I understand that folks here think that the general anti-AI sentiments that can be found in some of US culture are often misguided.
It's likely projection on my part but I have a deep suspicion that people understand that mass surveillance by the state is the main use case for all these LLMs, camera systems, and increasing large data centers.
Also add corporations. Insurance companies, Banks, Potential Employers, etc will definitively use mass surveillance and AI generated predictions based on that mass surveillance.
Most Americans really, really don't. Gallup puts Americans' trust in major institutions, including several parts of the government, at around 30% [0]
In OECD countries, trust in government sits at around 39% [1]
I would say that most people in Western nations don't trust their government. Whether they agree with what all their governments are doing is another issue-by-issue matter, but I would guess they don't love that on the whole, either.
They say that and then act the opposite. The cognitive dissonance is astonishing. Consider the MAGA deep state narrative and how it literally now exists because of them.
Distrust of the government comes in different levels: you can be just distrustful enough to be skeptical yet accepting, and so distrustful that you actively try to vote the bums out. I don't think the polls distinguish between them.
Trump didn't bring the CIA and MI6 into existence. That's liberal cope from the years they spent yelling about how secret police were actually good now, because they didn't like Trump. Well now they like Trump - happy?
The Trump (read: Russell Vought et al.) playbook is transparently self-serving:
1. Complain loudly about weaponization of institutions
2. Use public support to "reform" those institutions
3. Weaponize those institutions against opponents
4. (Implied) Everyone forgets those institutions were previously less corrupt
The entire reason Trump spent so much time talking about the swamp was that his band always had every intention of furthering government corruption, albeit to his own ends.
That's a lot easier if you've first degraded public trust in institutions.
lol. Talk about cope. You just invented a strawman and assumed it was my position so that you could claim victory. I guess you don’t know many progressives because by and large the CIA has been considered problematic forever. But it wasn’t celebrated the way MAGA cheers for ICE.
I would encourage you to refrain from saying things like ‘lol. Talk about cope.’ here, let your argument stand on its own without baiting the other person into responding emotionally.
I’m not offering this advice because I’m perfect either, I find it difficult sometimes to be respectful of someone I disagree with. You can take it or leave it, I’ll just say editing those sorts of things out of my own posts has been helpful.
Its another to do something truly effective about it.
Alas, the American people seem to be utterly paralyzed. Catatonic, even.
When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
> When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
Look I encourage people to vote and participate in government and politics as much as possible, but it's extremely clear at this point that this is more and more untrue every day. The government derives it's power from billionaires now, and thus the people always get the government billionaires want. It may not be exactly the route they want, but it's the same end results.
Look no further for proof than the endless slew of city and county governments that capitulate to big tech and sign sweeping data center contracts without even notifying their constituents, intentionally ignoring the feedback they get, or simply silencing the dissenters when they speak at meetings. Even local government has been sold to the highest bidder.
This has frequently been true in American history though.
Think folks were thrilled with the robber barons of the railroad area also owning newspapers?
Imho, the core thing that worsened was the election system. Specifically, closed primaries and gerrymandering. Both because they disincentivize centrists and compromise.
Ranked choice, mandatory opening of party primaries, and a Supreme Court definition of unacceptable gerrymandering (mathematically-based) would get us better government.
> When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
You've had people being apologists for all manner of bad forms of government around the world for at least the past 25 years. This shouldn't be surprising.
It's also clearly the wrong question for this decade. Private / public sector cooperation and all of the barriers between them that have been degraded and chipped away has left us with a very broken economic system that looks less and less like capitalism every day.
In Norway, as an act of sensibility and kindness, prior to WWII, registers were kept at all town halls as to your religion. The point was, people wanted to be buried in the proper cemetery. It was a plus, people registered willingly.
Then the Nazis rolled in. And you can imagine what happened with those registers.
So it doesn't even have to be about your own government. And with digital access being a world away, it can indeed be a threat.
In the Netherlands the Nazis were able to exterminate Jews much more thoroughly than they had in Germany, because the Netherlands kept such meticulous records of the name and address of every Jew.
And everyone else, but the Nazis were after the Jews.
Government agencies (foreign and domestic) will just be just a few of the many buyers of this information.
Private companies buy up this information like mad. It's so cheap - five figures gets you a database of every person over 18 in the USA and their addresses. Another five figures gets work history for them. Another five figures gets you property information. Another gets you social media feeds. Etc. Some vendors even sell it ad hoc with little up-front cost.
For less than a million a year, any company can build an extensive profile on every person in the USA. These companies are just adding to that list.
There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism, when in reality we'll likely all end up renting everything we own from the 6 people who own all the companies in the world. There seems to be a motte and bailey where the motte is "oh we should just remove all the governmental controls and let private enterprise flourish!" and then the bailey is "don't you see how little freedom you have from government" when it's made apparent what private enterprise has done in the modern world.
> There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism
So much this.
People forget that for all its fault, democratic government is democratic to some degree.
Corporations are democratic to zero degree. (And before someone brings up shareholders: institutional investors and dual-class shares)
Libertarianism is entirely self-serving. I am rich and have property, so my ideal government is one whose only job is to create property registries and allow their enforcement with violence. Ideally, the poor people are taxed (not me of course) to fund a government violence force to enforce the rules on the poor people, as is the case in the USA.
Communism is similarly self-serving. I own no property, and so my ideal government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone.
I think you misunderstand me -- perspective matters. If you have 12 cookies, and I have 2 cookies, and i say "it would be more fair if we each had 7 cookies", then i pretty transparently just want you to give me 5 cookies.
"Clean up trash" and "Donate money to the poor" are not as unevenly beneficial. Also "Donate money to the poor" is a far cry from "Seize money and give that to the poor".
> and i say "it would be more fair if we each had 7 cookies", then i pretty transparently just want you to give me 5 cookies.
But under the context of "government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone" it is not you (or any single person) that decides that, it's the contextual Communist government saying and doing that. Just because it benefits random governed person does not make it directly self serving.
The nuance is, in this version of Communism, the Communism itself it is not self serving it trys to equalize -- Libertarianism, in this context, enforces self serving ideals
> But under the context of "government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone" it is not you (or any single person) that decides that,
Under every version of Communism, it's "the government" that decides that, and those government officials seem to be much better dressed then everyone else.
You seem to be describing our current corrupt democracy that produces crony capitalism that gives favors to big businesses and enables the business owners to become one of the 6 people that own everything.
A major point of libertarianism is to tear down the government structure that enables that crony capitalism and restores real competition in the market.
So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?
If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.
> So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?
It's not about the amount of physical force they can assert.
Suppose you have a constrained set of things the government is allowed to do. They prohibit fraud, non-consensual physical harm (e.g. violence, pollution) and market consolidation. Market consolidation is given a rigid definition in the nature of any organization having more than 15% market share in any market, a rigid consequence in the nature of that organization being fully atomized, and a right for customers and suppliers to bring a private case against them with the same consequence if they're over the threshold and the government prosecutor won't do it. Every citizen has the constitutional right to smash corporations in consolidated markets into smithereens.
Meanwhile the government is prohibited from enacting more specific economic rules. They lack the authority to enact things like certificate of need laws, zoning density restrictions, price controls, anything that acts as a constraint on adversarial interoperability, etc. Micromanaging the population is not allowed.
How do these constraints benefit large incumbents? What benefit is there in giving the government the authority to do things that history has consistently shown to be anti-competitive and inefficient?
Such a scheme absolutely explodes in complexity as it comes to each level of additional detail.
This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best.
The smallest number of competitors that can split market share such that none exceed 15% is 7, and that cuts it absurdly close for an existential risk.
Do non-profit organizations count for this rule? If not, how would corporate structures that intentionally obfuscate these distinctions, e.g. IKEA, be handled?
If there's not some extremely tricky qualifiers, these markets seem likely to be a problem, just for starters: medicines†, operating systems, utilities to a specific house or even city, spy satellites, chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize, combat aircraft, crewed spacecraft, EUV lithography, armored fighting vehicles, cellular telecommunications services, samples of organisms restricted to high biosafety level labs, and literally any new product category.
† Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible." Also, no one could offer a specific specialized surgical procedure until seven or more independent organizations in the same geographic area have qualified staff and equipment, which would be especially hard for any novel techniques; if the problem it addressed was rare, they'd also effectively be forced into a cartel to allocate the patients evenly.
There's also separately and unavoidably the massive problem of transitioning from the current situation to one compliant with these restrictions.
Edit: Switch to using a dagger for the footnote to avoid a formatting issue.
> This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best.
The definition of a market is the set of goods or services which are fungible substitutes for one another.
The only thing that's hard about this at all is determining how fungible they have to be in order to be considered substitutes, e.g. two restaurants that are 3000 miles apart are obviously not substitutes for each other, but what if they're 30 miles apart? That one could go either way depending on how aggressive you want to be.
But it doesn't really matter how the coin flips like that turn out because the things that are close to the line aren't the markets where consolidation is causing major trouble, and conversely causing some local shops to not merge with each other so it stays unambiguous that the local market isn't consolidating is likewise not a big issue.
> Do non-profit organizations count for this rule?
Yes. If a non-profit has more than 15% market share then it has to be broken into multiple non-profits that each have less than 15% market share, the same as anyone else.
> Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible."
You're assuming that there are still patents. If there are then that obviously doesn't count during the patent term because that's what patents are, but then you count only the patented invention and any sort of tying is entirely prohibited. You shouldn't be able to patent a connector and use that to monopolize the market for replacement razor blades.
Whereas if there aren't patents then you don't have this problem to begin with because you get a dozen different companies all producing the new medicine right away.
> operating systems
Operating systems are easy. Microsoft would be atomized because they have too much market share and then a dozen different companies would have the full rights to make derivatives of Windows. None of them would ever be allowed to have majority market share again, so now it's in everyone's interests to standardize APIs so that the same software will run on each company's Windows distribution, and the same APIs would end up being supported by (or consolidated with) non-Windows operating systems as well.
The OS then becomes fungible as intended and most likely ends up being open source since there's not a lot of margin in fungible commodities. And software licensed to allow the entire public to modify and redistribute it has an unlimited number of suppliers and would never exceed the market share threshold.
> utilities to a specific house or even city
If you're a utility company and you know you're going to get broken up if you have more than 15% market share, what do you do?
The sensible thing to do is to build your infrastructure differently. You're digging up the road once, but instead of installing one big pipe, you install a conduit with 10 smaller ones inside it. Then you sell off nine out of ten to nine other companies so that you each have ~10% market share and if one of you ends up with 14% and another 6% you're still not over the threshold.
Then if a natural disaster damages the infrastructure, in theory they could each employ their own repair crews and each send one to each damaged location, but that seems pretty inefficient when there is another option. You have multiple independent repair companies and the utility companies pay whichever one gives them the best rate for a given job, which will tend to be the one already sending someone to that site, i.e. the same repair crew usually repairs all 10 damaged pipes and gets paid by all 10 utility companies. Meanwhile a different repair company puts in the best bid for a different site.
The status quo takes the assumption that everything has to be vertically integrated, but it doesn't, and it's a lot easier to have competition when each new entrant doesn't have to reproduce the entire supply chain themselves.
You're listing things that are concentrated markets because the government is the only one that buys them and then there is only one seller because there is only one buyer. And even then the way the government does that is stupid. If they're the only one who wants armored fighting vehicles then they should take competing bids to design one and then take the design they paid for and take competing bids to manufacture it. The contracts to make these things should be going to the same companies that make trucks and locomotives.
Likewise they should break Boeing up and then have the various pieces of it put in bids to design, manufacture or assemble combat aircraft.
> EUV lithography
Nothing about this should be a monopoly. It should be something that dozens of companies know how to do. It consolidated because the government has been allowing companies to merge with competitors and suppliers for decades.
> chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize
These are the sort of things that should have 50 suppliers rather than 50,000. Nothing about it requires a monopoly. Indeed, allowing the market to concentrate is dangerous, because what happens if that one company's facilities are damaged or they're the only ones who know how to do it and the bus to the company retreat goes over a cliff?
> literally any new product category
So someone invents e.g. 3D printers. How does the time it takes to litigate a case in court compare to the time it takes for multiple companies to be making the new category of product?
There is no need or incentive to file a case if it would be dismissed as moot by the time a decision would be rendered. And if a "new" product category is still a consolidated market multiple years later then that's actually a consolidated market and it's time to break them up.
David and goliath is not a story of a little man defeating an impossible giant. It's the story of a technologically advanced crack pistol shot vs a guy a with a knife and a hundred yards to cover
Government will not give any help to any corporation and we, the masses, will be empowered to stand up to corporations ourselves. And to be clear, when we talk about Power here we aren't talking about enforcing our will with violence (like the government ultimately does) but with the lifeblood of corporations: money. Deny them that and they quickly die.
Okay great. Let's say you have a dispute with your neighborhood electricity provider. They run the power plant 3 blocks down and vent smog into your house. By your logic the only recourse you have is to stop paying them. How do you handle that externality while still maintaining your electricity and also avoid having to learn how to run your own electricity grid?
If this isn't the complete anarchy form of libertarianism then the government can still enforce laws against air pollution. And there would be no way for a government official to make an underhanded executive branch "policy" change that let's the company get around that law.
If this is the more extreme form of libertarianism then surely my neighbors agree with me that the pollution sucks and we all stop paying them. Yeah, maybe we go without power for a short time, but then that company changes their ways or goes out of business. No long court battles, nobody single entity for the electric company to bribe, no writing your congressman and hoping there's a change. Vote directly with your wallet.
Or, there's the libertarian idea that another corporation is responsible for (essentially is hired as a caretaker of) the air we breathe and the electric company pays them for anything they emit into that air, so they are punished/disincentivized that way
A major point of libertarianism is to tear down government structures that hinder libertarians from engaging in world domination and retain government structures that hinder other people from hindering libertarians from engaging in world domination.
How hard would it be for you to look up whether Apple does any government lobbying, or if there are any laws, regulations, or tax codes that (whether intentionally or not) give Apple an advantage over a start up that wants to compete with them. Don't ignore things like copyright laws, patent protections, international trade agreements, corporate tax structures, insider trading by politicians, etc., etc.
What of observed human history gives you any hope that such a thing will happen?
All of these systems function well ... "in theory". Even the ones you may not agree with. Socialism and communism are perfectly fine theoretical systems, until you introduce humans into the equation with desires for power, wealth, etc.
I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. I also have no idea how you come to the conclusion that collusion will not be a problem in a libertarian world.
The US would have thrived on any system because it started the game with a continent whose indigenous population was small, pluralistic, nomadic and technologically backward, and whose natural resources were abundant or completely untouched. The colonists had access to the technology of the leading power in the world at the time, and had imported slaves in bulk from another technologically backward continent to jump-start their economy by the time the US was established.
They did not 'fail to thrive', they had different starting conditions and developed along different paths.
They were not as thinly populated when colonized and indigenous cultures were farther advanced, eg Aztec civilization had already made the transition to large cities of hundreds of thousands, whereas the largest indigenous settlements in the continental US were just a few thousand people. The geography of South America is vastly different, so were the patterns of colonialism and settlement, with far higher rates of intermarriage and takeover of existing feudal instititions.
Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology.
> Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology.
Then why are Hong Kong and Taiwan so successful with free markets?
Anyhow, Spain installed a feudal system in South and Central America, with a focus on looting it and extracting gold and silver. That was certainly not a path to prosperity.
In stark contrast, America was settled with the principle of allowing settlers to own land, and farm it as they saw fit. This created a large and very productive middle class.
It's funny how you keep trying to drag in other examples to support your position. Am I suppose to ignore the history and special great power support for both places in Asia and imagine that their economies just naturally developed that way, ceteris parabus? What a hoot.
You are right about looting resources. But economy is orthogonal to ideology, eg Australia is a property-minded free-trading polity but has a contracting economy as most of its exports are resource-based rather than manufactured goods or services. Nobody is preventing Australians from being a high-tech powerhouse, businesses have just chosen to focus on extractive and agrarian sources of revenue.
>Anyhow, Spain installed a feudal system in South and Central America
Yes, I already mentioned that: 'far higher rates of intermarriage and takeover of existing feudal institutions.' You haven't addressed the geographic, population, or civilizational arguments in any way, so merely repeating your initial assertion isn't very persuasive.
The US arguably would’ve thrived regardless, we had 50% of the world GDP post-WWII. That percentage pie has only declined, as other nations developed. Nations with disparate economic systems, some being top-down centrally controlled communist states. In fact, said states are the only ones who threatened the US economically.
And, the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations. There are plenty of underdeveloped nations that are, effectively, much more libertarian. Because their governments don’t have the capital to enforce much of anything. Those nations are doing quite poorly, hence why they are underdeveloped.
You will notice a pattern in the development of nations: as nations develop, the government has more stake in the macro economics of said nation. Because of course they do: they want the economics to go well, and they have the economics to enforce that, or try to. The US government does not “sit out” when things are going poorly, the opposite is true.
"The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations."
What?? Can you explain this better? The more developed a nation the more centrally controlled it is? The USSR was more developed than the US?
Also, when did any communist state ever threaten the US economically? See other comments about USSR buying wheat from the US. See the 21 million people Stalin had to murder to try and keep the system running. See Venezuela, drowning in the riches of it's oil, having massive inflation and people starving while their overweight leader ate a pile of empanadas on TV in front of them all. None of these arguments people are making about US resources or distance from other countries or whatever else make any sense.
> The more developed a nation the more centrally controlled it is?
Yes, generally, but it's not linear and 1-1. The USSR was not more developed than the US, it doesn't work like that, but the trend is: the more developed a nation is, the more centrally controlled the economy will be. Why? Because as nations develop, the government has BOTH the capital and motivation to more tightly control the economy.
Underdeveloped countries simply don't have the capital to enforce economic planning. They might have laws on the books, but it doesn't matter, they can't enforce them. The US has laws on the books, and the capital to back it up. On a macro level, the US government is very closely monitoring and steering the economy. Of course through control of the currency, the Fed, taxes, regulation, subsidies, tariffs, contracts, and more. Consider what makes up our GDP - healthcare alone is 20% ish. How is that controlled? Through our regulations and structure established and maintained by the US government.
That seems a bit reductive; I don't even know that you're "wrong", but there are a lot of factors that might have led to the United States' success. We have a lot of natural resources and a lot of our land is readily habitable.
Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism.
[1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.
"Prosperous" is a relative term; Russia, even during the USSR days, was still significantly more prosperous than Uganda, for example.
You can say "yes but they weren't as rich as the United States", but if "being as successful as the United States" is your bar then most countries fall short. There are plenty of countries that you would consider economically liberal that aren't as prosperous as the United States.
I'm not going to claim I know "why" some countries do well and some don't, and that's my point. There are oodles of variables that end up being relevant and I think it's intellectually dishonest to pick one and thank/blame it for everything.
The US had to ship wheat to Russia to keep them from starving.
There was a billboard put up in Kansas at the time: "Welcome to the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union".
