ago

companies in highly competitive industries don’t have the excess profits to reinvest in research.

On the flip side, monopolies often have little incentive to invest in improving their products/services, and find they can profit from making their products cheaper/worse.

titzer• 9 years ago

Yet all of those monopolies either imploded, had their markets simply dry up, were out-innovated by smaller competitors, or investors just moved onto hotter fads.

The crashing and burning of a big monopoly may very well be a healthy event; but oh the damage they do before then...

CPLX• 9 years ago

Bell Labs bankrolled by the AT&T monopoly.

Comparing one very effective and interesting skunkworks lab with the incredible explosion in choices and service in telecommunication, as well as drastically lower prices, that came when the monopoly was broken up?

I think you're demonstrating the anti-monopoly point handily.

pjc50• 9 years ago

AT&T of course had a strict ban on innovation by third parties on the phone network, up to the "hush-a-phone" case.

jgmjgm• 9 years ago

Yes, monopolies do have the resources to invest in R&D. The problem is that they often lack the incentive because they have control of a market.

Government regulations that mandate some return (think telecommunications services for those in rural areas, pollution standards, etc.) can provide an incentive for monopolists/oligopolists to perform better according to some criteria. The problem is those mandates are not what we would always consider "innovative". By definition, they are often designed to incrementally improve on the status quo.

The game of politics has an important role. When there are oligopolies in many industries it is not unusual to see regulators getting jobs at the very companies they regulate. Think of the ties between the SEC and finance, CRTC in Canada and the communications sector, etc. Monopolists have a way of cementing their position in the economy and reducing the mandates that governments place on them.

emodendroket8• 9 years ago

I don't really think it is fair or reasonable to gloss over the tremendous role of government research by just calling the military "the ultimate monopoly."

baursak• 9 years ago

I guess as long as they are regulated, monopolies can be beneficial to the society overall, in many ways intangibly. Bell Labs is a great example of something that kept on giving (Unix, C, etc).

I wonder what could make something like Comcast into a "good monopoly" though.

Another aspect is that commercial competition, while generally accepted as a system that in the end delivers superior results, seems woefully inefficient in terms of waste of resources, as opposed to something like academic competition, were people freely reuse competitors' previous work.

callinyouin• 9 years ago

Kind of a hard argument to make when there are plenty of examples of contributions to computing that weren't bankrolled by monopolies. Just think about how much, especially in the early days, came out of academia alone. And I'm not sure where you get that the modern web has been bankrolled by Google and Apple when there are many, many other contributors.

IMO, innovation is usually fueled by competition. Where there's lots of competition, the need to innovate is the necessity for survival. I mean, how innovative was Microsoft in the 90's when they essentially had a monopoly on desktop computing? That's how we got stuck with IE 6 for so long...

grzm2• 9 years ago

There may be an interesting discussion here somewhere, but as constructed your comment is less likely to produce such. Do you have specifics regarding Thiel’s position and how it compares with that of the article? As is, it appears you’re looking to provoke a reaction rather than promote a productive discussion.

newmanships• 9 years ago

He gave a talk about his thoughts to a Stanford class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6K8PZxyQfU His slide on monopolies is around 4:40

frgtpsswrdlame3• 9 years ago

He's also wrong.

atom-morgan• 9 years ago

Referring to natural monopolies or monopolies created and enforced by the government?

maxxxxx• 9 years ago

I remember reading his quote and I understood it to mean that a monopoly is good for the company that has it and a company should try to achieve a monopoly. I don't think he said that it's for the greater good.

OtterCoder3• 9 years ago

This is brilliant. I recently wrote in to my senator about net neutrality. His reply was a breathtakingly convoluted justification of not regulating companies like Comcast because antitrust laws would take care of it. I've never felt so insulted.

ch4s32• 9 years ago

Which senator was this?

OtterCoder3• 9 years ago

Senator Lee, who happens to be on the Antitrust Subcommittee.

genzoman• 9 years ago

"breathtakingly" convoluted. Click bait alert level 100.

chrisseaton2• 9 years ago

You felt insulted because he has a different opinion to you? Or did he write something insulting in his reply?

nnash• 9 years ago

You can count the number of companies that own all American media on one hand. How is it that anti-trust is "taking care of it" again?

dcre• 9 years ago

It's insulting when people say something you both know is stupid but they act like they're just making a civil good-faith argument. Kind of like what you're doing.

sjg007• 9 years ago

That’s an oxymoron... not regulating a company because anti trust..

whistlerbrk• 9 years ago

America has a corruption problem. The ability for companies to vertically integrate and essentially make smaller businesses non-competitive can only occur when you don't have to pay the taxes your smaller competitors have to pay and don't have to obey the same laws your competitors have to obey.

