cjet79
Anarcho Capitalist on moral grounds
Libertarian Minarchist on economic grounds
User ID: 124
cjet79
1yr ago
I have more updates from a previous situation. Things have escalated in a direction that I feel this may be more appropriate as an /r/drama post, but I don't go to such places, so I am here to share with you again.
Here was my last update
https://www.themotte.org/post/616/wellness-wednesday-for-august-2-2023/126205?context=8#context
Update:
Some of you might remember that I was playing in a recreational sport and had an annoying person to deal with.
She had reported a fellow player and board member to the national group and was generally disliked by multiple other other members.
We removed her from the email group, and didn't say why. I learned from another board member that she had a history of reporting lots of people, so they probably ignored the report.
After removing her from the email list she noticed a few weeks later. She sent me an email asking about it. I did not respond. I didn't see any way it would go well for me to be the bearer of bad news.
I am not generally a fan of ghosting people, but if someone has demonstrated a willingness to retaliate via reporting to higher authorities then I don't see any reason to stick my neck out. She has brought on the dislike that got her removed, and the ghosting that did not let her know why.
What happened this week is that she posted in a facebook group of "World [obscure sport] players"
I am only minorly editing with []s what she said for some privacy:
Content Warning - fat-shaming
There is increasing evidence that a top [obscure sport] club is retaliating against me because I called out a few people for fat-shaming the entire group.
I have been kicked out of their main communication channel and have not been allowed to rejoin.
Has anyone else been retaliated against when trying to report an injustice in [obscure sport]?
We had a flurry of messages among the board to discuss this. Eventually we got the only woman on the board (and by far the coolest head among us) to send her a message that we had removed a bunch of emails from the list of people that are not in the area, and are not dues paying members. The problem lady then took the post down from facebook a few hours after being told that.
One of the other things I learned is that she told another board member (the one she accused of fat-shaming) that our board had caused her tons of stress in the last month and led to her to the point of a failed suicide attempt. That board member has been consulting with a lawyer. I'm consulting with you all. I feel there might be a different level of quality in the advice we receive.
The board member who spoke with a lawyer is now suggesting we implement a code of conduct and probably some other sets of rules. I would rather avoid this and just fall on the grenade and kick her out. Or not explicitly ban her from practice, but just let her know that she is unwelcome, but allowed to attend.
This is probably the part where I need some advice, probably from a psychiatrist rather than a lawyer. I know I am supposed to feel guilty or bad that she might kill her self due to my words. And that even if she does not kill her self, she will certainly feel like crap and have her emotions badly hurt. But I simply do not care. I haven't been able to find a speck of caring in myself for her plight. I am only slightly worried about showing that I pretend to care, just so people don't think I'm a sociopath. (I'm also pretty sure I am not a sociopath, I can feel quite deeply for other people, I get secondary embarrassment quite easily, cry at movies, and have felt physically nauseous watching my daughters go through pain).
I am perhaps seeing this lady as an enemy. And I really have no sympathy for enemies. She hasn't done much of anything against me personally, aside from be mildly annoying (but I put up with lots of behaviors that I find annoying in others). But she has harmed and attacked people I think of as my allies or 'my people' members of the club I am responsible for, and fellow members of the board. I find that what she does to piss off the other around me infuriates me the most, and has drained any remaining sympathy I might have once had.
tagging @TheDag and @Walterodim since they commented on the last update.
cjet79
1yr ago
Though this is a quote, I believe that it is so precisely said that it is worth posting on the top level.
Incorrect. Don't do this.
cjet79
1yr ago
This post is too much on the side of waging the culture war rather than discussing it.
Remember to speak as if everyone is reading, rather than only people that agree with you.
Imagine you are writing to convince one of the people you mention: "(read: Reddit, PMC, sports media, and virtue-signaling athletes who are delighted to be out of the Sauronic Eye for once)".
cjet79
1yr ago
I think for (2) people can quibble a lot about the definition of the field. Like is "nurse" the category or "medical field".
cjet79
1yr ago
My heirarchy of news trustworthiness:
Top Tier: Happened to me or someone I know that I can ask about it.
2nd Tier: A trusted public personality that does their research has commented on the thing. Scott Alexander, Zvi Mowschowitz, Glenn Greenwald. I was gonna say "etc" but no other names came to mind.
3rd Tier: Well regarded comments from communities I trust. The commenters on themotte, or scott's blog, or zvi's blog all fall in this category. Well regarded blog personalities or podcasters, who post interesting stuff, but aren't necessarily doing the verification work, like Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, etc.