It would be worth your while to read a history of the USSR.
> pick one
The correlation between prosperity and free markets is a very strong one.
P.S. In WW2, the US supplied all its allies (including the USSR) with massive amounts of food and military aid. And the US fought WW2 in two hemispheres. That's what free markets delivered. The evidence is everywhere you look and is overwhelming.
I didn't claim that the USSR was doing well compared to the US. In fact I said the opposite.
I said that the USSR was economically more prosperous than Uganda, and was not wrong about that. Prosperity is a relative term, and pointing out that the US was/is rich isn't actually demonstrating anything outside of your inability to read.
My point wasn’t Uganda, my point was, and it still is, that “prosperity” is a relative term. I also have no interest in talking about the minutia of Uganda. I was pointing out that the USSR was “rich” by comparison to some other countries.
We're they more prosperous than Uganda? I don't know much about Uganda's history but the 21 million citizens of the USSR that Stalin murdered were as unpropserous as anyone could be. It was an incredibly uneven prosperity if there was any.
I should make it clear that I'm not a supporter of what the USSR was, and I'm not trying to apologize for it. I'm just trying to argue that "prosperity" is a relative term and trying to nail down the "why" of it is more complicated than the libertarian "corporations good government bad" wet dream that WalterBright always spouts.
ETA:
Just to cite my sources, you can look at the GDP per capita of Uganda and Russia in 1985 here [1].
No question, the United State was way wealthier than Russia at around ~$33k, Russia at around ~$12k, and Uganda at around $800.
The USSR was horrible, Stalin was horrible, I wouldn't want to live in the USSR even if it were still around, but my point is that wealth and prosperity are reductive terms, and it's also reductive to look at one factor and say that that's the cause of everything.
Prosperity is so much more than just GDP. But look, this discussion started with someone saying our corrupt government is bad, and then throwway120385 described something horrible and called it libertarian and I just had to correct that label. People then felt the need to jump in with a bunch of mostly orthogonal disparagement of libertarianism which led to all this unproductive arguing. By the way did you see my response to you about the Microsoft monopoly? I couldn't reply because we got too deeply nested so I made it a peer comment. I'm sure it will instantly turn you into a libertarian, lol!
I agree it’s much more than GDP. That’s kind of my entire point! These terms are complicated, and pretending that these things can be explained trivially by “LOL CORPORATIONS GOOD GOVERNMENT BAD AHAHAHAH” is reductive at best.
No libertarian is saying "corporations good!" Oh my gosh, the misunderstanding is huge. Go do some actual research about an idea before blindly arguing against it. Libertarianism is all about individuals and personal property and liberty. Sure people are free to organize into corporations, but libertarianism is not about favoring or giving special advantages or esteem or whatever else you seem to be imagining to corporations. It's about giving power to individuals! The hardest thing about libertarianism is people who are afraid of needing to exercise their own power and judgement. Every other political philosophy wants to make everything Someone Else's Problem. I think libertarianism is scary because it makes you responsible for yourself.
How is putting personal liberty above all else a love of corporations? If a corporation is furthering personal liberty then sure, I'll love them. If they aren't then I won't give them my time/money/attention. Why does everything revolve around corporations for you?
It’s not that “everything revolves around corporations for me”, it’s that every time I have ever criticized a corporation to a self-proclaimed libertarian, it it always deflected and turned into “well actually this is just the governments fault because…”
Walter did this by taking the frankly idiotic position that Standard Oil actually wasn’t a monopoly, and you took the less-idiotic-but-still-bad position that Microsoft’s terrible business was actually just a consequence of government.
I would argue that the 1950's and 1960's, which I've heard called a "golden age," was an age where we kept corporations in their place with a 90% corporate tax rate and we broke any corporation up who had an oversized market share. How is this "close to libertarianism?" If anything that suggests to me that the US was better off when corporations were weak and local, state and the federal government maintained lots of in-house expertise for their functions instead of outsourcing everything to consultants and contractors.
Doubt. Arguably the US thrived because it is too far from Europe for their wars to cause too much devastation. Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip.
After WW2 the US stood alone and enacted a lot of socialist ideas. Then spent a few decades slowly erroding those worker rights and sensible regulations in favor of corporate interests.
> Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip.
Do you think children did not work in colonial America? or Europe? In what contemporary country did children not work? Same for the hours and days of work.
There's a good reason why children have always worked prior to 1900. The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked.
When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
> When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
I'd interrogate the steps that led from rising productivity to both the disappearance of child labor and the disappearance of long hours. The claim that rising productivity alone led to this is perhaps a little hard to defend.
> The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked.
Rising productivity replaces workers all the time, starting with the least productive workers - children. Why is that so hard to believe?
For example, the first steam engine employed a boy to run up and down a ladder turning a valve at each end of the piston stroke. The boy, being lazy, devised a beam that would automatically move the valves, and went to sleep. The steam engine owner saw that, deployed the beam, and fired the boy.
> This shows necessity but not sufficiency.
Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand. This means, as productivity rises, wages increase. As wages increase, workers will realize they no longer have to work 100 hours/week to make a living, and will refuse to work those hours. (You see this in non-union shops all the time.)
I have professional standards to uphold, and this is probably where my actuarial background makes me uncomfortable with the argument as posed. Supply, demand, and marginal productivity are great and useful components of an economic model, but I cannot take their relationships as they appear in a freshman micro/macro sequence to be axiomatic of an empirical system. I cannot infer that the resulting equilibrium must occur in the real world.
In actuarial work, a model's assumptions are not observations. If I posit, what, a hazard function or assumptions about the independence of variables or a particular claim distribution, I can't treat the consequences of those assumptions as empirical facts about the financial portfolio; instead, I have to establish that the model adequately represents (and simplifies) the phenomenon I'm modeling.
> Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand.
I'd apply the same standard here. This is a model specification, not an observed law of nature. We can express labor demand as a relationship to marginal productivity under certain assumptions. Neither of these alone establishes sufficiency for an increase in productivity to result in an increase in workers' wages, let alone that it must result in shorter working hours.
My remark about necessity holds within the proposed mechanism though. If marginal productivity is the mechanism by which wages rise and worked hours fall, increased productivity is necessary before wages can increase and worked hours can decrease.
> (You see this in non-union shops all the time.)
"All the time" is a frequency claim. Where's the data?
> The unions only accomplished what was inevitable.
This is a counterfactual claim. In undertaking economic analysis of such a claim, I must specify the market structure, identify the constraints and frictions, and establish that the model's assumptions are sufficiently good approximations of the historical labor market.
I must also try to estimate the causal effect of unions, which amounts, more or less, to constructing the counterfactual labor market in which they did not exist.
No it didn't. People went on strike and middle class people fought for those things. Eliminating child labor was a major feather in the Progressive movement's cap. Don't pretend like any of that was spontaneous.
Note that the article only measures violations of child labor laws, i.e. there are (presumably many times more) children working without violating the laws. Why are people deliberately employing lousy workers? Why are business owners lobbying to allow these lousy workers to work more hours?
Have a look at what children were doing at work, and then come back.
In once case I know of, the children in a textile factory worked all day at replacing spent spools of thread on the weaving machines. They were replaced by a machine that did the same thing, at much lower cost.
Are there any jobs at your work place that would be productively performed by children? Have you ever gotten your kids to clean their rooms or do their homework?
The US stood alone and enacted socialist ideas? You have heard of the USSR, haven't you? If the US was enacting socialist ideas it definitely wasn't alone in doing so.
Next I wonder what "a lot of socialist ideas" were. The New Deal during the Great depression was fairly socialist with the government making up work it could pay people to do and such, but I'm pretty sure after WWII is when anti-socialist (anti-Soviet) sentiment peaked in the US
Is this true? I ask because the metric for determining the distance from the US's construction at any point in time to the libertarian ideal is unclear. Like, given an assertion of closest, it should be quantifiable[0].
It should also be falsifiable and admit a counterfactual.
1. The US was within some epsilon of being libertarian;
2. The US became rich;
3. Therefore, the prosperity of the US was a direct consequence of libertarianism.
It's 2. here that I scratch my head at because, uh, the US has through its entire history, even pre-1776, been rich. It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration.
In fact, going back to 1., if we consider the laissez-faire dimension alone and compare it against the rate of wealth growth the US has sustained at least over my lifetime, the relationship is inverted[2]: we've somehow managed to accumulate more wealth as we've become less laissez-faire. This is a confounding variable that needs to be controlled for before we can draw a causal inference either way.
I'd also argue that broader land policy, education, formal banking institutions, infrastructure, immigration policy, patents and other forms of economic protectionism, and research and development all belong in that causal model since they also tend to be things I look at when analyzing risk and uncertainty.
--
0: I'm still unsure if this quantification is even appropriate. Libertarian-ness admits a whole-ass vector space of institutional characteristics, and it isn't obvious to me how the norm would fall down to aggregate all of them as a single scalar for the purposes of making this argument.
1: The fact that pre-Columbian civilizations didn't have the wheel was often a justification for how backwards they were. As it turns out, when you have as many rivers as North America has, getting around without the wheel is no big deal. It's just pre-Columbian YAGNI.
2: Well, kinda. Both "wealth" and "laissez-faire-ness" minimally need operational definitions and some kind of partial order to be comparable like this.
> It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration.
So has Russia, South America, Africa, Asia, etc. The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries.
And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc. Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
> The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries.
I accept that free markets is only one possible answer here. A lot of folks moved here because the US had all of that land that I'd mentioned. There were also some unusually high wages here compared to most of Europe in the 1700's[0, 1]. The political institutions here also allowed certain freedoms that weren't available in Europe (of particular note for me personally is the Münster rebellion), and by the time the earliest members of my family moved here in the 1860's, there were already immigrant communities to lean on.
This goes notwithstanding that the US had developed a bonkers huge continental economy with relatively abundant capital.
My argument isn't that markets didn't make this possible. My argument is that drawing a causal inference based on markets alone is intellectually dishonest.
> And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc.
Can we identify the countries that "tried" a free market approach? Can we identify which of those subsequently prospered? Is the relationship between those two things consistent enough to support the consequent of prospering accordingly?
I think the first is perhaps most obvious, but I'm at a loss for how to answer the latter two.
> Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
I'm honestly left scratching my head a little at what about Taiwan meets the bar for being a free market or where the comparison is here.
Taiwan has historically had heavy-handed state-directed industrial domestic policy. Like, the favoring of semiconductors wasn't an accident of the market figuring out what to do there. The domestic capital markets at the time of TSMC's founding were too small to finance the construction of a fabrication plant, so the government stepped in to assume the risk[2].
From a risk management perspective, though, Taiwan does tend to eschew a lot of the economic protectionism that we see elsewhere. Tariffs are less of a problem there, and the state will tend to sell its interests in businesses that don't do well abroad, so there isn't a sort of pathological "Weekend at Bernie's" or "too big to fail" kind of situation.
Taiwan's government also tends to fund research and development much more heavily.
--
0: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Colonial Incomes 1650-1774." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 19861. January 2014.
1: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Incomes 1774-1860." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 18396. September 2012.
2: This condenses a lot of the history of TSMC. It actually starts with ITRI in 1973 and the edict from above that research should focus on semiconductor development. Morris Chang then built on a lot of expertise developed via RCA and devised the foundry model, which then led to TSMC's founding. In some sense, it could be argued that the state deliberately constructed the market surrounding the semiconductor manufacturing industry.
I'm unsure that I'd draw that conclusion. Why else would the Crown want to tax the colonials so heavily?
> "Taiwan has a highly developed free-market economy where prices are set by supply and demand with little government control."
Forgive me. Was this in dispute? I was asking what causal work the label "free market" was doing with respect to Taiwan and how the country's economic development was adequately explained by laissez-faire economics.
The patient is healthy now, so the treatment that produced the health must have been "being healthy."
Huh, did they not? After the Seven Years' War, the Currency Act of 1764 received assent, and it functionally required that public debts be paid in hard money. Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, this was a little hard to come by in the colonies.
> Bone evidence showed that the colonials worked like dogs and died young.
I'd be interested to see the anthropological chain of inference for this.
I've read many accounts of the Revolutionary War, and the colonials were mostly offended by sending their money to England. Any tax seems heavy if the proceeds do not benefit the taxpayer.
> I'd be interested to see the anthropological chain of inference for this.
I read it many years ago. Sorry, I don't have a reference. I regret not having a photographic memory.
You said, essentially, "sure the US had freedom, but maybe the amount of land and resources it had is the real reason it has done so well."
Walter countered with, "Taiwan is a tiny island with very little resources, but it is economically prosperous, so maybe land and resources aren't a big factor. It also happens to have a free market economy."
You replied with what sounded like an attempt at saying that Taiwan wasn't actually a free market.
Walter said, "I don't know man, I just did a quick search to make sure Taiwan wasn't communist or anything before adding it as some data to your analysis."
Does that clear things up? We're just trying to help you out here. We've already made up our minds but it sounds like you're still wondering so maybe we can help?
I'm mostly trying to pick apart the epistemology of thinking about economic systems this way because, hey, maybe there's something that my professional background in the subject is blind to.
It isn't especially interesting to me to try devise frameworks for coercing Caesar to do one thing over another; Caesar's just going to do what Caesar's going to do. The most that I can do is hedge against needing to migrate again because this Caesar has decided, e.g., that staunch pacifism is treasonous.
Libertarianism is far more than just an economic system and it's too bad it went down that narrow piece of it.
I don't understand your reference about coercing Ceasar but a major tenent of Libertarianism is not coercering anyone to do anything. Individual liberty and personal property are the dogmas. If you have a problem with someone, talk to them about it, or ignore them. Give them your time/attention/money or don't. If you want others to help you with these problems you have to gently persuade them, not give up all our liberties so men with guns can force people to do one thing or another.
> Libertarianism is far more than just an economic system
Acknowledged. That nevertheless tends to be where my interest in it lies. Near as I can tell, I don't actually have much of an ideology; I wasn't raised to be political in the typical Anglo-American sense.
> I don't understand your reference about coercing Ceasar
This gets a little in the weeds about my conceptualization of the state, but here's the view from 10km high:
Caesar is a model of an institution that arises when coordination problems exceed the capacity of voluntary associations. He's an emergent response to complexity, and I tend to ask questions of him that are flavored more like, "What coordination problem requires coercion, if any, and how much coercion is actually necessary?"
(As it turns out, the answer looks something like "enough to prevent folks from killing each other." My Mennonite upbringing makes me inclined to add in "and perhaps enough to keep the trust of the congregation," but I'll admit that's probably less relevant for secular folks.)
> but a major tenent of Libertarianism is not coercering anyone to do anything. Individual liberty and personal property are the dogmas.
Why is property yours in the first place? Property is a socially enforced exclusion, and a construction of a society out of that major tenet of noncoercion and enforcement of property rights is by some measure impossible.
> If you have a problem with someone, talk to them about it, or ignore them. Give them your time/attention/money or don't.
This is definitionally impossible with Caesar.
> If you want others to help you with these problems you have to gently persuade them
I feel like this ignores collective action. Persuading enough individuals to contribute voluntarily is itself a coordination mechanism, and it isn't obvious to me how it could produce the same equilibrium as collective provision.
If the benefit is broadly non-excludable, there's a familiar free rider problem, and at some point, "please persuade everyone gently and individually" isn't really a solution to the coordination problem. It instead kinda handwaves it away.
> not give up all our liberties so men with guns can force people to do one thing or another.
Caesar isn't necessarily someone who happens to have more guns (though, typically, he tends to be). It's more important to consider that he's the head of an institution that is embedded in laws, norms, mores, folkways, consensus, trial of facts, bureaucracies, and behavioral expectations of individuals.
Moreover, coercion isn't even the defining feature of Caesar. It's just the backstop in his toolbox for solving coordination problems.
How is that not No True Scotsman? You disagree with the outcome of the described libertarian structures so it can't be actual libertarianism?
The government is inevitably going to do business with the market. Where do you draw the line between a government contract and favors to big business?
What is libertarianism's answer when there are 6 people that own everything, or more realistically, how the richest people in the world, already deeply entrenched and leading their respective industries from continuing to accrue resources until everything is owned by a small group of people and/or taking advantage of their market advantages to shut out any competition.
It is troublesome that libertarianism isn't super well defined, but no version of libertarianism has the government "doing business" with anyone. It only enforces laws, it doesn't buy and sell anything, and it certainly doesn't do anything to insulate anyone from market forces (like governments do now with regulations, subsidies, tax breaks, etc.).
So then what will the government due about supplying their military, offices, supplying technology, constructing the buildings that they work out of, purchasing or renting the land those buildings are on, or any other of the material goods that it needs to do the bare minimum of enforcing laws.
I don't see how libertarian can ever be well defined when it seemingly is always based in ideology and the arguments supporting it always seem to be fallacious.
Ok, maybe I went too far. There are the total anarchist libertarians that don't want any form of government. Personally I'm not sure I want to go that route. So my libertarian government will need a police force of some sort. That could be a collection of small local private businesses that small local governments do business with, giving them jurisdiction over the small local area. And there could be some hierarchy so that eventually they all are accountable to the central government. Like, city police contractors report to a state contractor, and the state contractors report to the federal contractor.
I totally just made that up, so I'm sure we could work out details and make it better, but the overall point of minimizing government power and distributing it could be preserved as much as possible.
No system is going to be perfect, but there is so much more we could do to take power, and therefore the temptation of corruption, away from the people we allow to rule over us. Giving fallible human individuals more power is never the right solution.
Giving private businesses the monopoly on violence seems like a great idea ;p
What happens to the business when it isn't small anymore? What does that accountability even look like? Paperwork isn't accountability.
I agree that details can be worked out and systems can be made better, and the government is corrupt (especially now, but also the past two decades I've been old enough to be politically conscious), but I don't think ideological free market libertarianism is the right path to get there. I think there is a lot of merit to a free market and I agree people deserve their own autonomy to not be ruled over, but right now corporations hold way too much power and wealth inequality is too large and only accelerating for me to accept libertarianism as a solution to modern society.
I think another issue is the word libertarianism can easily mean so many different things. There are anarchist libertarians on the left and right, with social libertarians and market libertarians taking up the space between anarchists, and between the four of them there is no solidarity because they all want different things regarding the structure of society.
Hey, I was working hard to not make it a monopoly! Lol! All those different local police forces and each level of the hierarchy are different corporations. But seriously, if we could achieve a peaceful society without giving anyone permission to do violence it would be amazing!
Sure, there are different ideas about how to implement libertarianism but the general idea is singular: Maximize individual liberty and private property rights.
Accountability always comes down to individual liberty. The question isn't, "is the corporation too big?" The question is, "is it taking away personal property or individual liberty?"