We have a systemic corruption problem (manifested in lobbying) coupled with greed on scales we've never seen before. Everything else is just a symptom of that problem.

emodendroket8• 9 years ago

Well, I wouldn't say that. One problem with monopolies is they eventually grow so huge that they have tremendous influence on politics.

ashark2• 9 years ago

Our preference for (relatively) high levels of local control (and the resulting tiered cake of tax jurisdictions and regulatory domains) makes our system incredibly vulnerable to race-to-the-bottom behavior when confronted with powerful non-state actors (corporations). Our fear of a hypothetical (though, to be clear, in other times and places realized) evil state leaves us with a host of real, everyday stresses, annoyances, and inefficiencies. It's a drag on GDP and, especially, on quality of life.

dforrestwilson• 9 years ago

Yup.

Amazon receiving 238 bids of localities falling over themselves to handover tax credits and other goodies is the example I've been thinking about recently.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-amazon-com-headquarters/a...

How to fix it though?

snomad• 9 years ago

Just a minor clarification to your point. In "industry" towns like the Bay Area, Detroit, and Chicago - corporations are definitely the powerful non-state actors.

Outside of those though, their are many cities of considerable size where local developers hold the most sway. These local developers behave and are motivated by different things then the mega corps.

anomie31• 9 years ago

Why do you believe economies of scale doesn't enable this?

oconnor663• 9 years ago

The ability for companies to vertically integrate and essentially make smaller businesses non-competitive can only occur when you don't have to pay the taxes your smaller competitors have to pay and don't have to obey the same laws your competitors have to obey.

That sounds a little too extreme. Has vertical integration never occurred without the help of tax law?

refurb4• 9 years ago

It's a little odd of a comment as well since there is a plethora of small business incentives that the big guys don't get.

It's much more complicated that what the OP laid out.

zanny5• 9 years ago

Generally if your economy is healthy the general case should be that no part of a supply chain can ever get rich enough to outright buy another piece. If any one part was making too generous a profit that could build that kind of war chest, low barriers to entry and competition would quickly propagate alternatives that took less profit.

This is, however, why you cannot just have a strict free market. Some industries emerge - and will emerge - that are naturally hard to enter and compete in. But at the same time, you need to have the lightest touch necessary, because the same regulatory apparatus can (and does in spades today) be abused to prevent competition by industry incumbents. But again, it is hard to accumulate the capital or scale to control government unless you have one of those non-competitive revenue streams.

The important historic realization is that we have failed to police businesses that had such extreme margins, probably because at the time those invested in such businesses felt it was just the success of the American market instead of being a wound in society that would grow infected.

sandworm101• 9 years ago

I think it goes a step deeper. Imho the issue starts with the fundamental distrust of government. Lacking the ability to see government as a valid leader, Americans turn to corporations and billionaires. They really do believe that Apple and Dow chemical can do a better job leading the country than any elected politician. They are not worried about the monopolies. They should be, any economist would agree that monopolies are not good for consumers, but the average person is not a rational economist. I don't think Americans believe lobbying is bad. They want to be led by corporations and see lobbying as the legitimate means for them to lead.

wav-part3• 9 years ago

This thread is confusing State granted monopoly with Market granted monopoly. Economists usually talks about the former.

TheAdamAndChe• 9 years ago

As an American who speaks to a lot of other Americans, this is definitely not the mentality that I'm seeing around me. Most people I know are becoming cynical about growing corporate control of our government and increasing income inequality. Pretty much everyone I know is worried about the monopolies.

adventured• 9 years ago

Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple would be extraordinarily profitable even if they were paying 26% corporate income tax rates. Your entire premise collapses right there.

Facebook will generate near $20 billion in earnings before tax for fiscal 2017. You're positing that if they pay $6 billion in taxes, instead of $4 billion, then their monopoly will unwind or somehow their competitors will finally be able to catch up (yeah, it's just not fair, the tax rate that Snap is paying).

Now apply the exact same thing to the other tech giants (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, etc). It's just as far-fetched with them as it is Facebook.

jack9• 9 years ago

Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple would be extraordinarily profitable even if they were paying 26% corporate income tax rates. Your entire premise collapses right there.