4th tier: The rest of the world. Yes, I put the NYT on the same level as some random 4chan troll. I don't know their motivations, I don't know their standards, I don't know what they trying to sell, etc etc. I don't discount the possibility that other people may find these sources far more trustworthy. Some people like Scott and Zvi specifically use these sources. But I don't know how to read these sources to tease out truthful information. So they are still useless to me without an investment on my part into understanding these sources. And that is an investment I feel no interest in taking, because I've already got sources that work for me. If they stop working for me then things will get shuffled around the tier list, as they have been before.
cjet79
1yr ago
On the meta of reoccurring ideas:
Happens to me occasionally. Often with people that run in the same intellectual circles. It is way more common the other way around, where I think of something that I thought was original and then find someone else already had the idea.
On the object level of stupid top-performers:
I think you'd need a weird combination of circumstances to create stupid top-performers. A few things that might cause it (in order of importance):
- The benefits to intelligence in the given endeavor are zero or negative. (even a small benefit to intelligence can compound at the top levels of performance).
- Depending on how you define the field, maybe the "top level" performers actually have another level that they can graduate to, and only the idiots are unable to do that graduation, and only people that truly love the minor leagues are unwilling to do the graduation.
- There is a huge base of people to pull from, such that the effects of low intelligence on other aspects of life won't screw over potential top performers before they become top performers.
- Top performers are created young and early, before bad real life decisions from low intelligence can screw them over.
Knowing all this. The best real world example I can think of is Michael Phelps. He isn't stupid by any means. But he also isn't some kind of recognized genius like other top athletes. Despite being a swimmer, I think the sport of swimming fulfills all 3 criteria (running probably fills it too, does anyone know how smart Usain Bolt is?).
For swimming and running being able to empty your mind and just do the thing for hours on end is important. As long as you are smart enough to learn good forms, and follow a diet plan no more intelligence is needed. But if you are too smart, cardio sports can be incredibly dull and boring. Which means there is a potentially negative return on intelligence.
For both swimming and running the people who are the best at it are also good athletes in general. And unless you are literally the world's best at those sports you can earn a lot more money as a professional athlete in other sports. So smart athletes can "graduate" from swimming and running into other better paying sports like soccer, baseball, basketball, cricket, or football.
Finally, they are both basic sports with very few barriers to entry. Swimming and running both require minimal equipment for training. The sport of swimming generally requires a lap pool, but those are plentiful in western nations. Elite athletes can also be created in both by the time an adult male is fully grown.
cjet79
1yr ago
At least half of the information we discuss here comes directly from mainstream newspapers, and much of the rest is filtered through them. And the information that comes from newspapers is disproportionately about 'real things' like politics, business, and war, while the thing that come from internet journalists are more often weird internet or culture war drama.
I'd say plenty comes from Twitter, blogs and real life experiences. And a bunch of the references to newspapers are because they are wrong and sharing stories we strongly disagree with.
And disagreements don't necessarily mean someone is wrong. There are a wide range of values here, and people with different values and the exact same information can easily disagree.
If I had to put my finger on why I distrust mainstream newspapers, it's that I'm not sure they place any value on real truth. They instead have a proxy measurement of "journalistic integrity" which means keeping your lies and misdirections within certain bounds. And those bounds seem to grow every year.
The same way you solved that problem for every other network-connected piece of military equipment, of which there are a lot? That was just a "guess" on my part though, I don't have any particular knowledge about this area.
There is usually a tradeoff between ease of access for the people you want, and security against those you want to keep out.
cjet79
1yr ago
That's possible, but all i have here is the New Yorker's assertion vs your assertion. Do you have a source or something?
This just made me realize I generally trust Internet commentors on themotte more than just about any mainstream newspaper. Why would I trust a mainstream newspaper on a culture war topic?
My guess would've been that access would've been controlled by some method of authentication, so that the Ukrainian terminals would work anywhere but anything held by Russians wouldn't work at all, making such a geofence unnecessary
Maybe works, but what how do you secure that authentication?
Ukrainian equipment and personnel can both be captured and interrogated to spill their secrets.
This is one of those age old problems in information transmission.
One of the ways to make the tech useless to the Russians, even if they crack all the security is to geofence.
cjet79
1yr ago
One mass-commercialized model where people looking for casual fun can swipe to find hookups, and a second non-profit or premium model
I do want to point out that their are premium dating services and match makers out there. So it is a bi-modal market. Those match making services are not cheap though.
And I think the expensiveness serves a purpose: It keeps out the unserious.
The problem with the okcupid model of serious matchmaking is that people who just want casual flings can easily infiltrate a free service. They can string partners along for sex, and then leave for other opportunities.
So people who just want sex can use the swipe model or the okcupid model. But people that want serious relationships can't easily use both models.
There is also a coordination problem going on. Why is your match on this dating website? Are they interested in the same thing as you? It's not good for either party to waste time and energy on someone looking for something different.
I was using okcupid back when Tinder was just starting to be a thing. I remember realizing at some point that my usage of the website had painted me into a corner of only finding people for hookups. The few times I found relationship material they had created their profiles on a lark or at their friends request.