The absolute hardest part of libertarianism that all of you opponents miss is that it requires people to always be evaluating that in their choices. It requires people to avoid making everything Someone Else's Problem and wishing for Government to Just Take Care of It. People complain that corporations are too big or people are starving or I don't like what my neighbor is doing with their yard and libertarians answer with, "well, you're going to have to do something about that yourself instead of giving up rights and liberty so that someone else can try and force a fix down all our throats." It just blows people's minds! You mean I have give to the poor myself of my own free will? I have to talk to my neighbor about this myself? I need to stop giving that big evil corporation my money of my own accord? If I want more people to do these same things I have to gently persuade them instead of asking the police to just shoot them if they don't comply? The horrors!!
In order to make competition flourish, you require a strong government which squishes anti-competitive behavior.
Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”.
Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly.
I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Look at any domain in the US - they’re all like this. The only exceptions are new domains, like AI. That will change, too, we’ve seen this pattern thousands of times.
There’s two moats here: regulation, and capital. You can eliminate the regulation moat with libertarianism, sure, but not the capital moat. And, you strengthen the capital moat when you remove the regulation. So nothing changes. Best case scenario, the situation is the same. Worst case, it’s accelerated.
> Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation
No, they don't. To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition.
The poster boy of monopolies, Standard Oil, never had a monopoly. During its rise, it dropped the consumer price of kerosene 70%. Its market share dropped steadily during the years of the anti-trust trial.
> It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Hmm. Why should the word monopoly only refer to the legal mechanism by which market exclusivity is enforced rather than referring to the resulting market structure or market power?
If I'm not legally prohibited from competing with a firm, but that firm's position nonetheless also makes it unprofitable for me to enter or compete, what is that market structure called?
Nothing is impossible, but it's really difficult. If some greedy entrepreneur is raking in the cash with some product or service then of course another greedy entrepreneur will see that and start competing with the first guy. The evil corporations you are worried about are not going to cooperate with another corporation. They're evil! At best they'll fake it for a while and then backstab each other.
And if they aren't evil backstabbers and they are actually friendly and good at cooperating then it's a win for all of us!
You really need to answer questions directly as asked, and not whatever question it is you think the other person is asking. Doing this only creates confusion. There are many occasions where I see this kind of miscommunication happening between users on this site without either person realizing it.
In this case I asked a yes or no question because I simply wanted to clarify and understand the nuance of your position. You shouldn't always assume that every person responding to your comments is immediately trying to argue against you (although I'll admit this a fairly accurate heuristic for internet discussions in general).
Instead of answering with "Yes, (I believe) it is impossible" or "No, it is possible", you answered with the following:
"You can always present a case history of one".
Because I asked you a yes/no question, I am going to interpret your response as a framing of a yes/no answer. I interpreted your comment as: "(No), you (one) can always present a case history of one".
Hence my confusion: it sounded like you were holding both beliefs simultaneously: "Yes, natural monopolies are impossible, but there are counterexamples".
In the future please just answer the questions as they are asked.
If some believes free market monopolies exist, they ought to know of some examples. Hence why I ask for a case, it's the easiest way to point out that they don't exist.
All you did was say that Standard Oil doesn't count as a monopoly because you claim that you need a government intervention to be a monopoly, which is not a definition I have heard and certainly does not fall under colloquial definitions. Your big rebuttle to it, as far as I can tell, appears to be "Nuh uh, now prove me wrong!!!".
There are plenty of companies that have gotten to monopolistic or near-monopolistic categories without a government declaring it; Microsoft in the 90's, for example, was famously anti-competitive and actually was briefly declared a monopoly (though that was overturned in higher courts). As far as I'm aware, it wasn't the US government that artificially made Microsoft anticompetitive.
Can't reply to tombert, we're too deeply nested for hacker news, but the Microsoft example is great. The government didn't have anything to do with them being a monopoly? Have you heard of copyright laws? Did you know that Microsoft's whole business depends on the application of copyright laws to software? Did you know copyright protection used to only last for a few years? And then copyright holders lobbied government for longer and longer copyright protection?
Over time, I've come to conclude that copyright should not be a monopoly, or at least the copyright protection shouldn't last more than a handful of years.
Even if I concede all of this, and I really don’t, that doesn’t imply that it was a concerted effort to make Microsoft in particular a monopoly, at least not in the same way that they, for example, made AT&T a monopoly.
Are you suggesting that the existence of laws means that monopolies are inherently government ordained? Great, then that means that the standard oil example still holds.
P.S. you can actually keep replying, there’s just an artificial timer as they get nested. You can actually get around that if you click on the date/time (e.g. “2 hours ago”) and reply directly.
Aha! Neat trick to defeat hacker news's attempt to keep us from having long unproductive conversations. Let's keep it going.
Does it matter if the government purposely ordained the monopoly or stupidly made it possible by extending copyright protections indefinitely? The government is the problem either way and they shouldn't have that much power!
Does it though? We've been living through that experiment with elimination of anti-trust and with other libertarian goals being met -- reduction of taxes, introduction of private industry into the public sphere, collection of tolls from public infrastructure, austerity, and general reduction of the size of government. All we've gotten is a replacement of the government with private enterprise. IOW there are a lot of companies out there that provide "public goods" for profit that are some combination of more expensive or lower-quality than the equivalent public services were in the heyday of the US. I think you should agree that without any kind of regulation at all companies are merging into uncontrollable behemoths, and without the ability to meaningfully "vote with our wallets" one of the central tenets of libertarian capitalism is pretty broken. I disagree that the US federal government is responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, the US federal government is taking a pretty strong stance of irresponsibility for this.
We in the US are so very far still from meeting the goals of libertarianism. Even farther than before with our current administration!
The current US government helps big business through a combination of tax breaks, burdensome regulations that small companies can't cope with, buying services (see: SpaceX, Boeing, Palantir, etc.), direct subsidies, tariffs, etc., etc.
With a libertarian government all of that goes away.
To expand, I believe the idea here is that what libertarianism is in principal matters less than what it collapses to in practice, similar to the difference in communism.
And there's a central tension that libertarianism, as far as I'm aware of, doesn't resolve in how to promote individual freedom across a highly economically unequal society.
Trusting those with all the capital to act in anything other than their own best interest doesn't seem a solid foundation.
In a true libertarian society, since it's small government, the government wouldn't help rich people stay rich. You could just declare yourself owner of Tesla, and nobody would stop you except the former owner of Tesla, if he can afford to stop you. Nobody believes in true libertarianism.
If communism is whatever the USSR did, and feudalism is whatever medieval England did, I see no problem asserting that libertarianism is whatever the USA does.
I don't think it's unrealistic for state or another party to be taking the decades of data on individuals they have and feeding it into their large hyperscale data centers and using the platforms they own to predict our actions and propagandize us.
Unfortunately, I don't think most people understand it's about mass surveillance yet, but about the misappropriation of resources in lower income communities to power LLMs and/or the intellectual theft and profits off the data used to train LLMs.
Government? As others have said, government may well contract it out to private companies. But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better.
People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
> But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear
It's the opposite that is true. Governments can selectively enforce laws against companies based on whether they comply or not, and pay them for whatever they want them to do.
The wealthy and their companies own Congress and the Executive because those positions rely on publicity to be elected, and they own the judiciary because the judges are both aligned with political parties and completely bribeable. They do not, however, exactly own the secret police funded by secret budgets - that's where the real executive lies, and that's where efforts are coordinated and conflicts between powerful blocs are adjudicated.
The performance we get is meaningless. The only important parts of the show we get to watch are following where the money is going and watching who state power is currently killing.
> People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
People certainly do understand. The media and the upper-middle class have made it almost a religion to spend their entire political life calling those people crazy. Why have upper-middle class people chosen such a stupid religion? Because a lot of money has been dumped into their stock portfolios.
> But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better
No its much worse. At least democratic governments have some semblance of democratic accountability and of course some inability to work at scale. At worse they can just pay the private company, they generally will have lower capabilities unless they can hit an infinite money glitch (in which case they can use that to pay private companies)
Dude, they're literally watching Flock Cameras go up in their neighborhood, being told they use AI, and anyone with a brain who can add 2+2 (or read Larry Ellison on "best behavior") concludes these data centers are not merely for ChatGPT.
In which case, they see noise pollution, water pollution, construction pollution, property value damage, utility bill cost explosions; and what's the reward? Surveillance and white-collar job loss, possibly culminating in home loss. With the added irony of corporations saying data centers will create jobs, simultaneously as they run record-breaking layoffs and increase outsourcing. "Misguided."
Maybe consider my conciliatory rhetoric ("folks here think") in the original post as statement about what I think the vicious and hyper-authoritarian tech bros here believe, namely everything from obviously dumb crap ranging from
- "it's ccp propaganda"
- or "you don't have a right to provacy in public"
- or "the environmental concerns are overblown"
- or "you already have a cellphone so why you bitchin"
- or "it's a private company so you don't have to worry about the gov"
to less arguable but widely held neoliberal premises like "the state has a perogative to do what it wants so if you're not able to participate in the [typically closed] {city council|senate|NSA} decisions that lead here then you have no right to take direct action".
Thus you might understand what I am writing here is an attempt to not trigger the VC bros and to get them to consider that all us unwashed masses might have some kind of point?
I am often not the clearest writer, but the first sentence literally is about what I understand a lot of people on the site to believe, not a statement about what I belive.
People on this site have a highly propagandized view of what (they think of as) the proles think, and I'd like the folks of the site to consider that people really do understand the vicious ends to which these technologies are put, hence the rhetoric.
To be clear, on some level, I think my average no-kings/Tucker-Carson-stan-ing friends can accept the argument that cops will use this tech to give worms to ex-girlfriends. While that should be enough of a reason to reject the tech it really doesn't go far enough into why that tech is objectionable: forcing warrants for the mass-survellience network aren'r really sufficient to remedy my own worries.
From my position, that idea of tech/policy-as-solution is indeed misguided because my deeper worry is that the state will use it for "counter-insurgency". Considering oneself a potential insurgent is foreign to about anyone in US mainline politics. It is, however, what I feel deeply when think about how folks might indeed be "misguided", and I am not sure if you'd agree with that or not. I can read that into a lot of the posts responding above. But that more radical concern not what I wrote about when I wrote that post.
So sure, you're 100% correct and I agree with your point.
I do not think the idea that "folks undrstand the survellience aspect of all this tech" is generally legible to the fascists and other anti-leftist US "centrists" who populate this specific message board- I think the conversation in this thread supports that view.
It's hard to make that point into something they are able to read. I'd still like them to consider it.
Be careful with the shallow dismissals. There's often truth in the isolated statement while it misses the mark in context. Thus dismissing it directly will easily make you look like you don't know what you're talking about.
For example:
> you don't have a right to provacy in public
You don't. That much is simple enough to work out given various highly entrenched cultural and legal values that have stood the test of time. The problem is that a network of surveillance cameras isn't remotely the same thing as an unrelated individual snapping a wide angle photograph of a street that you just so happen to be walking down.
So it's more like we need (but currently don't have) a legally recognized right not to be systematically surveilled in public spaces. Or better yet to make blanket surveillance outright illegal (which would also resolve many of the issues surrounding adtech).
> the environmental concerns are overblown
In many cases they are. In a few they aren't. As usual some businesses in some cases are exploiting holes in the regulations.
I think public sentiment about surveillance is complicated.
People have a lot of fears about being done injury by rogue antisocial actors. Ranging from nuisances like dog shit everywhere, stolen Amazon packages and car break-ins to life-defining traumas like sexual assault. Broader surveillance, in some form, is the first step towards getting traction on these kinds of problems. Leftist commentators prefer the more "grass-roots" varieties like cell phone videos and word-of-mouth name-and-shame campaigns, but, in general, disseminating awareness of antisocial behavior and coordinating a punitive response of some kind is the goal.
I think this internal tension in public opinion pre-dates LLMs, and my personal opinion is that the surveillance applications of AI are secondary drivers of the bipartisan anti-AI sentiment, which is more about revulsion at the possibility of a future where not only "artist" but "mathematician" may be lost as vocations.
The problem is, people who are the most spoken about personal freedom are the ones also voting conservative all the time. The libertarian square is still on the right.
By the time the government overreach starts being used on them, its gonna be too late.
Interstate transportation of marijuana is illegal in the US.[1]
But why is DHS doing this? Stopping interstate drug trafficking is DEA's job, and DEA is in the Justice Department, not Homeland Security. Homeland Security should be looking for illegal aliens and labor contractors who move them.
Because they want the money. The reason drug crimes are so heavily enforced is because they come with large fines and fees and monetary rewards for the department that arrests them and the courts that prosecute them. They use it as a funding source.
Look at what fines and fees a court gets when they successfully prosecute a murder versus a drug crime. Look at the grants the feds give towards police drug enforcement departments.
They already have a multi 100 billion dollar slush fund from Congress. If they’re doing it for the money then things have really gotten out of hand with internal DHS budgets.
The point is to get workers for low costs, the purpose of the system is what it does. They need the workers, and they need the workers to be scared. If they had no workers they'd have no workers, and if the workers weren't scared they'd have to pay proper wages.
"Homeland Security" isn't about homeland security, that's a meaningless propaganda name. It's the result of an evil initiative to coordinate all of America's Federal police and secret police agencies that was created after 9/11. It's not CBP/ICE, it sits above them (and everything else.)
It was something that had been warned against by everyone from the beginning of the US having secret police forces, and 9/11 was the excuse to do it. Before DHS, the FBI and the CIA (for example) had to go through protocols to share information with each other. This was good because the CIA aren't allowed to do some things that the FBI is allowed to do, and vice versa. Now they're really all one organization, although they have internal turf battles caused by power struggles between ambitious individuals.
> Putting one of those participant’s phone numbers into WhatsApp reveals a profile picture of a law enforcement patch. A pawn with wings sits in the center, surrounded by lightning bolts. The patch reads, “Laredo Sector Tech Ops PITT,” indicating there is also a Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team in the Laredo Sector.
I get the vibe they're using ALPRs to identify drivers, and then going from there to find crime? Seems like criminal investigations should start with an actual crime. At the minimum, I would think that there would need to be some suspicion of criminal involvement to obtain a warrant to get financial records. Apparently this administration considers driving down the interstate suspicious enough to toss the constitution out the window.
We've long since transitioned away from "identify the crime and find the person" Law Enforcement to "target the person and find a crime" Law Enforcement.
The article doesn't seem to explain why the BP targeted these folks and not other license plates gathered by the reader. Presumably there's some pattern, right?
You mean the government that has been kidnapping the neighbors with whom I do have a real "social contract"?
I mean, I don't generally think that it's a very useful contact, but of all the things I've studied in my life, taking a long, hard look at the material history of the US government has done teh most to make me think that social relations and responsibilities have nothing do with formal governance.
Shutting down the isp doesnt let them read what you've sent. There wouldn't be intensive government efforts to eliminate private encryption if it wasn't effective.
Did you know they can just beat you with a wrench anyways?
The "maybe if we do what they say and don't make a fuss they'll be appeased and stop" strategy fails when matched up against those who will never be appeased and stop.
> maybe if we do what they say and don't make a fuss
I never suggested that. Encryption is necessary but not sufficient.
Encrypt your shit. But above all vote, be engaged, and defend your rights like hell. If you're relying on encryption alone to protect you, it's already too late.
> In what universe does using encryption to evade the government function as a survival strategy?
Could be read as either
- It functions as a full and complete survival strategy
or
- One of it's functions is as a survival strategy
The former is saying it's all that is needed, the later is saying it's something that can be used in that way (but not saying it's enough). Kind of like saying that food is a human necessity vs saying it is _the_ human necessity.
State law in Tennessee requires all alcohol transactors to be ID'd; many retail stores have begun "scanning" the 2D barcode on the state ID's reverse (also for lighters, cough syrup, &c).
If you have a US Passport Card, there is no 2D barcode and your address isn't visible – yet it is still valid ID. I have also had success with placing an "I VOTED" sticker over TN_ID's 2D barcode; if the cashier looks puzzled I'll usually just say "I don't want my ID scanned so I'll just go put this back" – and then I can usually purchase alcohol (without scanless passport).
I always use cash for reasons, even if that is only to not become thousands-more datapoints for some soulless corporate bureucrats' annual dividends.
I pay with cash for pretty much all in-person transactions. It's great! Minimal friction, very little tracking risk, works even when the ISP connection or the merchant network is down. You can even use it to pay people who don't use the same apps you do.
I even get discounts for it most places. Highly recommended.
KYC stands for Know Your Customer, the regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties.
I think the intellectual position "it should be illegal for institutions transmitting money between two parties to identify either of those parties" might require some kind of logical argument behind it. Are you saying all financial transactions should be anonmyous by law? How would banks function if they were required to be blind to their customers? How would the government prosecute money laundering if all cash-trails went cold after the first time they passed a bank?
I understand people often like to express extreme positions on the Internet, but I think it's pretty easy to see an ideal society has rules somewhere in between "you're not allowed to know your customers" and "you can't accept a penny unless the giver does a blood draw in front of you and is confirmed to be in a central register of DNA".
Explaining the intellectual position without saying that I accept it (my actual views on this are "it's complicated"):
Arguments against KYC usually go hand-in-hand with the belief that AML statutes are a constitutional overreach and grant the federal government powers that they should not have. The logic is that the government's only role is to provide a stable currency and enforce contracts, and that anything else is involving the government in business that it has no business being in. What's done between two consenting parties should remain between two consenting parties.
Note that such a position usually doesn't have a problem with banks having information on their customers, for the purpose of judging credit risks. But it holds that such information should only be used for judging credit risks, ie if you are just depositing and withdrawing money that has already been earned, the bank should be agnostic to this. And they also object to this information being shared with a central clearinghouse where it can be used to cut off all access to the banking system rather than just one specific bank who objects to the source of funds.
> I understand people often like to express extreme positions on the Internet, but I think it's pretty easy to see an ideal society has rules somewhere in between "you're not allowed to know your customers" and "you can't accept a penny unless the giver does a blood draw in front of you and is confirmed to be in a central register of DNA".
Yeah. This often results in ludicrous positions.
On the other hand, EFT flattens scale. Physical cash gets harder to handle in large quantities. Electronic money does not. It's equally easy to transfer a billion as a cent. So it's hard to get situations where small amounts have privacy and large amounts have scrutiny.
> I think the intellectual position "it should be illegal for institutions transmitting money between two parties to identify either of those parties" might require some kind of logical argument behind it.
This is both a straw man position and begs the question. KYC laws aren't the option to identify either party, it's the requirement to identify both. The default throughout pretty much the whole of human history across cultures has been not having KYC laws. A logical and compelling argument must be made for implementing and unholding such laws.
> Are you saying all financial transactions should be anonmyous by law?
The anti-KYC position is that it should be possible for some financial transactions to be anonymous by law.
> How would banks function if they were required to be blind to their customers?
While they would not be required to be blind, most have been and by default would like to be. Maintaining identity records reliably tying people to transactions is a significant burden for banks for exactly the same reason it would be an incredible burden on you to keep track of which atm/cashier/couch cushion every dollar in your wallet came from.
Some banks may nevertheless consider the option a net positive, and require their customers to provide identification. People would be able to choose if they want to use those banks or not. If the benefits get passed along to the consumer, many likely would choose to.