You are flat wrong. The integration has already occurred. The corruption is currently ingrained. Being able to source from your own penny factories in another country put many of the behemoths into their market dominant position or solidified them. Facebook is an odd duck which leveraged capital wisely. Amazon had decades of massive loses (revenue-wise) until, roughly, AWS took off. The capital markets favor bigger players at almost every turn and smaller successful companies are consumed and destroyed at a shocking rate after they rise above a starting locality. Microsoft used to afford that kind of market attrition, but now it's been largely Yahoo, Google, Alibaba, etc.

curiousgeorgio4• 9 years ago

Think of it this way: it's not that the larger companies are breaking the laws or simply not paying taxes that they owe - they're just being more innovative in how they approach those things. In a global economy, when there's pressure to pay lower wages by outsourcing labor, pay lower taxes by organizing some or all of the company abroad, or exploit loopholes in domestic laws for greater efficiency, that's just what you're going to do (given enough expertise and resources).

It's laughable to think a country could solve any of those things through stricter legislation; that will simply encourage those companies to move more of their operations to jurisdictions with more advantageous laws/taxes/labor/etc.

So how do you "level the playing field"? One way would be bringing those advantages to smaller companies through businesses that exploit those same loopholes / tax strategies, providing them as services to companies who otherwise couldn't afford doing it themselves (i.e., exploiting legal loopholes as-a-service, international tax strategies as-a-service, etc).

Or, you embrace the global economy, specialize in what your country can do most efficiently (hint: it's not manufacturing anymore in the US), and make it advantageous for companies to keep operating domestically. You lower taxes for everyone, so even the companies with few resources can enjoy the eased financial burden of taxes that normally only the big guys could avoid. In short, you compete globally rather than stick your head in the sand pretending that your country is somehow isolated from the rest of the world and you can fix everything through legislation.

autokad• 9 years ago

so if if someone takes performance enhancing drugs that has not yet been discovered isn't cheating, they are being innovative.

treat it like the olympics. if an athlete that takes a performance enhancing drug that has yet to be prohibited, they still loose their medals and cannot compete.

charlesdm8• 9 years ago

That's essentially what is happening when people talk about inversions.

You have multinationals getting around a design flaw in the US tax system, by acquiring a foreign entity and going abroad.

Synaesthesia5• 9 years ago

You’re not mentioning the outsize influence that corporations have on government which leads to them permitting these loopholes. It can be fixed by legislation.

In 1952 corporate tax in the US was 33% of total revenue. Today it’s less than 9%.

marcosdumay• 9 years ago

hint: it's not manufacturing anymore in the US

I highly doubt that is true. I mean, there are only 3 basic economics sectors, and you just stroke an entire one out of the question.

It is way more likely that the reality is more nuanced, and the US can not efficiently manufacture some things, while keeping the lead on some other things.

abandonliberty4• 9 years ago

What you have is natural selection. Systemic corruption is itself a deterministic outcome/symptom when corruption is an adaptive trait. Unfortunately many undesirable behaviors are adaptive: the risk-adjusted rate of return is positive. 'Bad actors' have much more to gain from engaging in them than watchdogs have in stopping it.

You will always lose the fight against corruption in the long run because as the war goes on you get weaker and they get stronger.

This is a fundamental issue with organizational design (and democracy).

Highly recommended further reading/viewing:

Rules for rulers is very helpful at understanding this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Iron law of Oligarchy (the deterministic outcome of democracy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy

alasdair_• 9 years ago

From the Iron Law of Oligarchy page: "no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy"

I'm not sure this is proven yet. Certainly in the past, I'd have agreed, but with communication via the Internet making realtime decision-making between all members of a democracy possible, I think direct democracy is theoretically possible at least.

If not absolutely direct, then at least having the ability to instantly revoke a mandate from someone you have entrusted could go a low way to limiting the power of an oligarchy, as could entrusting different individuals and groups with a single person's vote, depending on the issue. For example, maybe I'd trust a particular economist to vote on my behalf for specific economic proposals, but I'd want Greenpeace to vote on my behalf for anything to do with, say, baby seal clubbing.

So long as the individuals can instantly take back the voting power they have entrusted to someone else, a reasonable semblance of direct democracy could work.

In practice, of course, it would be a hell of a mess to get everything functional, I just don't buy the notion that it's impossible in a world where everyone can communicate with everyone else essentially for free.