Okcupid was dying and would have been tenderized either way. They needed a more significant barrier to entry to prevent people from just looking for sex and hookups.
cjet79
1yr ago
Unlike most of the other responses, I love the song. I've had it on repeat for about as long as its been out.
I think the guy is from Farmville VA, which is the closest town South of Charlottesville VA where I grew up.
I'm not usually a fan of country or bluegrass, but there is a weird exception when its an accent I grew up around. His accent is very familiar to me, and I can fall into the same twang as I sing along.
I found a lot to like in the messages and when I watched his short video blog describing his background thoughts on the song I liked it a little more. If we were presented options in politics I'm not sure we'd agree with each other very often, but I feel like if he was my neighbor I'd get along with him well.
cjet79
1yr ago
Don't do this.
It is fine to engage.
It is fine to never engage them again by opening the three dot menu at the bottom of any of their posts and selecting "Block User". (unlike reddit you can consider any functionality on this website to be somewhat intentional and something that we are fine with users using)
It is not fine to engage by basically saying "Im not reading this because I don't like who posted it".
cjet79
1yr ago
Nazi Germany declared war on the US after Pearl Harbor. So Germany chose Japan over America.
It was also the shape of the previous war, and the US and Britain were more close.
If it had just been Russia vs Germany I think the US might have sided with Germany.
cjet79
1yr ago
I found just going on a walk somewhere was good. It allows for conversation and less awkward moments of silence. Also what is being observed on the walk can be a point of connection.
cjet79
2yr ago
Have these libertarians never been confronted with how they'd handle the commons? I feel like "have clear property rights" is a very libertarian answer.
And ownership of the commons doesn't require feudalism? That requires at least some explanation rather than a throwaway comment. The textbook example given is usually a lake where multiple farmers/fishers/something are using the lake and also polluting the lake. They can't get to a solution because its not individually beneficial to solve the pollution, but it is beneficial if they all do it.
You don't have to have someone own all the farmers to get to a solution in this scenario, you just have to have someone own the lake.
cjet79
2yr ago
If I set up a Discord server where I sell estrogen to consenting persons whose age I can't exactly verify, and I accept monetary and sexual favors as payment, and enforce a social hierarchy within the Discord server that functionally facilitates predation on people curios about this sort of thing, and I owe my entire existence to people under 15 consuming pornography at a great rate, that's just fine? Like, if your son comes in my discord server, pays me with sexual favors and starts consuming estrogen I sell him, rendering him sterile and depressed, but he also has permanent rectal damage after falling to peer pressure and posting videos of himself inserting large plastic items into his anus, then someone leaks the videos your son put up on the discord server, which was technically public, and your son later kills himself... Did I violate your son?
Because I didn't ask him to join the server. He got that idea from reading comments on a porn site.
As a parent, what was your course of action regarding your son? Given you don't control the internet, and you believe you should not exercise control over the internet to stifle what others can and can't see. Completely ban the internet in your house? That limits your freedom quite a bit. Try to block 'pr0n' and hope there aren't actors who want to guide your son towards watching it past the block?
My point would be that my discord server inherently infringes on your right to exist in a nice and healthy way. You should not have to live like the Amish just to avoid sexual deviants and freaks.
In that scenario I failed my hypothetical son, not you. And if he was 14 or 15 he also failed himself to some extent. As a parent I see my job as to raise functioning adults that can navigate adult society. That means they need some ability to make decisions on their own, assess dangers on their own, and when they fail in minor ways I am to be there as a support structure for them to fall back on.
You made your scenario about sexual deviancy, and something that is on the verge of being illegal. But there are plenty of fully legal and pernicious traps in society that do not involve sexual deviancy. Drinking is a problem, sugar and obesity are problems, there are MLM and pyramid schemes that can suck people in, cults, etc. I cannot burn a path through the world and eliminate every possible danger for my kids. My only option, without engaging in a strange war against modern society, is to give my child the tools to protect themselves.
If all my children become dead and destroyed by this world, then I will wage war. But it won't be because of any high minded principles, I'll just be a broken man bent on revenge.
cjet79
2yr ago
Is this argument basically "feudalism was bad, thus anything associated with it is also bad"?
cjet79
2yr ago
The issue is the real world has commons. Things like providing schools which I believe almost every libertarian thinks a smart poor kid should be provided with an education.
- School is not the commons. Schooling is a private good, and will obtain optimal distribution on its own.
- No I don't think that. Or the closest I get to thinking that is 'it would be nice, but in a world without infinite resources no need to force it'.
- Since I wouldn't force it, I'd like to be in a society rich enough to engage in charity for those cases, but its not a deal breaker. There could easily be other things that matter more.