> How would the government prosecute money laundering if all cash-trails went cold after the first time they passed a bank?
Presumably by going after the criminal infrastructure handling the money before it passed a bank. Giving up privacy rights tends to make law enforcement easier, but it is a common and reasonable opinion that we should not be trying to maximize the ease of law enforcement at the expense of privacy.
> the regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties.
There is much more to it than that. If that were all KYC was, it wouldn't need regulations, because banks would need to do it anyway.
I've had banks straight out ask me, on the phone, what a wire transfer that I executed via their online system was for. And unlike, say, a traffic stop where when the cop starts fishing for things unrelated to the stop, you can exercise your right to remain silent, in the banking scenario the consequences for that can be losing access to your account, losing funds, and everything that follows from that.
Some of the info required by KYC:
* Why the customer wants an account
* Expected types of transactions
* Expected source and approximate volume of funds
* For businesses, the nature of the business and expected banking activity
* Source of funds
This can all translate into very invasive questions, especially when you do something that a computer system or middle manager thinks is suspicious, like sending money to your mother in another country.
> I've had banks straight out ask me, on the phone, what a wire transfer that I executed via their online system was for
Wire transfers are also a common source of fraud; it's common for banks to ask about them so their customers don't unwittingly send their money into a black hole
That might make sense if the bank wasn't also acting as an agent for the government, with potentially severe, life-changing consequences if they hear something they don't like.
If the question was purely for my protection, then I could simply answer "I don't wish to share that information."
But I can't actually answer like that, because it's too risky.
There's also no option to opt out of such investigations. I didn't request the bank to protect me from my own actions. When there's a credit card transaction that they suspect is fraudulent, they ask "did you authorize that transaction?" That's fine, and that's all they need to know. Asking me who I'm paying and why, with implied duress, is a completely unwarranted violation of my privacy.
There's also a serious issue with an assumption of guilt in these cases. Look at the case of Donald Trump right now, suing Capital One because they closed over 300 Trump business accounts due to suspected money laundering. In Trump's case, I can well believe that there was some kind of corruption, money laundering, or other criminal activity going on. The man is a documented criminal. But the bank is making a decision to penalize someone, potentially severely, without any meaningful due process. Guilty until proven innocent. For someone without the resources Trump has to challenge something like that, what chance do they have of getting a fair outcome?
This is all completely unacceptable in a supposedly civilized society, and you should not be defending it.
> If the question was purely for my protection, then I could simply answer "I don't wish to share that information."
Fraudsters would tell you to answer the question by saying "I don't wish to share that information." but the bank would still be on the hook for paying you back from the fraudster.
In a sane society, though, you could say "I'm buying wholesale drugs to distribute on the street" and then bank wouldn't care.
I suspect the argument is more the particular KYC required by American law, eg, as long as your bank can identify you as a particular customer, they shouldn’t be required to collect certain information by law.
Though if I were going to rant, it would be about how constructive surveillance, such as requiring banks keep certain records and then claiming those records aren’t protected from search because they’re third party business records and not those of a private citizen, would be a much higher priority to fix.
1. "The business-model of being an anonymous fence of stolen goods is prohibited."
2. "You have to give us access to all your records at any time on the flimsiest of pretexts, and we'll charge you with a crime if you don't keep it ultra-secret that we even approached you."
"regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties"
Any such kind of regulation is not compatible with financial privacy. Maybe you could argue corporations don't deserve financial privacy, but an individual should have the right to send money to someone without being spied on the same way they should have the right to send a private communication to someone without being spied on.
I agree. If I gave my mother $1000 cash nobody is expecting receipts and records. But if I send it through a bank or payment processor? Now all of a sudden im under suspicion of some bs terrorist or drug law violation.
The criminal money and money laundering has been researched since 19th century. It has stayed at constant 2-5% of world GDP. However the cost of compliance has gone up exponentially.
Today banks use $250B/year on KYC checks. You could fix the world hunger and still have $50B leftover money with this amount.
The board of directors recognizes the cost savings and immediately start solving world hunger. Meanwhile a gangster in Moldova intrinsically knows that world money laundering has hit 5% GDP and decides not to.
It's not a fair comparison. Money laundering controls likely have also been implemented since the 19th century in some way shape or form. Therefore, that 2-5% figure also includes the effect of those controls. This might just the natural equilibrium below which the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.
Access to information and interconnectedness have also increased exponentially so it might make sense that the costs have increased proportionately.
Finally 200B/year would not solve world hunger if nefarious actors grift away most of that money (especially because you wouldn't be able to track them with out some form of KYC)
You also have to ask if money laundering is bad enough of a crime to warrant all of the overkill responses to it. At some point the medicine becomes worse than the disease. Lawmakers tend to get into these inescapable loops:
Crime X exists -> Try solution Y -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y0 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y1 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y2...
I think the problem here might be that while Crime by its definition might be the same, the way that it is executed changes drastically so Solution Y/Y0/Y1/Y2 are not required to exist in terms of severity (very likely solution Y was severe enough if you were tried and convicted of the crime) but they are needed because the way Crime X is executed changes (especially this Crime X)
Hard disagree, low level crimes should not be so heavily enforced. A bit of blackmarket activity is not only beneficial but neccessary for any stable economy. It can't be allowed at mass scale, but you can't effectively micromanage every transaction and account for every situation for every single good or dollar.
It's rich coming from a person affected by ukrainian propaganda that is one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. Maybe you should back your opinion with facts. Citation is desperately needed.
Who decides who we're sanctioning and who is a "terrorist"? Not me, that's for sure! My money is my business and I don't need the state nanny watching who I send it to.
> Government should require regular, mandatory reporting by technology service providers to document abuse of their systems including financial support of violence, harassment, and terrorism.This includes implementation of mandatory financial abuse reporting requirements for internet services operating in the United States, including social media services, infrastructure providers, banking institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, crowdfunding sites, video streaming platforms, and the like.
> [These companies] should be required to investigate and report the details of harms and abuse of their service. There should be … penalties applied to services that refuse these tracking and reporting responsibilities.
I just tried to pay my elderly neighbors cell phone bill here in California. I will spare you the details. Is all of this really required?
It reminds me of a time when credit and credit cards were flying fast. Large losses started appearing on consumer credit accounts by the tens of thousands. A casual look into it indicated that it was the employees and leaders of the sector, who read and understood the credit agreement that put liability ultimately on the company. The actual credit card employees, adjacent accountants, quick witted cons, all siphoning money from credit cards in very large numbers. Why say this? Actual customers with increasing security requirements were largely not at all involved with the growing fraud. It was the participants in the credit industry seizing the opportunity to steal, with relative impunity. Things have changed and changed again since then with scale, local rules, fraud detection systems etc.
The point of the rant is that ordinary people's rights are squeezed, privacy vanishes, routine humiliating document production and security, required because the people in the industry that created those is cheating.
Yes of course there is cheating on taxes over tip money, or no-show jobs for relatives.. but what kind of society is being built with constant oversight into ordinary people's activity ?
They route through all kinds of intermediaries that handle the banking by proxy — eg, as we saw in the Panama Papers and similar leaks.
Reporting $600 in CashApp isn’t about stopping cartels, terrorists, etc; it’s about harassing sex workers and street dealers, profiling side businesses, etc.
when terrorism can be defined as "having a book" and can result in indefinite detention without charge or access to an attorney maybe i'm not 100% gung-ho by default on everything labelled anti-terrorism
I want crypto to work like cash so bad, but in practice it's too complicated for your average person and I'm not sure anyone has the incentive to make it simple.
Monero works like cash and there's nothing complicated to get the privacy. With QR codes it's not bad but sync time and 20 minute confirmation is a convenience proble.
You know Zelle and venmo already won the arms race when every person selling meat cooked over open flame on the side of the road is set up for that and not crypto.
With Monero it doesn't matter for future transaction privacy if it's KYCed just like it doesn't matter for cash. Financial institutions know you have purchased Monero like if you withdrew cash from an ATM, but then it goes off their radar.
I wonder if we are at the point its safer to just cash your entire paycheck? I mean people's cards get skimmed or numbers leaked all the time. Maybe not under your mattress but some other hidy spot a thief will never find your cash, but the risk is probably nonzero for every debit/creidt card holder that they will not experience some fraud. Muggings are also simpler if you are cashed based. You get mugged with cash on you, that's it, that's the extent of the damage just whatever bills you had on you. You get mugged with your cards on you, good luck cancelling them quickly with that banking app on your phone the thief also stole off you.
I no longer have a credit card (nor cell phone [nor email]), so everything is cash or crypto (USA forty-something male). Semi-retired datacenter electrician.
As for "wrench attacks," mine is mostly held in offsite multi-signatures, so good luck (to us both!) on your attack. Multiple hidden guns might help here.
I'm increasingly finding businesses that simply don't accept cash. Want a beer at the Clippers game? Can't pay with cash. Even a local bar near my house stopped accepting cash about a year ago - a bar!
In the UK they passed laws a few decades ago allowing people to be surveilled, called RIPA. It was marketed as something necessary to catch terrorists and major criminals, that would only be used for those purposes.
Within a few years local councils were using it for highly trivial things like fly-tipping, littering, and checking people lived in school catchment areas.
I remember back in ye olde dark ages when "big data" was the hot buzzword people of a certain bent couldn't get enough of this kind of stuff. Everyone was jacking off nonstop to the idea that we could just hoover up everyone's data ad then "efficiently" or "proactively" dispatch enforcement resources. People talked all sorts of big talk about stuff like cross referencing people's Home Depot spend with permit requirements, identifying small businesses that don't have healthy enough financials to be fully compliant, cross referencing invoices and delivery receipts to identify overloaded trucks, and generally finding all sorts of ways to fine the crap out of people for the pettiest of petty deviance. They considered this a noble goal.
Everyone's head was too far up their asses to look at the magic crystal ball called "history" and realize that such systems and tactics would be used to go after <checks notes> weed dealers and brown people.
I worked a little on a finsec program in the early 90s. I had an anonymized dataset with bank account deposits and withdrawals and credit card transactions. I don't know how complete it was, but dividing by the US population the total number of records made it pretty feasible that it was the whole thing.
"We're proud to announce today that we're rolling out a trial phase of the Torment Nexus, as made famous in the scifi novel and accompanying film entitled 'Whatever You Do, Do Not Create the Torment Nexus'."
I’ve been under investigation for money laundering twice in the last three years - not because I’ve laundered a single dime, but because I have no discernible employment and move large capital sums around the globe almost constantly, and my bank accounts and tax returns inarguably look fucking weird. All 100% above board - I just made some good investments a while back.
I even had the feds come knocking because they decided they needed to check I wasn’t trafficking narcotics. We had a nice chat, they decided they didn’t need to search the place, and six months later I got a letter confirming the case had been archived. Like one of the folks in the article, I had weed on me when they rocked up. Thankfully, in Europe, that’s basically just a “shrug” by law enforcement, unless you’ve got clear intent to distribute. From how it all went, they had quite clearly decided this was a waste of their fucking time before they even arrived.
None of this is a good thing, and none of it is terribly new, either - reporting on finances has been going on for decades, but the integration is getting tighter.
The main problem as I see it is that it has a horrendous false positive rate, and you end up with innocent folks like yours truly having to waste their time and energy proving that they are innocent of a crime that a machine dreamt up.
It does sound like you should have been investigated though. Like, this sounds like the (or a) system working. What would the alternatives be? Don't investigate for money laundering? Or have so much info that they can eliminate you as interesting without even having a visit?
Wait for actual evidence of a crime (or even an anonymous tip) instead of going on a fishing expedition targeting anyone with an unusual lifestyle or weird spending habits?
I’m sure we could just put always-on cameras in every house to catch criminals too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
> I’m sure we could just put always-on cameras in every house to catch criminals too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
I use this type of point all the time, and every time to blank stares.
Me> The Flock surveillance network is bad - it is an invasion of privacy and gives way too much power to people that should not have that power. It _can_ be used to solve crimes, and does. But so could not allowing anyone out of their house without a permit. But that, too, would be stupid and harm society
I’m not sure that informants are the way to go either. More often than not in history, this has just been used as a tool to mess with the lives of people you do not like.
False positives are never a _should_ thing, they're a "best we can do, and worth the cost" thing (or not). It's entirely reasonable to push for a better system, one with fewer false positives (and false negatives).
I think finding better systems with fewer false negatives and fewer false positives is very difficult and might even be impossible for many things. It might be my lack of imagination, but I often think about the measures taken to prevent child abuse. As I see it, you’re either going to get kids left in abusive situations or you’re going to have kids unjustly removed. Both are terrible. I’m not going to argue where the action bias should be. We live in an imperfect world.
I think preventing other crimes is similar. There will always be injustice on some side of the issue. And I’m not trying to argue that that means the status quo is great! But I don’t think we will eventually hone in a perfect system. Maybe just circle around some imaginary point, refining rules and processes until the whole thing breaks down.
Cash is still king. You have to figure all potential networks are backdoored by intelligence. They have things they could do with cash too but its a lot more real work no one has the budget to scale out compared to what you can do at scale in the digital space, thanks to the fact that it is a fungible physical entity already set loose on all corners of the earth.
Wouldn't the comrades want financial activity to be monitored, to make sure that nobody is getting more then everyone else? (unless they're a party official, of course)
The comrades in the US want the existing system removed. So, for now, while it remains, they want no policing, no oversight, no enforcement because weak governance advances their goals. Later, when the system is replaced with their preferred system, they will want maximum policing, maximum enforcement, maximum purges of undesirable elements because strong governance advances their goals.
I understand that folks here think that the general anti-AI sentiments that can be found in some of US culture are often misguided.
It's likely projection on my part but I have a deep suspicion that people understand that mass surveillance by the state is the main use case for all these LLMs, camera systems, and increasing large data centers.
That certainly is my own worry, at least.
>mass surveillance
Its not mass surveillance by the state, exclusively.
Its also the potential for mis-use and corruption by criminal networks.
Plus, there's that whole degradation of culture factor. Sure, you trust your government today. But do you trust the government of tomorrow?
Anyone who thinks this is misguided is probably seeking to profit from it at some point.
And that is precisely the problem.
Also add corporations. Insurance companies, Banks, Potential Employers, etc will definitively use mass surveillance and AI generated predictions based on that mass surveillance.
> Sure, you trust your government today.
Most Americans really, really don't. Gallup puts Americans' trust in major institutions, including several parts of the government, at around 30% [0]
In OECD countries, trust in government sits at around 39% [1]
I would say that most people in Western nations don't trust their government. Whether they agree with what all their governments are doing is another issue-by-issue matter, but I would guess they don't love that on the whole, either.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/712436/confidence-institutions-...
[1] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/oecd-survey-on-drivers-...
They say that and then act the opposite. The cognitive dissonance is astonishing. Consider the MAGA deep state narrative and how it literally now exists because of them.
Distrust of the government comes in different levels: you can be just distrustful enough to be skeptical yet accepting, and so distrustful that you actively try to vote the bums out. I don't think the polls distinguish between them.
Trump didn't bring the CIA and MI6 into existence. That's liberal cope from the years they spent yelling about how secret police were actually good now, because they didn't like Trump. Well now they like Trump - happy?
The Trump (read: Russell Vought et al.) playbook is transparently self-serving:
The entire reason Trump spent so much time talking about the swamp was that his band always had every intention of furthering government corruption, albeit to his own ends.That's a lot easier if you've first degraded public trust in institutions.
Which “liberals” are you talking about? My circle of leftists complained about the CIA just as much during the Obama administration.
lol. Talk about cope. You just invented a strawman and assumed it was my position so that you could claim victory. I guess you don’t know many progressives because by and large the CIA has been considered problematic forever. But it wasn’t celebrated the way MAGA cheers for ICE.
I would encourage you to refrain from saying things like ‘lol. Talk about cope.’ here, let your argument stand on its own without baiting the other person into responding emotionally.
I’m not offering this advice because I’m perfect either, I find it difficult sometimes to be respectful of someone I disagree with. You can take it or leave it, I’ll just say editing those sorts of things out of my own posts has been helpful.
Its one thing to not trust ones government.
Its another to do something truly effective about it.
Alas, the American people seem to be utterly paralyzed. Catatonic, even.
When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
> When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
Look I encourage people to vote and participate in government and politics as much as possible, but it's extremely clear at this point that this is more and more untrue every day. The government derives it's power from billionaires now, and thus the people always get the government billionaires want. It may not be exactly the route they want, but it's the same end results.
Look no further for proof than the endless slew of city and county governments that capitulate to big tech and sign sweeping data center contracts without even notifying their constituents, intentionally ignoring the feedback they get, or simply silencing the dissenters when they speak at meetings. Even local government has been sold to the highest bidder.
This has frequently been true in American history though.
Think folks were thrilled with the robber barons of the railroad area also owning newspapers?
Imho, the core thing that worsened was the election system. Specifically, closed primaries and gerrymandering. Both because they disincentivize centrists and compromise.
Ranked choice, mandatory opening of party primaries, and a Supreme Court definition of unacceptable gerrymandering (mathematically-based) would get us better government.
> When all it really needs is civic responsibility and an understanding that the government derives its power from the people, and thus the people always get the government they deserve.
You've had people being apologists for all manner of bad forms of government around the world for at least the past 25 years. This shouldn't be surprising.
It's also clearly the wrong question for this decade. Private / public sector cooperation and all of the barriers between them that have been degraded and chipped away has left us with a very broken economic system that looks less and less like capitalism every day.
> Its not mass surveillance by the state, exclusively.
> Its also the potential for mis-use and corruption by criminal networks.
But you repeat yourself
In Norway, as an act of sensibility and kindness, prior to WWII, registers were kept at all town halls as to your religion. The point was, people wanted to be buried in the proper cemetery. It was a plus, people registered willingly.
Then the Nazis rolled in. And you can imagine what happened with those registers.
So it doesn't even have to be about your own government. And with digital access being a world away, it can indeed be a threat.
In the Netherlands the Nazis were able to exterminate Jews much more thoroughly than they had in Germany, because the Netherlands kept such meticulous records of the name and address of every Jew.
And everyone else, but the Nazis were after the Jews.
Think about it the way the US thought about them pesky Rooskies during the Cold War:
Don't look at intentions. Look at capabilities.
Government agencies (foreign and domestic) will just be just a few of the many buyers of this information.
Private companies buy up this information like mad. It's so cheap - five figures gets you a database of every person over 18 in the USA and their addresses. Another five figures gets work history for them. Another five figures gets you property information. Another gets you social media feeds. Etc. Some vendors even sell it ad hoc with little up-front cost.
For less than a million a year, any company can build an extensive profile on every person in the USA. These companies are just adding to that list.
There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism, when in reality we'll likely all end up renting everything we own from the 6 people who own all the companies in the world. There seems to be a motte and bailey where the motte is "oh we should just remove all the governmental controls and let private enterprise flourish!" and then the bailey is "don't you see how little freedom you have from government" when it's made apparent what private enterprise has done in the modern world.