09094920394314• 9 years ago

What you, CGP Grey and other people tend to not say is that this is not a deterministic outcome of democracy at all. Even the second link you posted has some exceptions in the article . The book that the video is based on (the Dictators handbook, great read) contains some ways out of it dilemma. It shows how and why democracy is more efficient at creating wealth for a bigger number of people, and so there is a strong market pressure towards a free society. These forces can be smothered (e.g. by making pessimistic youtube videos because those get viral views) or tapped into and strengthened (by offering counter points, becoming active in your local political sphere etc.) Culture shapes us and is shaped by us. This is not a game where fate is a player (oh, and as a side note for those that need it, it is also in your personal monetary interest to become involved in politics, even if you do not get corrupt. Knowledge and connections are power, even without corrupt behaviour)

bythckr• 9 years ago

"America is NOT corrupt. Every corrupt practice is being lobbied to be legalized. USA has legalized corruption." - a quip I heard somewhere.

irrational3• 9 years ago

I agree with what you said, except for the "greed on scales we've never seen before". I think it's pretty clear, if you look back at the last 5,000 years of history that we've clearly seen greed on the same scale (or greater) than what we are seeing right now. It seems to be endemic to the human condition.

Animats• 9 years ago

The last time income concentration in the US looked like this was around 1900. That generated the union movement and interest in socialism and communism.

(This time we got Trump. Oops.)

nikolay8• 9 years ago

I see more competition possible in some much more corrupt countries, so, maybe that's not exactly the root cause.

chiefalchemist2• 9 years ago

The bigger problem is we're naive and/or completely unwilling to admit we have a corruption problem. US exceptionalism kinda dictates that corruption is a problem other (lesser) countries have. But certainly not here.

athenot• 9 years ago

We have become a rent-seeking society

It just dawned on me while reading the article that this accurately describes the shift from licensed software to SaaS that has been happening in the past decade.

savanaly• 9 years ago

That's not what rent seeking means in this context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

frgtpsswrdlame3• 9 years ago

Eh, it still applies. There's plenty of articles that have been posted here talking about how the real way to make money is SaaS, not on-prem. In that context, the provider is making more profit with no further innovation, in fact the only thing they've added is a limitation. To quote from your link:

Rent-seeking is an attempt to obtain economic rent (i.e., the portion of income paid to a factor of production in excess of what is needed to keep it employed in its current use) by manipulating the social or political environment in which economic activities occur, rather than by creating new wealth. Rent-seeking implies extraction of uncompensated value from others without making any contribution to productivity. The classic example of rent-seeking, according to Robert Shiller, is that of a feudal lord who installs a chain across a river that flows through his land and then hires a collector to charge passing boats a fee (or rent of the section of the river for a few minutes) to lower the chain. There is nothing productive about the chain or the collector. The lord has made no improvements to the river and is helping nobody in any way, directly or indirectly, except himself. All he is doing is finding a way to make money from something that used to be free.[5]

Now maybe, the program used to be $40 and not free but switching to $20 a month is definitely rent-seeking.

wu-ikkyu3• 9 years ago

The digital landscape seems to be growing increasingly feudalistic. Users have increasingly less control over the products and services they use.

-Instead of buying a movie or a song, you stream it

-You don't own your data in the cloud

-You don't own the music you buy from Apple

-You can't even take the battery out of many newer model phones

deusum2• 9 years ago

feudalism

A political and economic system of Europe from the 9th to about the 15th century, based on the holding of all land in fief or fee and the resulting relation of lord to vassal and characterized by homage, legal and military service of tenants, and forfeiture.

CaptSpify• 9 years ago

I don't think he came up with the term, but: https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2012/12/feudal_sec.ht...

chasing• 9 years ago

That's paying for a service, not rent-seeking.

L_Rahman• 9 years ago

SaaS is essentially an acknowledgement that the most profitable and extractive business model in modern capitalism is to build a capital intensive product and rent it out.

With software there is the added benefit of low-cost, highly scalable replication of the capital intensive product.

zanny5• 9 years ago

Intellectual property in general is rent seeking. The fixed costs of producing IP are on the hands of creators, who often use third parties (or parent companies) that act as middle men who take fixed resources and extract infinite revenue from them through rent seeking on either licenses or subscriptions.

