Well I guess to be fair with pure capitalism you wouldn’t have a minimum wage at all. Seems like that would only hurt mom and pop shops more though as places like Walmart can drive prices even lower with the lower employee costs.
Nah I’m good. First rule of trolls is to never feed them
@thunderbolt23 @pfury @Aragon @tyler23
I’m confused (big shock I know). So the problem is large corporations using the politicians they buy to make life harder for upstart competition (regulations, red tape). Increasing the barriers to entry if you will.
So the proposed solution is to give those same politicians more power to shape the marketplace and ensure that monopolies don’t have too much power. How does anyone think this is going to work out well for smaller business?
Why not just address the problem directly and reduce regulation in order to get government out of the way?
Air BnB went from worthless startup in 2008 to having a market cap of more than Hilton and Hyatt combined in 2016, all while owning no hotel rooms. Big corporations can be beaten.
Worth the read:
My proposed solution is to make lobbying illegal and stop companies from being allowed to donate to political campaigns.
Because if you don’t get big business out of Washington first, you just end up letting them decide which regs to remove. Contrary to Trump’s retardmath of 2for1, not all regs are created equal. Some NEED to exist.
Is the hotel industry one that actively lobbies to keep competition as low as possible the way ISPs/etc do? Serious question, I dont pay much attention to the hotel industry.
As long as creative destruction can occur. I think that’s the underlying issue. Has Washington via corporate lobbyist effectively neutralize innovation? Hard to say and probably industry specific.
I think that’s part of the solution (not complete gutting of regulations, just reducing them), but regulations alone aren’t driving barriers to entry, in other words, government isn’t the lone or even primary problem - markets can trend toward monopoly in the absence of regulation (some argue it’s automatic and inevitable), which is precisely why antitrust laws were born.
As a result, politicians will have to drive this, because it will be a policy fix.
Because it used to work for everyone and small businesses. We used to have robust antitrust enforcement, and it worked well for the economy and politics. We’ve got precedent for it.
I would agree that it used to work to some degree. Now we have financialization and globalization. There’s more capital seeking returns than there are positive NPV projects for businesses to undertake. If one country has antitrust laws while the rest don’t… Then that concentrated capital will flow to fund M&A’s in other countries. The corporations will just shift their headquarters and operations if appropriate.
@anon50325502 great article. Not often I read Marxist economic theory that isn’t just bitter hyperbole. They conflated classical economics as being only perfect competition economics, which I disagreed with. Still it was a good history lesson on lefty economists in the US.
The one thing the Marxists and the free market guys fail to emphasize in this debate about multinational oligopoly/mega-corps is government intervention and national stakes.
Some nations protect the hell out of their manufacturing sector. China subsidizes and/or tarrifs nearly everthing that flows through there. Then there’s the capital controls. They know that every factory job means 5 or more ancillary jobs to the broader economy and that a nation should probably produce some tangible goods for trade. They know that busy people working many hours per week don’t have the time to disrupt public order and create unrest. China is far from the only nation playing the “sign free trade deals, practice protectionism” game.
The US trying to play “free trade” with these other countries is just playing the patsie at the card game. It should be mirror policies at best, and trade wars at worst.
By this “race to the bottom” scenario has problems - first, most sophisticated markets where investors want to be have antitrust because such countries and markets have other things that come along with that - namely reliable legal systems where your (investing) rights will be enforced. Second, I don’t think enforcement would scare capital away that much because you’re opening the playing field to new ideas with potential for ROI, which the investors want. How many good ideas are sitting on the sidelines because of barriers to entry?
In any event, some of the issues you raised are why I think the solutions are going to have to be comprehensive. Fix trade. Reform taxes - make investment more attractive in the US, which expands the pool of capital for small businesses. Enforce antitrust like in the good ole days. Reduce regulation (smartly, but meaningfully). Reform lobbying practices - and shut down the gravy train.
I’m pro-market and believe in capitalism, but I’ve grown sick of my country being effectively run by a class of plutocrats who conflate their private interest with the public interest on every single issue. And as one person recently said it, we’re at one of those points again in American history where we have to save capitalism from the capitalists.
Whats the over under on Tillerson getting canned? Fat Donnie loves canning folks on Friday Im saying tomorrows it…
Maybe the NSA should stop reading our emails and do their job.
It was either read our emails or watch porn.
$10 Billion for border wall. Iran deal decertified. Removing requirements for employer plans to cover birth control/abortion. Holy Friday.
Didn’t know abortion was mandated, unless you’re saying birth control and abortions are the same thing, which is a bit off the mark in my opinion.
I would think pro-life people would like increasing birth control use because it reduces unwanted pregnancies, and any abortions from those unwanted pregnancies.
Just don’t tell those fiscal conservatives, if you can find them.
It’s not going anywhere anyway.
Ya I agree (and hope, as I think its ridiculous), seems to be more of a fake win for Trump and his base, glad to see they’re doing productive things in Washington.
Sounds fantastic… No Mexican nannys to take care of all these one night stand babies and a new guy with Nukes to talk shit to. #winning #nostroyva
Somebody better tell the guys building prototype walls and doing soil analysis. Bad idea or not they are going for it.
I mean in Congress.