> There's a self-serving aspect of Libertarianism where we dismantle the government so we can build our own government out of corporations with zero accountability to any of the people they govern. A kind of modern feudalism. And a lot of people in this camp envision themselves the count or duke or king or whatever in this feudalism
So much this.
People forget that for all its fault, democratic government is democratic to some degree.
Corporations are democratic to zero degree. (And before someone brings up shareholders: institutional investors and dual-class shares)
Libertarianism is entirely self-serving. I am rich and have property, so my ideal government is one whose only job is to create property registries and allow their enforcement with violence. Ideally, the poor people are taxed (not me of course) to fund a government violence force to enforce the rules on the poor people, as is the case in the USA.
Communism is similarly self-serving. I own no property, and so my ideal government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone.
How is communism self-serving when, you said it yourself, the main concept is assigning resources to everyone?
If "assigning resources to everyone" is a net gain (IE the voter doesn't have resources), then yes it is self serving.
What if the voter has lots of resources, but soon they'll likely lose them due to external factors, so they vote for communism?
What if the voter has very few resources, but soon they'll likely gain lots of resources, and still vote for communism?
What if the voter prefers a social safety net to having lots of resources, because they're really afraid of ending up broke?
Pretty much everything is self serving using that definition. Clean up trash in a park? Self serving. Donate money to the poor? Self serving.
I think you misunderstand me -- perspective matters. If you have 12 cookies, and I have 2 cookies, and i say "it would be more fair if we each had 7 cookies", then i pretty transparently just want you to give me 5 cookies.
"Clean up trash" and "Donate money to the poor" are not as unevenly beneficial. Also "Donate money to the poor" is a far cry from "Seize money and give that to the poor".
> and i say "it would be more fair if we each had 7 cookies", then i pretty transparently just want you to give me 5 cookies.
But under the context of "government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone" it is not you (or any single person) that decides that, it's the contextual Communist government saying and doing that. Just because it benefits random governed person does not make it directly self serving.
The nuance is, in this version of Communism, the Communism itself it is not self serving it trys to equalize -- Libertarianism, in this context, enforces self serving ideals
> But under the context of "government has no concept of property and assigns resources to everyone" it is not you (or any single person) that decides that,
Under every version of Communism, it's "the government" that decides that, and those government officials seem to be much better dressed then everyone else.
You seem to be describing our current corrupt democracy that produces crony capitalism that gives favors to big businesses and enables the business owners to become one of the 6 people that own everything.
A major point of libertarianism is to tear down the government structure that enables that crony capitalism and restores real competition in the market.
So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?
If that's true then Libertarians have a rosier view of government than I do. A regular David vs. Goliath situation. Biblical stories aside, my money is on Goliath.
> So we're going to make government weaker, and by doing so, they will stand up to corporations that are now stronger than them?
It's not about the amount of physical force they can assert.
Suppose you have a constrained set of things the government is allowed to do. They prohibit fraud, non-consensual physical harm (e.g. violence, pollution) and market consolidation. Market consolidation is given a rigid definition in the nature of any organization having more than 15% market share in any market, a rigid consequence in the nature of that organization being fully atomized, and a right for customers and suppliers to bring a private case against them with the same consequence if they're over the threshold and the government prosecutor won't do it. Every citizen has the constitutional right to smash corporations in consolidated markets into smithereens.
Meanwhile the government is prohibited from enacting more specific economic rules. They lack the authority to enact things like certificate of need laws, zoning density restrictions, price controls, anything that acts as a constraint on adversarial interoperability, etc. Micromanaging the population is not allowed.
How do these constraints benefit large incumbents? What benefit is there in giving the government the authority to do things that history has consistently shown to be anti-competitive and inefficient?
Such a scheme absolutely explodes in complexity as it comes to each level of additional detail.
This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best.
The smallest number of competitors that can split market share such that none exceed 15% is 7, and that cuts it absurdly close for an existential risk.
Do non-profit organizations count for this rule? If not, how would corporate structures that intentionally obfuscate these distinctions, e.g. IKEA, be handled?
If there's not some extremely tricky qualifiers, these markets seem likely to be a problem, just for starters: medicines†, operating systems, utilities to a specific house or even city, spy satellites, chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize, combat aircraft, crewed spacecraft, EUV lithography, armored fighting vehicles, cellular telecommunications services, samples of organisms restricted to high biosafety level labs, and literally any new product category. † Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible." Also, no one could offer a specific specialized surgical procedure until seven or more independent organizations in the same geographic area have qualified staff and equipment, which would be especially hard for any novel techniques; if the problem it addressed was rare, they'd also effectively be forced into a cartel to allocate the patients evenly.
There's also separately and unavoidably the massive problem of transitioning from the current situation to one compliant with these restrictions.
Edit: Switch to using a dagger for the footnote to avoid a formatting issue.
> This requires a magically flexible definition of "market" at very best.
The definition of a market is the set of goods or services which are fungible substitutes for one another.
The only thing that's hard about this at all is determining how fungible they have to be in order to be considered substitutes, e.g. two restaurants that are 3000 miles apart are obviously not substitutes for each other, but what if they're 30 miles apart? That one could go either way depending on how aggressive you want to be.
But it doesn't really matter how the coin flips like that turn out because the things that are close to the line aren't the markets where consolidation is causing major trouble, and conversely causing some local shops to not merge with each other so it stays unambiguous that the local market isn't consolidating is likewise not a big issue.
> Do non-profit organizations count for this rule?
Yes. If a non-profit has more than 15% market share then it has to be broken into multiple non-profits that each have less than 15% market share, the same as anyone else.
> Imagine a serious condition getting its first drug treatment approved and the company saying "Only every seventh patient is eligible."
You're assuming that there are still patents. If there are then that obviously doesn't count during the patent term because that's what patents are, but then you count only the patented invention and any sort of tying is entirely prohibited. You shouldn't be able to patent a connector and use that to monopolize the market for replacement razor blades.
Whereas if there aren't patents then you don't have this problem to begin with because you get a dozen different companies all producing the new medicine right away.
> operating systems
Operating systems are easy. Microsoft would be atomized because they have too much market share and then a dozen different companies would have the full rights to make derivatives of Windows. None of them would ever be allowed to have majority market share again, so now it's in everyone's interests to standardize APIs so that the same software will run on each company's Windows distribution, and the same APIs would end up being supported by (or consolidated with) non-Windows operating systems as well.
The OS then becomes fungible as intended and most likely ends up being open source since there's not a lot of margin in fungible commodities. And software licensed to allow the entire public to modify and redistribute it has an unlimited number of suppliers and would never exceed the market share threshold.
> utilities to a specific house or even city
If you're a utility company and you know you're going to get broken up if you have more than 15% market share, what do you do?
The sensible thing to do is to build your infrastructure differently. You're digging up the road once, but instead of installing one big pipe, you install a conduit with 10 smaller ones inside it. Then you sell off nine out of ten to nine other companies so that you each have ~10% market share and if one of you ends up with 14% and another 6% you're still not over the threshold.
Then if a natural disaster damages the infrastructure, in theory they could each employ their own repair crews and each send one to each damaged location, but that seems pretty inefficient when there is another option. You have multiple independent repair companies and the utility companies pay whichever one gives them the best rate for a given job, which will tend to be the one already sending someone to that site, i.e. the same repair crew usually repairs all 10 damaged pipes and gets paid by all 10 utility companies. Meanwhile a different repair company puts in the best bid for a different site.
The status quo takes the assumption that everything has to be vertically integrated, but it doesn't, and it's a lot easier to have competition when each new entrant doesn't have to reproduce the entire supply chain themselves.
> spy satellites, combat aircraft, armored fighting vehicles
You're listing things that are concentrated markets because the government is the only one that buys them and then there is only one seller because there is only one buyer. And even then the way the government does that is stupid. If they're the only one who wants armored fighting vehicles then they should take competing bids to design one and then take the design they paid for and take competing bids to manufacture it. The contracts to make these things should be going to the same companies that make trucks and locomotives.
Likewise they should break Boeing up and then have the various pieces of it put in bids to design, manufacture or assemble combat aircraft.
> EUV lithography
Nothing about this should be a monopoly. It should be something that dozens of companies know how to do. It consolidated because the government has been allowing companies to merge with competitors and suppliers for decades.
> chemicals that are difficult or dangerous to synthesize
These are the sort of things that should have 50 suppliers rather than 50,000. Nothing about it requires a monopoly. Indeed, allowing the market to concentrate is dangerous, because what happens if that one company's facilities are damaged or they're the only ones who know how to do it and the bus to the company retreat goes over a cliff?
> literally any new product category
So someone invents e.g. 3D printers. How does the time it takes to litigate a case in court compare to the time it takes for multiple companies to be making the new category of product?
There is no need or incentive to file a case if it would be dismissed as moot by the time a decision would be rendered. And if a "new" product category is still a consolidated market multiple years later then that's actually a consolidated market and it's time to break them up.
David and goliath is not a story of a little man defeating an impossible giant. It's the story of a technologically advanced crack pistol shot vs a guy a with a knife and a hundred yards to cover
Government will not give any help to any corporation and we, the masses, will be empowered to stand up to corporations ourselves. And to be clear, when we talk about Power here we aren't talking about enforcing our will with violence (like the government ultimately does) but with the lifeblood of corporations: money. Deny them that and they quickly die.
Okay great. Let's say you have a dispute with your neighborhood electricity provider. They run the power plant 3 blocks down and vent smog into your house. By your logic the only recourse you have is to stop paying them. How do you handle that externality while still maintaining your electricity and also avoid having to learn how to run your own electricity grid?
If this isn't the complete anarchy form of libertarianism then the government can still enforce laws against air pollution. And there would be no way for a government official to make an underhanded executive branch "policy" change that let's the company get around that law.
If this is the more extreme form of libertarianism then surely my neighbors agree with me that the pollution sucks and we all stop paying them. Yeah, maybe we go without power for a short time, but then that company changes their ways or goes out of business. No long court battles, nobody single entity for the electric company to bribe, no writing your congressman and hoping there's a change. Vote directly with your wallet.
Or, there's the libertarian idea that another corporation is responsible for (essentially is hired as a caretaker of) the air we breathe and the electric company pays them for anything they emit into that air, so they are punished/disincentivized that way
Laws against air pollution are anti-libertarian.
Is that like, inverse One True Scotsman?
A major point of libertarianism is to tear down government structures that hinder libertarians from engaging in world domination and retain government structures that hinder other people from hindering libertarians from engaging in world domination.
OP’s point is that world domination is possible only in collusion with the State.
You can’t have trillion dollar companies without going to dinner with the President of the banana republic to kiss his ass and line his pockets.
How did Apple kiss Obama's ass?
How hard would it be for you to look up whether Apple does any government lobbying, or if there are any laws, regulations, or tax codes that (whether intentionally or not) give Apple an advantage over a start up that wants to compete with them. Don't ignore things like copyright laws, patent protections, international trade agreements, corporate tax structures, insider trading by politicians, etc., etc.
What of observed human history gives you any hope that such a thing will happen?
All of these systems function well ... "in theory". Even the ones you may not agree with. Socialism and communism are perfectly fine theoretical systems, until you introduce humans into the equation with desires for power, wealth, etc.
I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea. I also have no idea how you come to the conclusion that collusion will not be a problem in a libertarian world.
> I have seen no hint that Libertarianism is somehow above this and will be the panacea.
The US has been the closest any country has come to libertarianism. And the US thrived on it.
The US would have thrived on any system because it started the game with a continent whose indigenous population was small, pluralistic, nomadic and technologically backward, and whose natural resources were abundant or completely untouched. The colonists had access to the technology of the leading power in the world at the time, and had imported slaves in bulk from another technologically backward continent to jump-start their economy by the time the US was established.
Not to mention their main competitor self-destructed twice in 1914 and 1939
You're overlooking the 19th century.
Germany did not self-destruct. It was destroyed by the Allied powers.
"Their main competitor" meaning western Europe. Not specifically Germany or the UK. So the point still stands.
Whatever growth US had in the 19 century, Europe self-destructing through WWI and WWII ensured US will be the lead in the 20th.
Why did Mexico and S America fail to thrive?
They did not 'fail to thrive', they had different starting conditions and developed along different paths.
They were not as thinly populated when colonized and indigenous cultures were farther advanced, eg Aztec civilization had already made the transition to large cities of hundreds of thousands, whereas the largest indigenous settlements in the continental US were just a few thousand people. The geography of South America is vastly different, so were the patterns of colonialism and settlement, with far higher rates of intermarriage and takeover of existing feudal instititions.
Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology.
> Geography is far more deterimiantive than ideology.
Then why are Hong Kong and Taiwan so successful with free markets?
Anyhow, Spain installed a feudal system in South and Central America, with a focus on looting it and extracting gold and silver. That was certainly not a path to prosperity.
In stark contrast, America was settled with the principle of allowing settlers to own land, and farm it as they saw fit. This created a large and very productive middle class.
Ideology was totally the dominant force.
It's funny how you keep trying to drag in other examples to support your position. Am I suppose to ignore the history and special great power support for both places in Asia and imagine that their economies just naturally developed that way, ceteris parabus? What a hoot.
You are right about looting resources. But economy is orthogonal to ideology, eg Australia is a property-minded free-trading polity but has a contracting economy as most of its exports are resource-based rather than manufactured goods or services. Nobody is preventing Australians from being a high-tech powerhouse, businesses have just chosen to focus on extractive and agrarian sources of revenue.
>Anyhow, Spain installed a feudal system in South and Central America
Yes, I already mentioned that: 'far higher rates of intermarriage and takeover of existing feudal institutions.' You haven't addressed the geographic, population, or civilizational arguments in any way, so merely repeating your initial assertion isn't very persuasive.
Feel free to try harder.
The US arguably would’ve thrived regardless, we had 50% of the world GDP post-WWII. That percentage pie has only declined, as other nations developed. Nations with disparate economic systems, some being top-down centrally controlled communist states. In fact, said states are the only ones who threatened the US economically.
And, the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close. The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations. There are plenty of underdeveloped nations that are, effectively, much more libertarian. Because their governments don’t have the capital to enforce much of anything. Those nations are doing quite poorly, hence why they are underdeveloped.
You will notice a pattern in the development of nations: as nations develop, the government has more stake in the macro economics of said nation. Because of course they do: they want the economics to go well, and they have the economics to enforce that, or try to. The US government does not “sit out” when things are going poorly, the opposite is true.
When I wrote "has been" I meant the 19th century.
> the US is not the most libertarian country, it’s not even close.
Please give an example.
Switzerland perhaps? https://freedomandprosperity.org/2021/blog/according-to-the-...
Note I wrote "has been". The economic freedom in the US has steadily declined over the years.
You were responding to a comment which was written using the present tense.
"The US is developed, so it’s automatically more centrally controlled than most nations."
What?? Can you explain this better? The more developed a nation the more centrally controlled it is? The USSR was more developed than the US?
Also, when did any communist state ever threaten the US economically? See other comments about USSR buying wheat from the US. See the 21 million people Stalin had to murder to try and keep the system running. See Venezuela, drowning in the riches of it's oil, having massive inflation and people starving while their overweight leader ate a pile of empanadas on TV in front of them all. None of these arguments people are making about US resources or distance from other countries or whatever else make any sense.
> The more developed a nation the more centrally controlled it is?
Yes, generally, but it's not linear and 1-1. The USSR was not more developed than the US, it doesn't work like that, but the trend is: the more developed a nation is, the more centrally controlled the economy will be. Why? Because as nations develop, the government has BOTH the capital and motivation to more tightly control the economy.
Underdeveloped countries simply don't have the capital to enforce economic planning. They might have laws on the books, but it doesn't matter, they can't enforce them. The US has laws on the books, and the capital to back it up. On a macro level, the US government is very closely monitoring and steering the economy. Of course through control of the currency, the Fed, taxes, regulation, subsidies, tariffs, contracts, and more. Consider what makes up our GDP - healthcare alone is 20% ish. How is that controlled? Through our regulations and structure established and maintained by the US government.
That seems a bit reductive; I don't even know that you're "wrong", but there are a lot of factors that might have led to the United States' success. We have a lot of natural resources and a lot of our land is readily habitable.
Yes, the US also has relatively liberal economics [1], and maybe that's why the US has done well, but I think there are too many confounding variables to conclude it's purely because of economic liberalism.
[1] I mean liberal in the academic sense, not as a synonym for Democrat.
Russia is chock full of natural resources. But Russia was never prosperous. Ditto for Mexico and S America.
"Prosperous" is a relative term; Russia, even during the USSR days, was still significantly more prosperous than Uganda, for example.
You can say "yes but they weren't as rich as the United States", but if "being as successful as the United States" is your bar then most countries fall short. There are plenty of countries that you would consider economically liberal that aren't as prosperous as the United States.
I'm not going to claim I know "why" some countries do well and some don't, and that's my point. There are oodles of variables that end up being relevant and I think it's intellectually dishonest to pick one and thank/blame it for everything.
The US had to ship wheat to Russia to keep them from starving.
There was a billboard put up in Kansas at the time: "Welcome to the Breadbasket of the Soviet Union".
It would be worth your while to read a history of the USSR.
> pick one
The correlation between prosperity and free markets is a very strong one.
P.S. In WW2, the US supplied all its allies (including the USSR) with massive amounts of food and military aid. And the US fought WW2 in two hemispheres. That's what free markets delivered. The evidence is everywhere you look and is overwhelming.
I didn't claim that the USSR was doing well compared to the US. In fact I said the opposite.
I said that the USSR was economically more prosperous than Uganda, and was not wrong about that. Prosperity is a relative term, and pointing out that the US was/is rich isn't actually demonstrating anything outside of your inability to read.
Sorry I'm not interested in your diversion into Uganda.
My point wasn’t Uganda, my point was, and it still is, that “prosperity” is a relative term. I also have no interest in talking about the minutia of Uganda. I was pointing out that the USSR was “rich” by comparison to some other countries.
We're they more prosperous than Uganda? I don't know much about Uganda's history but the 21 million citizens of the USSR that Stalin murdered were as unpropserous as anyone could be. It was an incredibly uneven prosperity if there was any.
Okay well George Floyd was also less prosperous than most of the USSR. I don't see what cherry-picking a specific subset of people has to do with it.
I should make it clear that I'm not a supporter of what the USSR was, and I'm not trying to apologize for it. I'm just trying to argue that "prosperity" is a relative term and trying to nail down the "why" of it is more complicated than the libertarian "corporations good government bad" wet dream that WalterBright always spouts.
ETA:
Just to cite my sources, you can look at the GDP per capita of Uganda and Russia in 1985 here [1].
No question, the United State was way wealthier than Russia at around ~$33k, Russia at around ~$12k, and Uganda at around $800.
The USSR was horrible, Stalin was horrible, I wouldn't want to live in the USSR even if it were still around, but my point is that wealth and prosperity are reductive terms, and it's also reductive to look at one factor and say that that's the cause of everything.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-p...