There isn’t a strong libertarian argument against open borders. Which would then make Democracy incompatible with unlimited immigration. The voter base would change and you would be voted out. So I guess you need a dictator to maintain your politics.
Democracy isn't compatible with libertarianism in the first place, so there is no need to preserve it. If there was a form of democracy that was a fit with libertarianism, it would probably look closer to corporate shareholder voting.
Or say a community of libertarians have good well supported and agreed to schools. The current way to keep the poors out is to ban property density. But that isn’t very libertarian. If you let people do whatever they want with their property than one person sells to a developer who builds low-income housing. And the commons you did agree with is suddenly underfunded. I think libertarian is good within boundaries. But it easily falls apart without something above it enforcing something for the commons.
I didn't realize you were building up to a "trap", I genuinely disagreed with the previous stuff. Land ownership and property ownership agreements would probably happen a lot more often without zoning as a crutch. If there is an actual commons problem there are typically two ways to solve it:
- One person/entity is given entire ownership of the commons. They then suffer the destruction of the commons, so have reasons to preserve it.
- Complex systems of social governance arise to protect the commons. Elinor Ostrom won an economic nobel prize for her work on this.
cjet79
2yr ago
"Libertarian" is not trademarked. Anyone can use the term. I consider myself libertarian, and many other people would agree I fit the common conception of that term. But I'm not gonna defend anyone and everyone that uses it for themselves.
You also seem to have some personal beef with "vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives". I'd suggest dropping it. This is not the kind of discussion forum for your personal grievances.
I was attempting to write up a longer post, but I'm tired and sick so it was turning into low quality crap writing. So I'm just gonna do short responses to your questions.
But this is a song and dance that has been done before. Hans Herman Hoppe laid down the law on this stuff years ago. Insofar as libertarians want to live in nice societies (they do) the only functional tool against the kind of people who destroy nice societies is physical punishment. You quickly stop being a libertarian in a universalist sense and turn into a Civic Nationalist. My question for libertarian or libertarian leaning people would be, why bother with this song and dance?
Libertarians have set out the rules pretty clearly. Property is a thing. Property implies ultimate ownership. You and only you can have ownership of your body and person. That ownership can be expanded to physical objects. The rules of how that ownership can be expanded do not have to be set in stone, or handed down by the gods of libertarianism. Violations of property are considered initiations of violence and will likely be met with violence. Libertarians have never expressed a full story of non-violence. So there has never been a contradiction with libertarians using physical violence against thieves, rapists, and murderers.
Why ground your arguments in some abstract first principles relating to freedom and whatever else when you truly do not want freedom for everyone to do what they please?
Some of us are true believers. I want you to do whatever you want. Just don't violate me or mine.
Asking for the golden rule treatment is apparently a horrible thing for libertarians to do. "Well yes, you can want to have your freedom to live in peace and not have your stuff stolen, but I also want my freedom to enact endless social problems with wealth I don't have, so I need you to pay taxes first, oh and go along with my social programs when I want".
Why not just say the things you want society to be and stand on those grounds?
Because I don't think everyone else has to live in the same society as me. I'm hoping they can live in the society they want. So how would my vision of a good society convince anyone? The idea of imposing your vision of society on others is a fundamentally statist way of looking at things. For example, I don't want to live in Amish society, but I support their right to exist. When the government tries to say "no Amish, you must do X" my thought is to push back against those government intrusions. If you ask me to defend Amish society, I'm gonna shuffle my feet and say 'well they want to live that way, so let them, yeah I agree it looks boring as hell and more than a little silly'.
cjet79
2yr ago
Married with kids. My wife doesn't have any interest in this place. Occasionally I'll show her a post of mine. But she has about the same level of interest as she does hearing about me playing video games.
Best of luck in your search.
cjet79
2yr ago
The Oliver Anthony song hit me hard. I also grew up within 100 miles of where that artist is based. So the appalachin country twang blues is familiar to me. I'm usually more of a fan of pop music.
Oliver has additional commentary on the song:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=tmxyMJd7IQ8
Its a nine minute video that I watched all of, but I'll summarize some things I remember (cuz i know I hate watching videos that other people post):
- The video I posted was uploaded just prior to the one that NotBritishorSouthern posted. It is his first video released not on a cell phone camera.
- He comments on many parts of the song, but doesn't mention the line "if you're 5 foot 3 and 300 pounds, tax dollars shouldn't pay for your bags of fudge rounds."
- Was formerly an "angry agnostic", said he used to make fun of the "sky daddy". Has come around to religion recently.
- Doesn't like pedos. Doesn't understand how someone can do that to children.
- Feels like Washington has made things harder on people.
- He has gotten messages from people about his music helping others. He hopes to do more.
- Talked about getting high and drunk and wasting his early time in life.
- Says he met good people at the factory he worked at.