This is how all the stores selling IP make so much money, how all the streaming services are so profitable, etc all while not producing any original content themselves. And it applies to creators who direct sell themselves, because they aren't charging marginal costs on IP licenses - they are rent seeking their existing properties. Often to fund the creation of new ones, but I don't think many people argue the morality of rent seeking based on how the owner spends the rent. Any landlord can invest the rents they collect into new building construction, but that will still just lead to generating more rents.

wiremine2• 9 years ago

American has an optimism problem. Or rather, optimism seems to be unequally distributed. Feels like we need some leadership to raise our eyes to all the opportunities out there, and how we can get to a better spot.

irrational3• 9 years ago

So, we need someone to show us how to make America great again?

wiremine2• 9 years ago

No, I think the opposite: current leadership is driven a lot of FUD. We need some honest optimism.

kerbalspacepro• 9 years ago

I don't need to know what privilege you have to say, "check your privilege".

scarface744• 9 years ago

From the article

Firms like Microsoft led in the innovation in creating new barriers to entry. How could one compete with a browser provided at a zero price.

I think what happened to Microsoft is the perfect example of how to overcome a monopoly.

20 years ago, everyone thought that Microsoft’s monopoly was unassailable. Google barely existed, Facebook didn’t exist, Amazon was a bookseller and Apple was basically bankrupt.

20 years ago, Netflix had a few million DVD customers and AOL was the largest ISP.

Who knows what will happen in the next 20 years?

Shivetya• 9 years ago

this whole topic is because of political considerations and if you just look around you will see nearly all members coming from the same party parroting the same lines. throw in lots of google money which was the basis for a story recently bemoaning Amazon's influence and you can see its all for naught.

there is lot of movement by said members in Congress to invoke antitrust by drowning people in buzzwords and FUD. If anything the larger American based companies brought up as issues themselves face even greater competition from overseas. What we have to fear besides even more regulation on our own industries is having it turn into a trade war when overseas entities not burdened by the same restrictions start to compete.

marinman• 9 years ago

But importantly, the government went after Microsoft for anti-trust and actually won even if they didn't break them up. It's impossible to really know the counter-factual of what would have happened if it wasn't sued for anti-trust. But, you can safely say it wouldn't have thrown a lifeline to Apple with the investment and it may have been much more aggressive in these emerging spaces. I still think it was still not fundamentally "ready" for the Internet and mobile but I do think that lawsuit made it much, much friendlier to newcomers.

scarface744• 9 years ago

But, you can safely say it wouldn't have thrown a lifeline to Apple with the investment and it may have been much more aggressive in these emerging spaces.

Microsoft "saving" Apple is apocryphal at best. The $250 million that MS invested wouldn't have made a difference when Apple lost a billion the same quarter and spent $100 million buying out PowerComputings Mac license.

Microsoft tried aggressively to get into mobile, search, and the music business. They failed at execution.

nikolay8• 9 years ago

ISPs are monopolies in the purest form. Here in Orange County, California, you have no choice but go with Cox. And that's why an internet service, which costs less than $10 around the globe and is symmetrical and offers higher bandwidth, costs $100 here! Even worse when it comes to the business internet service! I had to find internet service for a church here in OC and the pricing starts at $200 for 10 Mbps!

scarface744• 9 years ago

Isn't there a chance that in the next few years that the last mile competition will eventually be solved by wireless?

arantius• 9 years ago

20 years ago, Netflix had a few million DVD customers ...

Off topic, but I was amazed/interested, so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netflix#Founding_and_establish...

"Netflix was founded on August 29, 1997 ... Netflix was launched on April 14, 1998, with only 30 employees and 925 DVDs available ..."

So you're technically wrong, but not far off. I thought Netflix was closer to 10 years old than 20.

thecombjelly3• 9 years ago

America has a capitalism problem. What the article fails to address is that the root cause is really capitalism. Under capitalism wealth and power always concentrates, which in the case of businesses, that eventually means bad monopolies. Under a representative democracy that also means politics will always be corrupted because those with money and power will always be benefited by controlling politics, and they have the money and power to do so (who owns the news media? who can afford to buy off politicians, whether they start corrupt or not?). While the power of monopolies ebbs and flows as those without capital get angrier, the monopolies will always come back because that's what capitalism does.

Monopolies are not inherently bad. It's entirely possible to have a monopoly and have a great thing that everyone likes and is happy with and which keeps innovating. But under capitalism the primary incentive is the accumulation of capital which rarely lines up with creating something great long term.

ianai3• 9 years ago

I can think of at least one way to diminish companies power over legislatures. Pay representatives enough that they’re indifferent to corrupt forces. It’s not like there an expectation for representives to be broke.

thecombjelly3• 9 years ago

At that point it seems you would have just promoted politicians in to the capital class without the middle-person, but again they now represent the capital class and all their non-politician capital class buddies at the cocktail parties, instead of representing those without much capital.

beart• 9 years ago

Define "enough".