Prosperity is so much more than just GDP. But look, this discussion started with someone saying our corrupt government is bad, and then throwway120385 described something horrible and called it libertarian and I just had to correct that label. People then felt the need to jump in with a bunch of mostly orthogonal disparagement of libertarianism which led to all this unproductive arguing. By the way did you see my response to you about the Microsoft monopoly? I couldn't reply because we got too deeply nested so I made it a peer comment. I'm sure it will instantly turn you into a libertarian, lol!
I agree it’s much more than GDP. That’s kind of my entire point! These terms are complicated, and pretending that these things can be explained trivially by “LOL CORPORATIONS GOOD GOVERNMENT BAD AHAHAHAH” is reductive at best.
No libertarian is saying "corporations good!" Oh my gosh, the misunderstanding is huge. Go do some actual research about an idea before blindly arguing against it. Libertarianism is all about individuals and personal property and liberty. Sure people are free to organize into corporations, but libertarianism is not about favoring or giving special advantages or esteem or whatever else you seem to be imagining to corporations. It's about giving power to individuals! The hardest thing about libertarianism is people who are afraid of needing to exercise their own power and judgement. Every other political philosophy wants to make everything Someone Else's Problem. I think libertarianism is scary because it makes you responsible for yourself.
It’s not explicitly about loving corporations, that just appears to be the consequence.
How is putting personal liberty above all else a love of corporations? If a corporation is furthering personal liberty then sure, I'll love them. If they aren't then I won't give them my time/money/attention. Why does everything revolve around corporations for you?
It’s not that “everything revolves around corporations for me”, it’s that every time I have ever criticized a corporation to a self-proclaimed libertarian, it it always deflected and turned into “well actually this is just the governments fault because…”
Walter did this by taking the frankly idiotic position that Standard Oil actually wasn’t a monopoly, and you took the less-idiotic-but-still-bad position that Microsoft’s terrible business was actually just a consequence of government.
I would argue that the 1950's and 1960's, which I've heard called a "golden age," was an age where we kept corporations in their place with a 90% corporate tax rate and we broke any corporation up who had an oversized market share. How is this "close to libertarianism?" If anything that suggests to me that the US was better off when corporations were weak and local, state and the federal government maintained lots of in-house expertise for their functions instead of outsourcing everything to consultants and contractors.
I wrote "has been". Everybody seems to have missed that.
Doubt. Arguably the US thrived because it is too far from Europe for their wars to cause too much devastation. Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip.
After WW2 the US stood alone and enacted a lot of socialist ideas. Then spent a few decades slowly erroding those worker rights and sensible regulations in favor of corporate interests.
> Unregulated industrialization also gave us child labor, 12h days, 6d work weeks, and company scrip.
Do you think children did not work in colonial America? or Europe? In what contemporary country did children not work? Same for the hours and days of work.
There's a good reason why children have always worked prior to 1900. The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked.
When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
> When productivity rose sufficiently, child labor disappeared, as did the long hours.
I'd interrogate the steps that led from rising productivity to both the disappearance of child labor and the disappearance of long hours. The claim that rising productivity alone led to this is perhaps a little hard to defend.
> The economy was not productive enough to enable them to not work. The same for hours worked.
This shows necessity but not sufficiency.
Rising productivity replaces workers all the time, starting with the least productive workers - children. Why is that so hard to believe?
For example, the first steam engine employed a boy to run up and down a ladder turning a valve at each end of the piston stroke. The boy, being lazy, devised a beam that would automatically move the valves, and went to sleep. The steam engine owner saw that, deployed the beam, and fired the boy.
> This shows necessity but not sufficiency.
Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand. This means, as productivity rises, wages increase. As wages increase, workers will realize they no longer have to work 100 hours/week to make a living, and will refuse to work those hours. (You see this in non-union shops all the time.)
The unions only accomplished what was inevitable.
> Why is that so hard to believe?
Economics isn't a game of make believe for me.
I have professional standards to uphold, and this is probably where my actuarial background makes me uncomfortable with the argument as posed. Supply, demand, and marginal productivity are great and useful components of an economic model, but I cannot take their relationships as they appear in a freshman micro/macro sequence to be axiomatic of an empirical system. I cannot infer that the resulting equilibrium must occur in the real world.
In actuarial work, a model's assumptions are not observations. If I posit, what, a hazard function or assumptions about the independence of variables or a particular claim distribution, I can't treat the consequences of those assumptions as empirical facts about the financial portfolio; instead, I have to establish that the model adequately represents (and simplifies) the phenomenon I'm modeling.
> Wages (in a free market) are determined by the Law of Supply & Demand.
I'd apply the same standard here. This is a model specification, not an observed law of nature. We can express labor demand as a relationship to marginal productivity under certain assumptions. Neither of these alone establishes sufficiency for an increase in productivity to result in an increase in workers' wages, let alone that it must result in shorter working hours.
My remark about necessity holds within the proposed mechanism though. If marginal productivity is the mechanism by which wages rise and worked hours fall, increased productivity is necessary before wages can increase and worked hours can decrease.
> (You see this in non-union shops all the time.)
"All the time" is a frequency claim. Where's the data?
> The unions only accomplished what was inevitable.
This is a counterfactual claim. In undertaking economic analysis of such a claim, I must specify the market structure, identify the constraints and frictions, and establish that the model's assumptions are sufficiently good approximations of the historical labor market.
I must also try to estimate the causal effect of unions, which amounts, more or less, to constructing the counterfactual labor market in which they did not exist.
No it didn't. People went on strike and middle class people fought for those things. Eliminating child labor was a major feather in the Progressive movement's cap. Don't pretend like any of that was spontaneous.
Both happened at the time it became uneconomic to employ children, and productivity was sufficient that people didn't have to work that many hours.
Why do you suppose there was an exemption for farm work? It's because children were needed to bring in the harvest.
Children are lousy workers. What jobs in your workplace do you think they could do? None in any place I've worked.
Then why are there so many signs of increasing child labor in the US? Why are Republicans rolling back protections?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/22/child-labor-...
Note that the article only measures violations of child labor laws, i.e. there are (presumably many times more) children working without violating the laws. Why are people deliberately employing lousy workers? Why are business owners lobbying to allow these lousy workers to work more hours?
> None in any place I've worked.
Oh, well, if you don't think that children would be good at making compilers then child labor must not have been a problem. I guess you have a point.
Have a look at what children were doing at work, and then come back.
In once case I know of, the children in a textile factory worked all day at replacing spent spools of thread on the weaving machines. They were replaced by a machine that did the same thing, at much lower cost.
Are there any jobs at your work place that would be productively performed by children? Have you ever gotten your kids to clean their rooms or do their homework?
No, I was making fun of the fact that you haven't seen something and you act like this is compelling evidence of anything.
If you can find a dip in productivity after the laws were passed, you'd have a case.
The US stood alone and enacted socialist ideas? You have heard of the USSR, haven't you? If the US was enacting socialist ideas it definitely wasn't alone in doing so.
Next I wonder what "a lot of socialist ideas" were. The New Deal during the Great depression was fairly socialist with the government making up work it could pay people to do and such, but I'm pretty sure after WWII is when anti-socialist (anti-Soviet) sentiment peaked in the US
Did the US stand with the USSR?
Is this true? I ask because the metric for determining the distance from the US's construction at any point in time to the libertarian ideal is unclear. Like, given an assertion of closest, it should be quantifiable[0].
It should also be falsifiable and admit a counterfactual.
1. The US was within some epsilon of being libertarian;
2. The US became rich;
3. Therefore, the prosperity of the US was a direct consequence of libertarianism.
It's 2. here that I scratch my head at because, uh, the US has through its entire history, even pre-1776, been rich. It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration.
In fact, going back to 1., if we consider the laissez-faire dimension alone and compare it against the rate of wealth growth the US has sustained at least over my lifetime, the relationship is inverted[2]: we've somehow managed to accumulate more wealth as we've become less laissez-faire. This is a confounding variable that needs to be controlled for before we can draw a causal inference either way.
I'd also argue that broader land policy, education, formal banking institutions, infrastructure, immigration policy, patents and other forms of economic protectionism, and research and development all belong in that causal model since they also tend to be things I look at when analyzing risk and uncertainty.
--
0: I'm still unsure if this quantification is even appropriate. Libertarian-ness admits a whole-ass vector space of institutional characteristics, and it isn't obvious to me how the norm would fall down to aggregate all of them as a single scalar for the purposes of making this argument.
1: The fact that pre-Columbian civilizations didn't have the wheel was often a justification for how backwards they were. As it turns out, when you have as many rivers as North America has, getting around without the wheel is no big deal. It's just pre-Columbian YAGNI.
2: Well, kinda. Both "wealth" and "laissez-faire-ness" minimally need operational definitions and some kind of partial order to be comparable like this.
> It wasn't liquid wealth in the financial sense, but the US has had oodles of arable land, navigable waterways[1], natural resources, and favorable geography. It's only within the last 250 years that we've realized wealth in the form of bonkers huge internal markets and (at least, before recently) high levels of immigration.
So has Russia, South America, Africa, Asia, etc. The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries.
And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc. Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
> The high levels of immigration came from poor people in un-free countries coming to the US to make their fortunes. Free markets is what has distinguished the US from other countries.
I accept that free markets is only one possible answer here. A lot of folks moved here because the US had all of that land that I'd mentioned. There were also some unusually high wages here compared to most of Europe in the 1700's[0, 1]. The political institutions here also allowed certain freedoms that weren't available in Europe (of particular note for me personally is the Münster rebellion), and by the time the earliest members of my family moved here in the 1860's, there were already immigrant communities to lean on.
This goes notwithstanding that the US had developed a bonkers huge continental economy with relatively abundant capital.
My argument isn't that markets didn't make this possible. My argument is that drawing a causal inference based on markets alone is intellectually dishonest.
> And every country that has tried free markets since has prospered accordingly, regardless of their natural resources, waterways, etc.
Can we identify the countries that "tried" a free market approach? Can we identify which of those subsequently prospered? Is the relationship between those two things consistent enough to support the consequent of prospering accordingly?
I think the first is perhaps most obvious, but I'm at a loss for how to answer the latter two.
> Like, what natural resources does Taiwan have?
I'm honestly left scratching my head a little at what about Taiwan meets the bar for being a free market or where the comparison is here.
Taiwan has historically had heavy-handed state-directed industrial domestic policy. Like, the favoring of semiconductors wasn't an accident of the market figuring out what to do there. The domestic capital markets at the time of TSMC's founding were too small to finance the construction of a fabrication plant, so the government stepped in to assume the risk[2].
From a risk management perspective, though, Taiwan does tend to eschew a lot of the economic protectionism that we see elsewhere. Tariffs are less of a problem there, and the state will tend to sell its interests in businesses that don't do well abroad, so there isn't a sort of pathological "Weekend at Bernie's" or "too big to fail" kind of situation.
Taiwan's government also tends to fund research and development much more heavily.
--
0: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Colonial Incomes 1650-1774." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 19861. January 2014.
1: Lindert, Peter H. and Jeffrey G. Williamson. "American Incomes 1774-1860." NBER Working Paper Series, no. 18396. September 2012.
2: This condenses a lot of the history of TSMC. It actually starts with ITRI in 1973 and the edict from above that research should focus on semiconductor development. Morris Chang then built on a lot of expertise developed via RCA and devised the foundry model, which then led to TSMC's founding. In some sense, it could be argued that the state deliberately constructed the market surrounding the semiconductor manufacturing industry.
> the US had developed a bonkers huge continental economy with relatively abundant capital
The US created that economy and created the capital. Colonial America had much of nothing.
> Taiwan
I asked Google "is taiwan a free market country?"
yielding:
"Taiwan has a highly developed free-market economy where prices are set by supply and demand with little government control."
> Colonial America had much of nothing.
I'm unsure that I'd draw that conclusion. Why else would the Crown want to tax the colonials so heavily?
> "Taiwan has a highly developed free-market economy where prices are set by supply and demand with little government control."
Forgive me. Was this in dispute? I was asking what causal work the label "free market" was doing with respect to Taiwan and how the country's economic development was adequately explained by laissez-faire economics.
The patient is healthy now, so the treatment that produced the health must have been "being healthy."
The Crown did not heavily tax the colonials.
Bone evidence showed that the colonials worked like dogs and died young.
> The Crown did not heavily tax the colonials.
Huh, did they not? After the Seven Years' War, the Currency Act of 1764 received assent, and it functionally required that public debts be paid in hard money. Unless I'm remembering incorrectly, this was a little hard to come by in the colonies.
> Bone evidence showed that the colonials worked like dogs and died young.
I'd be interested to see the anthropological chain of inference for this.
I've read many accounts of the Revolutionary War, and the colonials were mostly offended by sending their money to England. Any tax seems heavy if the proceeds do not benefit the taxpayer.
> I'd be interested to see the anthropological chain of inference for this.
I read it many years ago. Sorry, I don't have a reference. I regret not having a photographic memory.
> Any tax seems heavy if the proceeds do not benefit the taxpayer.
I dunno, man. Caesar asks for his money, and I just give it to him. I don't really have much of a say.
> I regret not having a photographic memory.
That's fine. I don't have a photographic memory either; I just have a few boxes of 3x5 notecards and accompanying topic/source indices in a notebook.
I'm going to try and summarize.
You said, essentially, "sure the US had freedom, but maybe the amount of land and resources it had is the real reason it has done so well."
Walter countered with, "Taiwan is a tiny island with very little resources, but it is economically prosperous, so maybe land and resources aren't a big factor. It also happens to have a free market economy."
You replied with what sounded like an attempt at saying that Taiwan wasn't actually a free market.
Walter said, "I don't know man, I just did a quick search to make sure Taiwan wasn't communist or anything before adding it as some data to your analysis."
Does that clear things up? We're just trying to help you out here. We've already made up our minds but it sounds like you're still wondering so maybe we can help?
I'm mostly trying to pick apart the epistemology of thinking about economic systems this way because, hey, maybe there's something that my professional background in the subject is blind to.
It isn't especially interesting to me to try devise frameworks for coercing Caesar to do one thing over another; Caesar's just going to do what Caesar's going to do. The most that I can do is hedge against needing to migrate again because this Caesar has decided, e.g., that staunch pacifism is treasonous.
Libertarianism is far more than just an economic system and it's too bad it went down that narrow piece of it.
I don't understand your reference about coercing Ceasar but a major tenent of Libertarianism is not coercering anyone to do anything. Individual liberty and personal property are the dogmas. If you have a problem with someone, talk to them about it, or ignore them. Give them your time/attention/money or don't. If you want others to help you with these problems you have to gently persuade them, not give up all our liberties so men with guns can force people to do one thing or another.
> Libertarianism is far more than just an economic system
Acknowledged. That nevertheless tends to be where my interest in it lies. Near as I can tell, I don't actually have much of an ideology; I wasn't raised to be political in the typical Anglo-American sense.
> I don't understand your reference about coercing Ceasar
This gets a little in the weeds about my conceptualization of the state, but here's the view from 10km high:
Caesar is a model of an institution that arises when coordination problems exceed the capacity of voluntary associations. He's an emergent response to complexity, and I tend to ask questions of him that are flavored more like, "What coordination problem requires coercion, if any, and how much coercion is actually necessary?"
(As it turns out, the answer looks something like "enough to prevent folks from killing each other." My Mennonite upbringing makes me inclined to add in "and perhaps enough to keep the trust of the congregation," but I'll admit that's probably less relevant for secular folks.)
> but a major tenent of Libertarianism is not coercering anyone to do anything. Individual liberty and personal property are the dogmas.
Why is property yours in the first place? Property is a socially enforced exclusion, and a construction of a society out of that major tenet of noncoercion and enforcement of property rights is by some measure impossible.
> If you have a problem with someone, talk to them about it, or ignore them. Give them your time/attention/money or don't.
This is definitionally impossible with Caesar.
> If you want others to help you with these problems you have to gently persuade them
I feel like this ignores collective action. Persuading enough individuals to contribute voluntarily is itself a coordination mechanism, and it isn't obvious to me how it could produce the same equilibrium as collective provision.
If the benefit is broadly non-excludable, there's a familiar free rider problem, and at some point, "please persuade everyone gently and individually" isn't really a solution to the coordination problem. It instead kinda handwaves it away.
> not give up all our liberties so men with guns can force people to do one thing or another.
Caesar isn't necessarily someone who happens to have more guns (though, typically, he tends to be). It's more important to consider that he's the head of an institution that is embedded in laws, norms, mores, folkways, consensus, trial of facts, bureaucracies, and behavioral expectations of individuals.
Moreover, coercion isn't even the defining feature of Caesar. It's just the backstop in his toolbox for solving coordination problems.
How is that not No True Scotsman? You disagree with the outcome of the described libertarian structures so it can't be actual libertarianism?
The government is inevitably going to do business with the market. Where do you draw the line between a government contract and favors to big business?
What is libertarianism's answer when there are 6 people that own everything, or more realistically, how the richest people in the world, already deeply entrenched and leading their respective industries from continuing to accrue resources until everything is owned by a small group of people and/or taking advantage of their market advantages to shut out any competition.
It is troublesome that libertarianism isn't super well defined, but no version of libertarianism has the government "doing business" with anyone. It only enforces laws, it doesn't buy and sell anything, and it certainly doesn't do anything to insulate anyone from market forces (like governments do now with regulations, subsidies, tax breaks, etc.).
So then what will the government due about supplying their military, offices, supplying technology, constructing the buildings that they work out of, purchasing or renting the land those buildings are on, or any other of the material goods that it needs to do the bare minimum of enforcing laws.
I don't see how libertarian can ever be well defined when it seemingly is always based in ideology and the arguments supporting it always seem to be fallacious.
Ok, maybe I went too far. There are the total anarchist libertarians that don't want any form of government. Personally I'm not sure I want to go that route. So my libertarian government will need a police force of some sort. That could be a collection of small local private businesses that small local governments do business with, giving them jurisdiction over the small local area. And there could be some hierarchy so that eventually they all are accountable to the central government. Like, city police contractors report to a state contractor, and the state contractors report to the federal contractor.
I totally just made that up, so I'm sure we could work out details and make it better, but the overall point of minimizing government power and distributing it could be preserved as much as possible.
No system is going to be perfect, but there is so much more we could do to take power, and therefore the temptation of corruption, away from the people we allow to rule over us. Giving fallible human individuals more power is never the right solution.
So mercenaries? Has that ever worked out well for anyone?
You one line lot shots aren't doing anything useful here. Maybe sit the rest of this out
Giving private businesses the monopoly on violence seems like a great idea ;p
What happens to the business when it isn't small anymore? What does that accountability even look like? Paperwork isn't accountability.
I agree that details can be worked out and systems can be made better, and the government is corrupt (especially now, but also the past two decades I've been old enough to be politically conscious), but I don't think ideological free market libertarianism is the right path to get there. I think there is a lot of merit to a free market and I agree people deserve their own autonomy to not be ruled over, but right now corporations hold way too much power and wealth inequality is too large and only accelerating for me to accept libertarianism as a solution to modern society.