- Some other stuff, but I'm forgetting now.
cjet79
2yr ago
Materialist areas of the economy tend to have materialist oriented customers and businesses. I don't know of any non-profit version of a superstore. Non-materialist businesses tend to be non-materialist oriented. It is easy to find non-profit hospitals, schools, and social clubs. I think there are plenty of examples of businesses having values other than profit. Its just that many of those values have become so ingrained with profit because they are required to be profitable that you don't really separate them in your head. For example, good customer service is expected in the US, and people pay for it.
The superstores I am familiar with pay their employees decent wages compared to their alternatives. The small stores that superstores replaced were often family run. If you asked the younger family members what they got paid, they'd laugh in your face (if their parents weren't around). Because many of them were not paid. Many of the "greeters" at stores often completely lack alternative employment options. So paying someone more than zero dollars is not a hard hurdle to pass.
It is hyperbolic to say that nestle murdered babies. In the 70s they marketed infant formula in a region with chronic malnutrition and water problems. Very dumb of them in hindsight. But the evidence for malicious seems thin. Imagine you are a sheltered Swiss executive in the 70s. You don't know much about Africa. Your country has not had a serious famine or food security problem in at least three centuries. You hear that babies are dying from malnutrition in Africa. You think "hey we have baby formula that is healthy, why don't we sell it there". The teams beneath you carry this out, no one brings up the logistical problems.
Its not really even clear how much damage Nestle' did. I tried to look up numbers, the only stuff I found was highly exaggerated. One of them blamed nestle for 1.5 million baby deaths from malnutrition. I tried to look up the total number of kids dying from malnutrition in Africa, and the scattered data I could find suggested that the total number of malnutrition deaths was also around 1.5 million. So that source basically used Copenhagen ethics on Nestle "you touched the problem, so all of it is your fault".
Africa is also not a profitable market. If some executive started selling formula there hoping to make a profit they should be fired for being an idiot that can't do math. This was likely a botched humanitarian effort.
I don't need companies to get involved in charities and politics and sacrifice money to change the world to make it better. Just don't be evil.
If I'm right about Nestle's Africa thing being botched humanitarianism then ironically they ended up being evil by trying to be a charity and massively fucking up. Wouldn't be the first time that has happened in Africa.
cjet79
2yr ago
The parents may consider it good, but I don't think even the most hardcore anarcho-capitalists would argue that it's fair, any more than it's fair that some people are born kings and some are born peasants.
Fairness is admittedly not a major concern of mine. You can't eat fairness. It would be more fair if we were all born into subsistence farming and lived a hard miserable life until the ripe age of 25. Lots of things could be more fair and awful. I think an approach of "eating the rich" (if it succeeds, rather than just transforming them into a "poor" politically powerful class) is more likely to just get rid of the rich and not improve anyone else's welfare. The math is really hard to get around. There are too many poor people still.
I mean yeah that's kinda the idea. If I believe that it's bad for people to accumulate large quantities of wealth, then it follows that I would want to disincentivize that.
I think you would just discourage the acquisition of fungible or stealable forms of wealth. As has happened in many communist countries, powerful men just switch into the activity of controlling other directly.
I mean I wouldn't be much of a Socialist if I didn't believe in getting rid of private property to some extent, but personally, I'm less concerned about the stuff you keep around the house and more the sort of thing that 99% of people would never be able to buy, like factories, refineries, large swaths of land and such.
...
That seems uncharitable. I want to avoid making this sort of agreement in the first place.
...
I've heard the risk argument before and I've never bought it, mostly because taking a large quantity of risks is statistically equivalent to taking no risk. If you bet on one horse, you might go broke, but if you bet on 100 horses, you're virtually guaranteed to win a few. The gambling analogy isn't great because the average expected return is always negative, which isn't the case in investment. This is why virtually every extremely rich person has most of their money in investments, and why even the most risk-averse financial advisors support this.
You seem fine destroying all private incentives to create factories. Is this intentional? All the rich people invest right now because it is a safe thing to do with their money. The US system has set it up that way. If it was not a safe thing to do, then their behavior would change.
I would add food to your list as well.
In other words, the things we don't need are getting cheaper and the things we do need are getting more expensive. The logical extreme of this sounds like a world where we're all constantly distracting ourselves from the fact that we're unhealthy, sick, and constantly at risk of homelessness, which feels very familiar.
I'm sure you'd like to add food to successfully tell your story, but you'd be wrong to do so. Food has gotten cheaper as well. What hasn't gotten cheaper is labor. So any food you consume out at a restaurant, or any food that is labor intensive is likely to be more expensive. Which feels like something you would want, yes?