I don't think this solution really works. For some folks, nothing is ever enough. Then you also need to consider that it is less about money for some and more about friends and power. Maybe I don't do what corporations ask because they are going to pay my campaign. Maybe I do it because it makes me feel like a big man being the person they all come to for favors. Maybe I do it to gain acceptance into an aristocracy. I don't know how you can compete against that on a government salary, no matter how big.

Donald Trump is supposedly worth $3.5 billion. Do you think paying him more money would change the way he governs? I only use him as an example because he is the richest US politician, but there aren't too many poor ones at the federal level.

I guess I just don't see how you could ever pay a politician enough to be "indifferent to corrupt forces".

zerebubuth• 9 years ago

Under capitalism wealth and power always concentrates

Not always. The share of wealth owned by the top 10% in the USA fell between 1932 and 1952, and again between 1962 and 1985 [1].

[1] http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014.pdf#page56

thecombjelly3• 9 years ago

Yes, it fluctuates depending on numerous factors, including how unhappy those without capital get about the unequal distribution of capital. You see this when monopolies start getting broken up and some wealth gets passed back down. But inevitably the capital gets concentrated again because that's how capitalism works. And even when some of the wealth gets passed back down the people in power generally stay in power.

menerva• 9 years ago

Capitalism on a smaller scale is broken. Once you have achieved a monopoly they become entrenched in the socio-political system.

On a global scale, where laws can't protect I.P. we will see innovation coming out from new sources. If America is happy to stagnate, we will see India and China leading the future.

nikolay8• 9 years ago

Monopolies are a natural phenomenon in capitalism. I'm not sure why people glorify capitalism as much, given the fact that competition is impossibly hard in many areas, and that to reduce costs, and remove competitive pressure, companies tends to consolidate, i.e. reduce competition. Neither socialism nor capitalism makes sense today. We need a totally new system, but it's really hard to make a dent into the status quo, which is well-entrenched, and would resist any change!

oconnore4• 9 years ago

We need a totally new system

This seems historically ignorant. Most systems of allocating power and resources have been tried at various times. The answer is likely at the end of a long, nuanced, and painful road of combining ideas from several of those systems: adjusting, revisiting, admitting failure, and correcting.

I would be skeptical of any "new system" that is not a result of reflection on historical economies.

nikolay8• 9 years ago

No, I think your opinion is arrogant and ignorant. All existing systems are based on the technical limitations of the past time. In Australia, for example, there's a good start to integrate new ideas into the existing system - it's called Flux [0].

Edit: to clarify about Flux, it's still using an existing system, i.e. Democracy although it is implemented as Direct and Delegate Democracy within a Representative Democracy system, but, my point was, that such system could be used as a political virus to change the system from within without bloodshed, and then a totally new system can be put in place.

[0] https://voteflux.org/

astrodust2• 9 years ago

"Socialism" and "capitalism" are not switches you turn either on or off, they're a set of policies and practices you can apply to varying degrees and extremes.

The military is quite socialist as when you enlist you're given food, housing, equipment, medical care, and other things to perform your job, but it's also part of a large capitalist system where equipment and supplies are provisioned from a (theoretically) competitive marketplace.

What we need to do is find the right balance between dog-eat-dog individualism and insufferable collectivisim.

nikolay8• 9 years ago

I disagree that the solution is a balanced one somewhere between the only two puristic and unrealistic options as in both money is key, and I disagree that it should be the centerpiece of our society as it's already proven to be a weak motivator and leads to very negative consequences.

There are good things in both orders, we need to learn from them, but something in the middle we already have in EU, and it's not working so well.

nikolay8• 9 years ago

What do you think about The Venus Project [0] and Jaque Fresco's resource-based economy [1]?

Edit: I'm saddened to find out that Jacque has recently passed away. I was planning to meet him in person as he was at an honorable age.

[0] https://www.thevenusproject.com/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacque_Fresco

dlwdlw• 9 years ago

There's an interesting fat protocols article on block chain technology by usv. Unlike thin protocols like tcp/up where the value is captured by edge nodes, a fat protocol captures the bulk of the value and the edges are forced into commodity pricing.

I think it would be like everyone living in and contributing to the US as an idea. The block chain of the "US" has a good social security net, good public non-profit infrastructure, ample opportunity etc... Or theoretically would/should anyway. In reality it's too prone to corruption and manipulation.

If smart contracts get stable and consistent enough (and build up a correspondingly large body of contract law) we end up being able to create entities of faith, things to believe in and rely on but are also fragile in that they need faith to persist as well. "gods" if you will.

America has a monopoly problem

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