I think another issue is the word libertarianism can easily mean so many different things. There are anarchist libertarians on the left and right, with social libertarians and market libertarians taking up the space between anarchists, and between the four of them there is no solidarity because they all want different things regarding the structure of society.
Hey, I was working hard to not make it a monopoly! Lol! All those different local police forces and each level of the hierarchy are different corporations. But seriously, if we could achieve a peaceful society without giving anyone permission to do violence it would be amazing!
Sure, there are different ideas about how to implement libertarianism but the general idea is singular: Maximize individual liberty and private property rights.
Accountability always comes down to individual liberty. The question isn't, "is the corporation too big?" The question is, "is it taking away personal property or individual liberty?"
The absolute hardest part of libertarianism that all of you opponents miss is that it requires people to always be evaluating that in their choices. It requires people to avoid making everything Someone Else's Problem and wishing for Government to Just Take Care of It. People complain that corporations are too big or people are starving or I don't like what my neighbor is doing with their yard and libertarians answer with, "well, you're going to have to do something about that yourself instead of giving up rights and liberty so that someone else can try and force a fix down all our throats." It just blows people's minds! You mean I have give to the poor myself of my own free will? I have to talk to my neighbor about this myself? I need to stop giving that big evil corporation my money of my own accord? If I want more people to do these same things I have to gently persuade them instead of asking the police to just shoot them if they don't comply? The horrors!!
In order to make competition flourish, you require a strong government which squishes anti-competitive behavior.
Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation. Cooperation just works better than competition. Competition is, really, a zero-sum game, a race to the bottom for companies. Cooperation is optimal, it’s “everybody wins”.
Even if companies didn’t just buy up each other (why wouldn’t they? We need laws against that), they would certainly work together to set prices as high as the market can bear. Which is then, effectively, a monopoly.
I mean, imagine a perfect market with hundreds of thriving competitors. What happens over time? As the industry matures, competitors buy each other up and consolidate capital. Then, newcomers can’t break in, because they don’t have the capital. And any newcomers who have a new innovative process or product, just get bought out before they threaten the market share. Then, eventually, there are only a handful of companies left. It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Look at any domain in the US - they’re all like this. The only exceptions are new domains, like AI. That will change, too, we’ve seen this pattern thousands of times.
There’s two moats here: regulation, and capital. You can eliminate the regulation moat with libertarianism, sure, but not the capital moat. And, you strengthen the capital moat when you remove the regulation. So nothing changes. Best case scenario, the situation is the same. Worst case, it’s accelerated.
> Markets, left to their own accord, naturally tend to monopolies and cooperation
No, they don't. To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition.
The poster boy of monopolies, Standard Oil, never had a monopoly. During its rise, it dropped the consumer price of kerosene 70%. Its market share dropped steadily during the years of the anti-trust trial.
> It’s trivial for them to move in lock-step and everyone wins… except the consumer.
Ever wonder what happened to IBM?
Hmm. Why should the word monopoly only refer to the legal mechanism by which market exclusivity is enforced rather than referring to the resulting market structure or market power?
If I'm not legally prohibited from competing with a firm, but that firm's position nonetheless also makes it unprofitable for me to enter or compete, what is that market structure called?
If it's unprofitable for you, that means the other firm is doing a better job serving customers than you.
Are you saying that it's impossible for a company to become a monopoly purely under its own power?
Nothing is impossible, but it's really difficult. If some greedy entrepreneur is raking in the cash with some product or service then of course another greedy entrepreneur will see that and start competing with the first guy. The evil corporations you are worried about are not going to cooperate with another corporation. They're evil! At best they'll fake it for a while and then backstab each other.
And if they aren't evil backstabbers and they are actually friendly and good at cooperating then it's a win for all of us!
You can always present a case history of one.
You said:
> To become a monopoly, they need the collusion of government to outlaw competition.
Yes, I did. And you can prove that wrong with a case history.
You really need to answer questions directly as asked, and not whatever question it is you think the other person is asking. Doing this only creates confusion. There are many occasions where I see this kind of miscommunication happening between users on this site without either person realizing it.
In this case I asked a yes or no question because I simply wanted to clarify and understand the nuance of your position. You shouldn't always assume that every person responding to your comments is immediately trying to argue against you (although I'll admit this a fairly accurate heuristic for internet discussions in general).
Instead of answering with "Yes, (I believe) it is impossible" or "No, it is possible", you answered with the following:
"You can always present a case history of one".
Because I asked you a yes/no question, I am going to interpret your response as a framing of a yes/no answer. I interpreted your comment as: "(No), you (one) can always present a case history of one".
Hence my confusion: it sounded like you were holding both beliefs simultaneously: "Yes, natural monopolies are impossible, but there are counterexamples".
In the future please just answer the questions as they are asked.
If some believes free market monopolies exist, they ought to know of some examples. Hence why I ask for a case, it's the easiest way to point out that they don't exist.
All you did was say that Standard Oil doesn't count as a monopoly because you claim that you need a government intervention to be a monopoly, which is not a definition I have heard and certainly does not fall under colloquial definitions. Your big rebuttle to it, as far as I can tell, appears to be "Nuh uh, now prove me wrong!!!".
There are plenty of companies that have gotten to monopolistic or near-monopolistic categories without a government declaring it; Microsoft in the 90's, for example, was famously anti-competitive and actually was briefly declared a monopoly (though that was overturned in higher courts). As far as I'm aware, it wasn't the US government that artificially made Microsoft anticompetitive.
Plenty? Let's start with Microsoft. It did not have a monopoly. Apple and Linux computers were available for sale.
Any other examples?
Can't reply to tombert, we're too deeply nested for hacker news, but the Microsoft example is great. The government didn't have anything to do with them being a monopoly? Have you heard of copyright laws? Did you know that Microsoft's whole business depends on the application of copyright laws to software? Did you know copyright protection used to only last for a few years? And then copyright holders lobbied government for longer and longer copyright protection?
Copyright is a government granted monopoly.
Over time, I've come to conclude that copyright should not be a monopoly, or at least the copyright protection shouldn't last more than a handful of years.
Even if I concede all of this, and I really don’t, that doesn’t imply that it was a concerted effort to make Microsoft in particular a monopoly, at least not in the same way that they, for example, made AT&T a monopoly.
Are you suggesting that the existence of laws means that monopolies are inherently government ordained? Great, then that means that the standard oil example still holds.
P.S. you can actually keep replying, there’s just an artificial timer as they get nested. You can actually get around that if you click on the date/time (e.g. “2 hours ago”) and reply directly.
Aha! Neat trick to defeat hacker news's attempt to keep us from having long unproductive conversations. Let's keep it going.
Does it matter if the government purposely ordained the monopoly or stupidly made it possible by extending copyright protections indefinitely? The government is the problem either way and they shouldn't have that much power!
You might want to read "Titan" by Chernow before telling me I am wrong.
Does it though? We've been living through that experiment with elimination of anti-trust and with other libertarian goals being met -- reduction of taxes, introduction of private industry into the public sphere, collection of tolls from public infrastructure, austerity, and general reduction of the size of government. All we've gotten is a replacement of the government with private enterprise. IOW there are a lot of companies out there that provide "public goods" for profit that are some combination of more expensive or lower-quality than the equivalent public services were in the heyday of the US. I think you should agree that without any kind of regulation at all companies are merging into uncontrollable behemoths, and without the ability to meaningfully "vote with our wallets" one of the central tenets of libertarian capitalism is pretty broken. I disagree that the US federal government is responsible for this state of affairs. Rather, the US federal government is taking a pretty strong stance of irresponsibility for this.
We in the US are so very far still from meeting the goals of libertarianism. Even farther than before with our current administration!
The current US government helps big business through a combination of tax breaks, burdensome regulations that small companies can't cope with, buying services (see: SpaceX, Boeing, Palantir, etc.), direct subsidies, tariffs, etc., etc.
With a libertarian government all of that goes away.
> and general reduction of the size of government
What? Seriously? The size of city government, state government, and federal government grows every year in scope, regulations, and spending.
That isn't remotely what libertarianism is.
Doesn't matter what it is in principle.
It certainly is not feudalism.
Yeah, it's corporate-feudalism instead.
To expand, I believe the idea here is that what libertarianism is in principal matters less than what it collapses to in practice, similar to the difference in communism.
And there's a central tension that libertarianism, as far as I'm aware of, doesn't resolve in how to promote individual freedom across a highly economically unequal society.
Trusting those with all the capital to act in anything other than their own best interest doesn't seem a solid foundation.
In a true libertarian society, since it's small government, the government wouldn't help rich people stay rich. You could just declare yourself owner of Tesla, and nobody would stop you except the former owner of Tesla, if he can afford to stop you. Nobody believes in true libertarianism.
If communism is whatever the USSR did, and feudalism is whatever medieval England did, I see no problem asserting that libertarianism is whatever the USA does.
Louder for the marxists in the back.
Remember Cambridge Analytica and PRISM?
I don't think it's unrealistic for state or another party to be taking the decades of data on individuals they have and feeding it into their large hyperscale data centers and using the platforms they own to predict our actions and propagandize us.
Unfortunately, I don't think most people understand it's about mass surveillance yet, but about the misappropriation of resources in lower income communities to power LLMs and/or the intellectual theft and profits off the data used to train LLMs.
Mass surveillance? You could be right.
Government? As others have said, government may well contract it out to private companies. But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better.
People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
They understand that they don't need to care as long as there are enough others getting eaten before them.
> But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear
It's the opposite that is true. Governments can selectively enforce laws against companies based on whether they comply or not, and pay them for whatever they want them to do.
The wealthy and their companies own Congress and the Executive because those positions rely on publicity to be elected, and they own the judiciary because the judges are both aligned with political parties and completely bribeable. They do not, however, exactly own the secret police funded by secret budgets - that's where the real executive lies, and that's where efforts are coordinated and conflicts between powerful blocs are adjudicated.
The performance we get is meaningless. The only important parts of the show we get to watch are following where the money is going and watching who state power is currently killing.
> People understand? You're almost certainly wrong there.
People certainly do understand. The media and the upper-middle class have made it almost a religion to spend their entire political life calling those people crazy. Why have upper-middle class people chosen such a stupid religion? Because a lot of money has been dumped into their stock portfolios.
> But surveillance by private companies who have the government's ear isn't much better
No its much worse. At least democratic governments have some semblance of democratic accountability and of course some inability to work at scale. At worse they can just pay the private company, they generally will have lower capabilities unless they can hit an infinite money glitch (in which case they can use that to pay private companies)
> are often misguided
Dude, they're literally watching Flock Cameras go up in their neighborhood, being told they use AI, and anyone with a brain who can add 2+2 (or read Larry Ellison on "best behavior") concludes these data centers are not merely for ChatGPT.
In which case, they see noise pollution, water pollution, construction pollution, property value damage, utility bill cost explosions; and what's the reward? Surveillance and white-collar job loss, possibly culminating in home loss. With the added irony of corporations saying data centers will create jobs, simultaneously as they run record-breaking layoffs and increase outsourcing. "Misguided."
I agree with you.
Maybe consider my conciliatory rhetoric ("folks here think") in the original post as statement about what I think the vicious and hyper-authoritarian tech bros here believe, namely everything from obviously dumb crap ranging from
- "it's ccp propaganda"
- or "you don't have a right to provacy in public"
- or "the environmental concerns are overblown"
- or "you already have a cellphone so why you bitchin"
- or "it's a private company so you don't have to worry about the gov"
to less arguable but widely held neoliberal premises like "the state has a perogative to do what it wants so if you're not able to participate in the [typically closed] {city council|senate|NSA} decisions that lead here then you have no right to take direct action".
Thus you might understand what I am writing here is an attempt to not trigger the VC bros and to get them to consider that all us unwashed masses might have some kind of point?
I am often not the clearest writer, but the first sentence literally is about what I understand a lot of people on the site to believe, not a statement about what I belive.
People on this site have a highly propagandized view of what (they think of as) the proles think, and I'd like the folks of the site to consider that people really do understand the vicious ends to which these technologies are put, hence the rhetoric.
To be clear, on some level, I think my average no-kings/Tucker-Carson-stan-ing friends can accept the argument that cops will use this tech to give worms to ex-girlfriends. While that should be enough of a reason to reject the tech it really doesn't go far enough into why that tech is objectionable: forcing warrants for the mass-survellience network aren'r really sufficient to remedy my own worries.
From my position, that idea of tech/policy-as-solution is indeed misguided because my deeper worry is that the state will use it for "counter-insurgency". Considering oneself a potential insurgent is foreign to about anyone in US mainline politics. It is, however, what I feel deeply when think about how folks might indeed be "misguided", and I am not sure if you'd agree with that or not. I can read that into a lot of the posts responding above. But that more radical concern not what I wrote about when I wrote that post.
So sure, you're 100% correct and I agree with your point.
I do not think the idea that "folks undrstand the survellience aspect of all this tech" is generally legible to the fascists and other anti-leftist US "centrists" who populate this specific message board- I think the conversation in this thread supports that view.
It's hard to make that point into something they are able to read. I'd still like them to consider it.
Be careful with the shallow dismissals. There's often truth in the isolated statement while it misses the mark in context. Thus dismissing it directly will easily make you look like you don't know what you're talking about.
For example:
> you don't have a right to provacy in public
You don't. That much is simple enough to work out given various highly entrenched cultural and legal values that have stood the test of time. The problem is that a network of surveillance cameras isn't remotely the same thing as an unrelated individual snapping a wide angle photograph of a street that you just so happen to be walking down.
So it's more like we need (but currently don't have) a legally recognized right not to be systematically surveilled in public spaces. Or better yet to make blanket surveillance outright illegal (which would also resolve many of the issues surrounding adtech).
> the environmental concerns are overblown
In many cases they are. In a few they aren't. As usual some businesses in some cases are exploiting holes in the regulations.
I think public sentiment about surveillance is complicated.
People have a lot of fears about being done injury by rogue antisocial actors. Ranging from nuisances like dog shit everywhere, stolen Amazon packages and car break-ins to life-defining traumas like sexual assault. Broader surveillance, in some form, is the first step towards getting traction on these kinds of problems. Leftist commentators prefer the more "grass-roots" varieties like cell phone videos and word-of-mouth name-and-shame campaigns, but, in general, disseminating awareness of antisocial behavior and coordinating a punitive response of some kind is the goal.
I think this internal tension in public opinion pre-dates LLMs, and my personal opinion is that the surveillance applications of AI are secondary drivers of the bipartisan anti-AI sentiment, which is more about revulsion at the possibility of a future where not only "artist" but "mathematician" may be lost as vocations.
The problem is, people who are the most spoken about personal freedom are the ones also voting conservative all the time. The libertarian square is still on the right.
By the time the government overreach starts being used on them, its gonna be too late.
Age old story in human history.
It's projection on your part. The general public (excluding the "very online" subset thereof) is barely even aware of mass surveillance.
Not true. The major rallying cry in my home state is "no more surveillance data centers!"
Which proves they don't know anything because the surveillance is barely related to the data centers.
I mean... Ken Paxton?
Interstate transportation of marijuana is illegal in the US.[1]
But why is DHS doing this? Stopping interstate drug trafficking is DEA's job, and DEA is in the Justice Department, not Homeland Security. Homeland Security should be looking for illegal aliens and labor contractors who move them.
[1] https://federal-criminal.com/drugs/marijuana-cross-border-tr...
Because they want the money. The reason drug crimes are so heavily enforced is because they come with large fines and fees and monetary rewards for the department that arrests them and the courts that prosecute them. They use it as a funding source.
Look at what fines and fees a court gets when they successfully prosecute a murder versus a drug crime. Look at the grants the feds give towards police drug enforcement departments.
DHS wants that easy cash.
They already have a multi 100 billion dollar slush fund from Congress. If they’re doing it for the money then things have really gotten out of hand with internal DHS budgets.
Don't forget about civil forfeiture where the government sues the alleged drug money.
Or punish the companies that hire them knowingly. Why punish the immigrants at all? If they weren’t given jobs they wouldn’t come.
The point is to get workers for low costs, the purpose of the system is what it does. They need the workers, and they need the workers to be scared. If they had no workers they'd have no workers, and if the workers weren't scared they'd have to pay proper wages.
>they need the workers to be scared
See also: US healthcare (typically) being tied to your employer.
...you're not going anywhere, worker.
"Homeland Security" isn't about homeland security, that's a meaningless propaganda name. It's the result of an evil initiative to coordinate all of America's Federal police and secret police agencies that was created after 9/11. It's not CBP/ICE, it sits above them (and everything else.)
It was something that had been warned against by everyone from the beginning of the US having secret police forces, and 9/11 was the excuse to do it. Before DHS, the FBI and the CIA (for example) had to go through protocols to share information with each other. This was good because the CIA aren't allowed to do some things that the FBI is allowed to do, and vice versa. Now they're really all one organization, although they have internal turf battles caused by power struggles between ambitious individuals.
> Putting one of those participant’s phone numbers into WhatsApp reveals a profile picture of a law enforcement patch. A pawn with wings sits in the center, surrounded by lightning bolts. The patch reads, “Laredo Sector Tech Ops PITT,” indicating there is also a Predictive Intelligence Targeting Team in the Laredo Sector.
https://www.aviatorgear.com/p-52057-laredo-sector-tech-ops-p...
I get the vibe they're using ALPRs to identify drivers, and then going from there to find crime? Seems like criminal investigations should start with an actual crime. At the minimum, I would think that there would need to be some suspicion of criminal involvement to obtain a warrant to get financial records. Apparently this administration considers driving down the interstate suspicious enough to toss the constitution out the window.
We've long since transitioned away from "identify the crime and find the person" Law Enforcement to "target the person and find a crime" Law Enforcement.
At long last we have achieved equality. Now everyone can know what it's like to be pulled over for DWB!
>I get the vibe they're using ALPRs to identify drivers, and then going from there to find crime?
This has gone on for a LONG time, but the change to empower it with AI tools that are presumed accurate is the new amplification.
The article doesn't seem to explain why the BP targeted these folks and not other license plates gathered by the reader. Presumably there's some pattern, right?
The violation of privacy and government breaking the social contract is why we must keep developing encryption and cryptocurrencies.
What social contract with those who have chosen to circumvent the Jurisdiction of The United States are you referring to?
You mean the government that has been kidnapping the neighbors with whom I do have a real "social contract"?
I mean, I don't generally think that it's a very useful contact, but of all the things I've studied in my life, taking a long, hard look at the material history of the US government has done teh most to make me think that social relations and responsibilities have nothing do with formal governance.
Has that ever worked in history? I seem to recall that every other fascist government was dealt with a different way.
In what universe does using encryption to evade the government function as a survival strategy?
Real life doesn't work that way. The government always has the $5 wrench. Or, well, the ability to just shut down your ISP.