Its a hotly argued debate, but one of the believed causes of the cost increase for healthcare and education is also the increased cost of labor inputs for those activities. Its why medical tourism exists where you can go to a different country and get high quality doctors with high quality equipment for a fraction of the cost in the west. The place where you are saving a bunch of money is on labor, those doctors are not paid nearly as much as their western counterparts. And it is rarely just the doctors. Its the nurses. Its the cleaning staff. It is every person involved in the enterprise.
The cost of materials to build a house from the 1900's has decreased significantly. But no one wants those houses, they want modern homes that have a whole host of features.
When I say "difficult to put objective value on", I'm not talking about everything that could possibly be subjectively valued. I'm talking about things that are virtually impossible to value as they have no minimum value, like art.
I'm aware of what you meant. I'm telling you that the plan you have in your head is likely a very bad one. Because it has been done before and failed miserably a bunch of times. And I was trying to explain why/how it fails.
Do I think they do nothing? No. Do I think they do enough to justify making triple what the people working for them make? Also no.
Also, while I've known a few lazy workers, most of them at least did enough work to look productive. I've known drastically more lazy managers who literally sat on their phones all day scrolling twitter.
I wrote what I thought was a pretty succinct summary explaining why they get paid more, and why they sometimes look unproductive. Though perhaps it was too succinct. If a manager is not paid more then it becomes easy for the employee to simply bribe their managers. The other stuff I think I addressed quite well.
As a final note, you seem to think I take issue with the existence of transactions, but I have no problem with these. If Peter has a million dollars and Paul has zero, and Peter pays Paul to perform services. I don't care about that transaction. I take issue with the fact that Peter has a million dollars and Paul has zero in the first place.
I think how peter has the million dollars is incredibly important. Imagine there is a singer that people like to hear. They find a big empty field that no one owns. And the singer sings for everyone there. There is enough people and enough wealth that the singer is able to do this for a year and eventually earn 1 million dollars. Do you think it is bad that the singer has 1 million dollars?
cjet79
2yr ago
This has been become sort of the creedo of various market reform movements over the years. ESG has been the latest. "profit shouldn't be everything, other concerns should matter".
This sounds great, but the problem is that coordinating on values is ridiculously difficult. One of the easiest things to coordinate on is "we all want more wealth". As soon as you allow any other values to creep into that equation you have a huge fight on your hands. The fight is going to be over, what values can be considered important, and how much money can we sacrifice for those values. The easiest answer to this massive fight is: no, you can't have other values, and thus you can't spend money on those other values. This is the solution the US has decided to settle on. Corporations that are publicly traded have a legal responsibility to make money for their investors to the best of their ability. If they are clearly prioritizing other values, then shareholders can sue them.
There is an out to all of this: non-profits and fully privately owned corporations. Some non-profits can be very business like in how they approach problems. And privately owned corporations can certainly have other objectives. Chik-fil-a is an example. There is no way in a hell a publicly traded fast food company would close any day of the week. Chik-fil-a does it because their owners are Christian and believe that is the right thing to do.
I was also going to give Ben and Jerry's as an example from the other end of the political spectrum. When I went to double check that they are privately owned it took me down a small rabbit hole of tracking down the ultimate owners. They are owned by unilever which is publicly traded on a few different stock exchanges. But they have an independent board of directors that they say preserves their values and brand. Which is another one of the ways out of this "profit is everything" conundrum. Stake your business' reputation on being not about "profit is everything" and you can honestly claim to shareholders that you'd lose money destroying this brand by caring only about money.
Which kind of leads me into the final way out of my concern for "profit is everything" corporations. Reputation matters. Humans are very good at playing tit for tat games. And if we see someone defecting, we'll bail and hit the defect button right back on them, even if it screws us over too. Smart corporations know this. And it is why most of them project an image of something like "nice, friendly, and not trying to rock the boat". Many corporations have policies on their books (and they carry them out) that explicitly lose them money to keep customers happy. But you object "they are just doing that cuz it makes them more money in the longterm", and I say "yes! exactly! that is my point".
When the profit motive is the only motive then corporations will behave as if all goals matter exactly as much as the customers think they should matter and is willing to pay for them to matter.
That is the crux of why people tend to hate the profit motive: That not all the other customers are as concerned as they are that this corporation might be screwing over poor old ladies. In other words not all customers share their values, and as I already discussed its hard for people to agree on values. While some cities boycotted chik-fil-a, other cities made lines around the block. And still other cities had lines around the block and continued to have lines around the block.
I'm tired and probably starting to ramble. I'll sum it up as best I can:
- "profit is everything" is an easy coordination point and schelling fence for investors.
- Profits does not preclude other values (and sometimes requires other values). But customers must be willing to express those values and pay for them.
- There are other organization types that are not solely focused on profits. Many of them do quite well within the American capitalist system.
cjet79
2yr ago
If I lived in the 1700s, I would probably be a libertarian. Technology hadn't advancad as far, and resources were more scarce, so if almost everyone didn't work hard for long hours, then everyone would starve, and a capitalist economy seems like a decent enough way to incentivize that.
I'm glad that we can agree incentives are necessary to some degree. I think I'd disagree on the amount of free floating wealth that is actually available today.
It's difficult for me to say that today. Take my previous job for example. I have to work 40-50 hours per week just to not be homeless, while my boss's boss has to work, on average, about 1 hour per week. He's not particularly intelligent or productive; the only reason he doesn't have to work as much as I do is that he was born rich and I wasn't. He didn't gain this wealth through hard work or taking risks, he gained it because his father was wealthy, who gained it because his father was weathy, who gained it because one of his ancestors found a silver mine under his property by accendent. I don't believe that he has a right to have double the free time that I do for the rest of his life while I don't just because he's from a weathly family.
I think wealth inheritance often appears unfair when viewed from the children's generation, but fair when viewed from the parents generation. The inevitability of it also becomes obvious when viewed from the parents generation. If you survive to your old age and have a bunch of kids you love, and you are rich and well off, wouldn't you want to spend some of that money to make the people you love more comfortable? To have someone else then come in and say "no, thats not fair that your kid gets a nice life, they must work and suffer like everyone else". I might feel like "why did I bother to earn all that wealth then?". Preventing generational wealth transfers seems largely impossible without just completely destroying the concept of private wealth. I can't tell if you are fine with destroying the concept of private wealth, if you are then I'd like some idea of who is supposed to own things instead. And by ownerhsip I mean final or majority say in how an asset is used.
Additionally, our company turns a substantial profit. I receive a very small proportion of that profit, and he receives 10 times that, despite the fact that his individual productivity is drastically lower than mine.
Does your boss have an ownership stake? He is being paid for that investment money, not for his productivity.
Think of it this way, there are three things you can do with wealth:
- Consume it. Food / vacation / travel / experiences / etc.
- Preserve it. Keep something that tends to hold its value over long time periods. Previous metal / art / land / etc.
- Invest it. Create a business that generates more wealth.
Ultimately most people want to consume wealth. Even preserving it is just is a way to delay consumption. Consuming wealth is also the least risky thing to do. You've done the thing, its over, its gone. It is rare that anyone can steal your past consumption of wealth. Preserving it for later consumption carries some risk. Someone might steal your stuff, or the thing you were holding lost its value for some reason. Maybe too many people were using it to store wealth, and not enough were actually valuing the thing being stored (these are called asset bubbles).
The most risky thing they can do is invest it. There is always a chance that a business will fail, or just that it will fail to return a bunch of profits. You might as well have consumed the wealth rather than investing it.
This is why there is a price to capital, and why you pay the investors. The more investors there are, the less you have to pay them. The more likely the investors are to lose their money, the more you have to pay them.
I don't believe that he has a right to more of the profits than I do, when I am more productive than he is.
I'm assuming your boss has some form of ownership stake. He is getting paid for that ownership stake, and the risks associated.
The irony is that the main thing preventing workers from just cutting out the middle man and refusing to give the owners their cut is that the state would side with the owners of the means of production, violently if necessary.
No, there is actually nothing preventing the workers from owning the business. This is fully legal in the US, and quite a few socialists I have spoken to love to point out various examples of worker owned cooperatives. You are not allowed to steal something you didn't create. This goes back to what I discussed earlier, the various owners of the company chose to invest rather than consuming the wealth. Had they known their investment would just get stolen, obviously they would have just consumed it instead. This is both an implicit and explicit (legally codified) relationship that business owners have in most countries. The government says "we will not just steal all of your investment" and the currently wealthy people either believe them and invest, or they don't believe them and just consume or preserve their wealth. You basically want to reneg on that agreement and change the terms in a way that benefits yourself at their expense.
I could, in theory, quit and go to a different job, but that, in all likelihood, would be exactly the same situation. I could start my own competing business, but I would be unlikely to ever be able to compete with my former employer, as they own the means of production, and have an economy of scale, and I would never be able to afford that.
There are lots of rich people. They don't all get along, or even like each other. If you are short on capital there are such things as loans and investment. If your current company is also underpaying workers then you could eat their lunch by offering wage increases to their employees and stealing their talent. Very few businesses are permanently entrenched in the US, and many that are have done so through government edicts and support. There is a huge amount of turnover in the S&P 500 decade to decade.
If starting a business and potentially losing lots of money to your competitors sounds scary and risky, then realize that is what your current company's investors already went through. That is why they are earning outsized profits. Its a survivor bias. You meet the rich gamblers in Vegas because they can afford to stay around, all the poor sops who lost it all are dead or gone. By definition you work at the business that made it. Not at the business that failed. I obviously have no clue how much risk is involved, you haven't told me anything about the industry. What I do know is that there are rarely million dollar bills lying around on the sidewalk. The business you work in is likely within normal parameters for returns on risk, capital investment returns, and share of money paid to labor.
Also, the rise of technology has led the average worker's productivity to skyrocket over the last few decades. Logically, this should lead to them being able to work drastically fewer hours for the same pay, but in reality, the average work week is the same it was 40 years ago, and average pay is about the same with respect to inflation. As automation gets better and better, it should ideally lead to a society where we have to work less and less, and have more free time, but this is not the case for most people. Since our system is set up such that most people can only support themselves by working 40-50 hours per week, automation becomes a threat to out jobs rather than a benefit, because our system only gives people value insofar as they benefit the people who own the means of production.
My career has generally been one where I work less and get paid roughly the same amount. I'm in web programming. I know its not the same for everyone. But I've also known plenty of people that don't work in the type of industries where productivity is drastically increasing.
There is also another thing to consider. I've talked so far about investors/owners in a business. You've talked about the workers. But we haven't talked much about the consumers. They exist and they have their own set of options. The price of the vast majority of goods and services have gone down over the last few decades. The huge exceptions to this are healthcare, education, and housing. They are each all their own massive topic, so I won't be getting into them.
Personally, I believe the (usually local, sometimes state/province, and occasionally federal) government should control many industries, and private industry should be limited to industries that are difficult to put an objective value on, like entertainment. The purpose of this would be to ensure that workers should receive the value of their labor with minimal amounts given to management. Anyone should be able to start a government-owned businesses to allow some choices for consumers while still guaranteeing workers the value of their labor.
I think in practice you'd find a lot of industries have degrees of subjective value involved. Communist countries have routinely run into these problems. What do you tell the iron nail factory to produce, and how do you know they are doing a good job? There was one point where they were judged based on how many nails they produced, so there were many tiny nails produced and not enough large ones. Then the metric was changed to weight of nails produced, and they just produced very large heavy nails. And nails as a product have been around for millenia they are one of the simplest products.
And do you not think management does anything? Have you never had a lazy co-worker who doesn't get much done? If you haven't then you've had amazing management and you should be singing their praises. More likely, you've had a lazy co-worker, and you were annoyed with management for not firing this person. But firing people is very unpleasant. Are you willing to punish a lazy worker that isn't doing their part? And if 'management' has the power to fire people, how do you know they won't just fire the people they dislike, rather than the unproductive ones?
Usually the answer to all of these questions is that you have to tie management's incentives to team productivity. So that if there is a lazy or unproductive worker the manager suffers from having that worker on the team. If all the people on the team are great then it should look like management is not doing anything. Management is sort of like the IT industry of economic systems. Everyone notices when they are doing badly, and everyone complains they are doing nothing when things run smoothly.
Additionally, I believe that the state should ensure that all their citizens receive the essentials, including a place to live, electric/water/internet, safe transportation around their town/city, and high-protein food.
I am not highly against a welfare state. I just don't think we are really at the point to provide it. At best we can provide it to a small minority of people. Possibly most people that live in a first world nation. I would rather see us continue on the wealth creation process until welfare is affordable to everyone in the world, not just those born in the correct country. Welfare states tend to want to close their borders to foreigners, and one of the best welfare programs that exists is capitalism. It is unrivaled at raising the living standard for large groups of people. You yourself admitted it was great to have capitalism in the 18th century, but I'd like to point out that most of the world doesn't have much better living standards than what was available in 18th century Britain.
The engine of capitalism is chugging along and doing great things. And it pulled you and those around you out of poverty, and now you want to turn it off because the engine is loud and annoying. But there are lots of other people still waiting to be pulled out. I think it would be wrong to shut it off now. Once the poorest in the world can complain that they have to work 40 hours a week just to afford their home, food, and entertainment I might be willing to discuss shutting off the engine.
I really liked that you brought it up, it was the first time I heard of the song. (and unlike many others here, I also enjoyed the song) I felt like it blew up even more in the following week.
Reddit really started as a link conglomerator. And we have done a weird thing reddit-wise by trying to move away from that towards more of a forum. I think link congolmerators are great at sharing news. You scan through a bunch of headlines to find a thing that interests you and you click through to it if you want the link, or if you want the discussion about the link you can click on the comments.
We have gravitated just towards providing the discussion aspect of reddit. But it comes with very real tradeoffs. One of those tradeoffs is that it takes more effort to actually share a link, so fewer links and sources are shared. We know this, but it is a feature not a bug. Our goal is not for you to learn of news items here, it is to have a place to discuss them. Because we believe most of the web sucks for discussing things, and there are already lots of great places for finding news items. Even reddit is still a great place for finding news items, even as I feel that it has become a worse and worse place for discussing them.
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