It is obviously working when the government says it is working too well:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49499394
Do you really think the government only tells you things that are true?
Shutting down the isp doesnt let them read what you've sent. There wouldn't be intensive government efforts to eliminate private encryption if it wasn't effective.
If you're at the point where the CIA is beating you with a $5 wrench, your encryption is working excellently.
That's cold comfort if you'd rather avoid a wrench beating.
Did you know they can just beat you with a wrench anyways?
The "maybe if we do what they say and don't make a fuss they'll be appeased and stop" strategy fails when matched up against those who will never be appeased and stop.
> maybe if we do what they say and don't make a fuss
I never suggested that. Encryption is necessary but not sufficient.
Encrypt your shit. But above all vote, be engaged, and defend your rights like hell. If you're relying on encryption alone to protect you, it's already too late.
Your wording was ambiguous
> In what universe does using encryption to evade the government function as a survival strategy?
Could be read as either
- It functions as a full and complete survival strategy
or
- One of it's functions is as a survival strategy
The former is saying it's all that is needed, the later is saying it's something that can be used in that way (but not saying it's enough). Kind of like saying that food is a human necessity vs saying it is _the_ human necessity.
That was someone else, not me.
I mean we can't help it if metal wrenches are cold... I guess we could ask them to hit them with a blowtorch first?
This tells me you should always pay cash if you are having a beer.
State law in Tennessee requires all alcohol transactors to be ID'd; many retail stores have begun "scanning" the 2D barcode on the state ID's reverse (also for lighters, cough syrup, &c).
If you have a US Passport Card, there is no 2D barcode and your address isn't visible – yet it is still valid ID. I have also had success with placing an "I VOTED" sticker over TN_ID's 2D barcode; if the cashier looks puzzled I'll usually just say "I don't want my ID scanned so I'll just go put this back" – and then I can usually purchase alcohol (without scanless passport).
I always use cash for reasons, even if that is only to not become thousands-more datapoints for some soulless corporate bureucrats' annual dividends.
They'll also never reject a sale from those crazy people who think barcode lasers are radioactive or whatever.
And that's why need to keep using cash and non-KYC'd crypto.
I pay with cash for pretty much all in-person transactions. It's great! Minimal friction, very little tracking risk, works even when the ISP connection or the merchant network is down. You can even use it to pay people who don't use the same apps you do.
I even get discounts for it most places. Highly recommended.
KYC should not be legal to begin with.
KYC stands for Know Your Customer, the regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties.
I think the intellectual position "it should be illegal for institutions transmitting money between two parties to identify either of those parties" might require some kind of logical argument behind it. Are you saying all financial transactions should be anonmyous by law? How would banks function if they were required to be blind to their customers? How would the government prosecute money laundering if all cash-trails went cold after the first time they passed a bank?
I understand people often like to express extreme positions on the Internet, but I think it's pretty easy to see an ideal society has rules somewhere in between "you're not allowed to know your customers" and "you can't accept a penny unless the giver does a blood draw in front of you and is confirmed to be in a central register of DNA".
Explaining the intellectual position without saying that I accept it (my actual views on this are "it's complicated"):
Arguments against KYC usually go hand-in-hand with the belief that AML statutes are a constitutional overreach and grant the federal government powers that they should not have. The logic is that the government's only role is to provide a stable currency and enforce contracts, and that anything else is involving the government in business that it has no business being in. What's done between two consenting parties should remain between two consenting parties.
Note that such a position usually doesn't have a problem with banks having information on their customers, for the purpose of judging credit risks. But it holds that such information should only be used for judging credit risks, ie if you are just depositing and withdrawing money that has already been earned, the bank should be agnostic to this. And they also object to this information being shared with a central clearinghouse where it can be used to cut off all access to the banking system rather than just one specific bank who objects to the source of funds.
> I understand people often like to express extreme positions on the Internet, but I think it's pretty easy to see an ideal society has rules somewhere in between "you're not allowed to know your customers" and "you can't accept a penny unless the giver does a blood draw in front of you and is confirmed to be in a central register of DNA".
Yeah. This often results in ludicrous positions.
On the other hand, EFT flattens scale. Physical cash gets harder to handle in large quantities. Electronic money does not. It's equally easy to transfer a billion as a cent. So it's hard to get situations where small amounts have privacy and large amounts have scrutiny.
> I think the intellectual position "it should be illegal for institutions transmitting money between two parties to identify either of those parties" might require some kind of logical argument behind it.
This is both a straw man position and begs the question. KYC laws aren't the option to identify either party, it's the requirement to identify both. The default throughout pretty much the whole of human history across cultures has been not having KYC laws. A logical and compelling argument must be made for implementing and unholding such laws.
> Are you saying all financial transactions should be anonmyous by law?
The anti-KYC position is that it should be possible for some financial transactions to be anonymous by law.
> How would banks function if they were required to be blind to their customers?
While they would not be required to be blind, most have been and by default would like to be. Maintaining identity records reliably tying people to transactions is a significant burden for banks for exactly the same reason it would be an incredible burden on you to keep track of which atm/cashier/couch cushion every dollar in your wallet came from.
Some banks may nevertheless consider the option a net positive, and require their customers to provide identification. People would be able to choose if they want to use those banks or not. If the benefits get passed along to the consumer, many likely would choose to.
> How would the government prosecute money laundering if all cash-trails went cold after the first time they passed a bank?
Presumably by going after the criminal infrastructure handling the money before it passed a bank. Giving up privacy rights tends to make law enforcement easier, but it is a common and reasonable opinion that we should not be trying to maximize the ease of law enforcement at the expense of privacy.
> KYC laws aren't the option to identify either party, it's the requirement to identify both.
But they didn't say KYC laws should be repealed, they said KYC should be illegal. Meaning it should be illegal to identify either party.
Call me old school, but money should be as free as the bank note - untraceable and anyone getting it could use it freely.
You know exactly what he means.
> the regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties.
There is much more to it than that. If that were all KYC was, it wouldn't need regulations, because banks would need to do it anyway.
I've had banks straight out ask me, on the phone, what a wire transfer that I executed via their online system was for. And unlike, say, a traffic stop where when the cop starts fishing for things unrelated to the stop, you can exercise your right to remain silent, in the banking scenario the consequences for that can be losing access to your account, losing funds, and everything that follows from that.
Some of the info required by KYC:
* Why the customer wants an account
* Expected types of transactions
* Expected source and approximate volume of funds
* For businesses, the nature of the business and expected banking activity
* Source of funds
This can all translate into very invasive questions, especially when you do something that a computer system or middle manager thinks is suspicious, like sending money to your mother in another country.
> I've had banks straight out ask me, on the phone, what a wire transfer that I executed via their online system was for
Wire transfers are also a common source of fraud; it's common for banks to ask about them so their customers don't unwittingly send their money into a black hole
That might make sense if the bank wasn't also acting as an agent for the government, with potentially severe, life-changing consequences if they hear something they don't like.
If the question was purely for my protection, then I could simply answer "I don't wish to share that information."
But I can't actually answer like that, because it's too risky.
There's also no option to opt out of such investigations. I didn't request the bank to protect me from my own actions. When there's a credit card transaction that they suspect is fraudulent, they ask "did you authorize that transaction?" That's fine, and that's all they need to know. Asking me who I'm paying and why, with implied duress, is a completely unwarranted violation of my privacy.
There's also a serious issue with an assumption of guilt in these cases. Look at the case of Donald Trump right now, suing Capital One because they closed over 300 Trump business accounts due to suspected money laundering. In Trump's case, I can well believe that there was some kind of corruption, money laundering, or other criminal activity going on. The man is a documented criminal. But the bank is making a decision to penalize someone, potentially severely, without any meaningful due process. Guilty until proven innocent. For someone without the resources Trump has to challenge something like that, what chance do they have of getting a fair outcome?
This is all completely unacceptable in a supposedly civilized society, and you should not be defending it.
> If the question was purely for my protection, then I could simply answer "I don't wish to share that information."
Fraudsters would tell you to answer the question by saying "I don't wish to share that information." but the bank would still be on the hook for paying you back from the fraudster.
In a sane society, though, you could say "I'm buying wholesale drugs to distribute on the street" and then bank wouldn't care.
I suspect the argument is more the particular KYC required by American law, eg, as long as your bank can identify you as a particular customer, they shouldn’t be required to collect certain information by law.
Though if I were going to rant, it would be about how constructive surveillance, such as requiring banks keep certain records and then claiming those records aren’t protected from search because they’re third party business records and not those of a private citizen, would be a much higher priority to fix.
Right: We must distinguish between:
1. "The business-model of being an anonymous fence of stolen goods is prohibited."
2. "You have to give us access to all your records at any time on the flimsiest of pretexts, and we'll charge you with a crime if you don't keep it ultra-secret that we even approached you."
"regulations that require institutions moving money between two parties to positively identify each of those two parties"
Any such kind of regulation is not compatible with financial privacy. Maybe you could argue corporations don't deserve financial privacy, but an individual should have the right to send money to someone without being spied on the same way they should have the right to send a private communication to someone without being spied on.
I agree. If I gave my mother $1000 cash nobody is expecting receipts and records. But if I send it through a bank or payment processor? Now all of a sudden im under suspicion of some bs terrorist or drug law violation.
KYC is necessary because you do not want for money laundering to be easy. Nor sanctions avoiding, nor terrorist sponsoring.
The criminal money and money laundering has been researched since 19th century. It has stayed at constant 2-5% of world GDP. However the cost of compliance has gone up exponentially.
Today banks use $250B/year on KYC checks. You could fix the world hunger and still have $50B leftover money with this amount.
The board of directors recognizes the cost savings and immediately start solving world hunger. Meanwhile a gangster in Moldova intrinsically knows that world money laundering has hit 5% GDP and decides not to.
It's not a fair comparison. Money laundering controls likely have also been implemented since the 19th century in some way shape or form. Therefore, that 2-5% figure also includes the effect of those controls. This might just the natural equilibrium below which the juice is no longer worth the squeeze.
Access to information and interconnectedness have also increased exponentially so it might make sense that the costs have increased proportionately.
Finally 200B/year would not solve world hunger if nefarious actors grift away most of that money (especially because you wouldn't be able to track them with out some form of KYC)
You also have to ask if money laundering is bad enough of a crime to warrant all of the overkill responses to it. At some point the medicine becomes worse than the disease. Lawmakers tend to get into these inescapable loops:
Crime X exists -> Try solution Y -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y0 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y1 -> Crime X still exists -> Try harsher solution Y2...
Maybe, but you also have to recognize that organized crime is a system. Easier money laundering will necessarily incentivize and enable more crime.
> Crime X exists -> Try solution Y ...
I think the problem here might be that while Crime by its definition might be the same, the way that it is executed changes drastically so Solution Y/Y0/Y1/Y2 are not required to exist in terms of severity (very likely solution Y was severe enough if you were tried and convicted of the crime) but they are needed because the way Crime X is executed changes (especially this Crime X)
Hard disagree, low level crimes should not be so heavily enforced. A bit of blackmarket activity is not only beneficial but neccessary for any stable economy. It can't be allowed at mass scale, but you can't effectively micromanage every transaction and account for every situation for every single good or dollar.
It's rich coming from a person affected by ukrainian propaganda that is one of the most corrupt countries in Europe. Maybe you should back your opinion with facts. Citation is desperately needed.
How am I affected by Ukranian propaganda? And how does Ukranian corruption relate to.. money laundering?
> Maybe you should back your opinion with facts. Citation is desperately needed
That you don't want to make money laundering too easy? What exactly are you looking for as a citation here? "Crime bad"?
Why should our rights be restricted when law enforcement is impotent?
Who decides who we're sanctioning and who is a "terrorist"? Not me, that's for sure! My money is my business and I don't need the state nanny watching who I send it to.
Southern Poverty Law Center decides:
> Government should require regular, mandatory reporting by technology service providers to document abuse of their systems including financial support of violence, harassment, and terrorism.This includes implementation of mandatory financial abuse reporting requirements for internet services operating in the United States, including social media services, infrastructure providers, banking institutions, cryptocurrency exchanges, crowdfunding sites, video streaming platforms, and the like.
> [These companies] should be required to investigate and report the details of harms and abuse of their service. There should be … penalties applied to services that refuse these tracking and reporting responsibilities.
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/nonprofit-indicted-ba...
I just tried to pay my elderly neighbors cell phone bill here in California. I will spare you the details. Is all of this really required?
It reminds me of a time when credit and credit cards were flying fast. Large losses started appearing on consumer credit accounts by the tens of thousands. A casual look into it indicated that it was the employees and leaders of the sector, who read and understood the credit agreement that put liability ultimately on the company. The actual credit card employees, adjacent accountants, quick witted cons, all siphoning money from credit cards in very large numbers. Why say this? Actual customers with increasing security requirements were largely not at all involved with the growing fraud. It was the participants in the credit industry seizing the opportunity to steal, with relative impunity. Things have changed and changed again since then with scale, local rules, fraud detection systems etc.
The point of the rant is that ordinary people's rights are squeezed, privacy vanishes, routine humiliating document production and security, required because the people in the industry that created those is cheating.
Yes of course there is cheating on taxes over tip money, or no-show jobs for relatives.. but what kind of society is being built with constant oversight into ordinary people's activity ?
cash indeed
In practice, KYC does little to stop any of that — but does do a lot to enable mass surveillance and oppression.
> In practice, KYC does little to stop any of that
Source? The fact that it's not infallible doesn't mean that it's ineffective.
Here is a good book on the topic of ineffectiveness of anti-money laundering:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DVLLL1X3?lv=shuf&channelId=500&p...
Podcast if you do not want to buy the book:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2026-09-08/odd-lots-wh...
They route through all kinds of intermediaries that handle the banking by proxy — eg, as we saw in the Panama Papers and similar leaks.
Reporting $600 in CashApp isn’t about stopping cartels, terrorists, etc; it’s about harassing sex workers and street dealers, profiling side businesses, etc.
when terrorism can be defined as "having a book" and can result in indefinite detention without charge or access to an attorney maybe i'm not 100% gung-ho by default on everything labelled anti-terrorism
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49481385
But that’s also a data point and could/will be flagged as suspicious behaviour. Opting out of the norm makes you identifiable just as much.
I want crypto to work like cash so bad, but in practice it's too complicated for your average person and I'm not sure anyone has the incentive to make it simple.
Monero works like cash and there's nothing complicated to get the privacy. With QR codes it's not bad but sync time and 20 minute confirmation is a convenience proble.
If you have a tab they have to let you pay the tab with cash because a tab is a debt and cash is legal tender. Do bars still do tabs though?
You know Zelle and venmo already won the arms race when every person selling meat cooked over open flame on the side of the road is set up for that and not crypto.
With Monero it doesn't matter for future transaction privacy if it's KYCed just like it doesn't matter for cash. Financial institutions know you have purchased Monero like if you withdrew cash from an ATM, but then it goes off their radar.
I wonder if we are at the point its safer to just cash your entire paycheck? I mean people's cards get skimmed or numbers leaked all the time. Maybe not under your mattress but some other hidy spot a thief will never find your cash, but the risk is probably nonzero for every debit/creidt card holder that they will not experience some fraud. Muggings are also simpler if you are cashed based. You get mugged with cash on you, that's it, that's the extent of the damage just whatever bills you had on you. You get mugged with your cards on you, good luck cancelling them quickly with that banking app on your phone the thief also stole off you.
I no longer have a credit card (nor cell phone [nor email]), so everything is cash or crypto (USA forty-something male). Semi-retired datacenter electrician.
As for "wrench attacks," mine is mostly held in offsite multi-signatures, so good luck (to us both!) on your attack. Multiple hidden guns might help here.
I'm increasingly finding businesses that simply don't accept cash. Want a beer at the Clippers game? Can't pay with cash. Even a local bar near my house stopped accepting cash about a year ago - a bar!
Good luck with that...
https://schwartzcohenlaw.com/can-police-lawfully-seize-your-...
Civil asset forfeiture is banned in Maine, Montana, New Mexico, and North Carolina from a quick search.
Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus.
Everyone's 401k: 100% TNEX
In the UK they passed laws a few decades ago allowing people to be surveilled, called RIPA. It was marketed as something necessary to catch terrorists and major criminals, that would only be used for those purposes.
Within a few years local councils were using it for highly trivial things like fly-tipping, littering, and checking people lived in school catchment areas.
This kind of stuff always trickles down.
Minority Report anyone?
unquestionably, which is weird, because you asked a question!
I remember back in ye olde dark ages when "big data" was the hot buzzword people of a certain bent couldn't get enough of this kind of stuff. Everyone was jacking off nonstop to the idea that we could just hoover up everyone's data ad then "efficiently" or "proactively" dispatch enforcement resources. People talked all sorts of big talk about stuff like cross referencing people's Home Depot spend with permit requirements, identifying small businesses that don't have healthy enough financials to be fully compliant, cross referencing invoices and delivery receipts to identify overloaded trucks, and generally finding all sorts of ways to fine the crap out of people for the pettiest of petty deviance. They considered this a noble goal.
Everyone's head was too far up their asses to look at the magic crystal ball called "history" and realize that such systems and tactics would be used to go after <checks notes> weed dealers and brown people.
Be careful what you wish for I guess.
The people you're talking about probably still consider that a noble goal, though. In fact some of the people like that are CEOs of tech companies.
The Precogs don't see what you're gonna do, they see what you're gonna do if you're not stopped.
This comes straight out of Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism book. If you haven't: read it.
> The DHS document obtained by 404 Media shows that Border Patrol is analyzing the financial activity of Americans to find people to pull over...
> It is not clear how exactly Border Patrol is monitoring Americans’ financial activity.
Can anyone take a guess how they are monitoring financial activity?
Buying it from CapitalOne like everyone else?
Is CapOne unique among banks and sells data that e.g. Chase and Citi don't?
spending taxpayer money on buying the taxpayers data from credit card companies.
imagine paying someone to buy your own information to spy on you, pretty incredible system that we've come up with
Explicitly bypasses your rights too! Cops don't need a warrant if they can buy it with your money.
This is exactly "information retrieval charges" from the film "Brazil"
I worked a little on a finsec program in the early 90s. I had an anonymized dataset with bank account deposits and withdrawals and credit card transactions. I don't know how complete it was, but dividing by the US population the total number of records made it pretty feasible that it was the whole thing.
OpenAI swarm incident is just good practice
Garry Tan's dream coming true.
I saw a film about this…
I'm come to realize that movies and literature have nearly 0 ability to warn the people about what can could come to pass and why it is bad.
"We're proud to announce today that we're rolling out a trial phase of the Torment Nexus, as made famous in the scifi novel and accompanying film entitled 'Whatever You Do, Do Not Create the Torment Nexus'."
I live in Europe.
I’ve been under investigation for money laundering twice in the last three years - not because I’ve laundered a single dime, but because I have no discernible employment and move large capital sums around the globe almost constantly, and my bank accounts and tax returns inarguably look fucking weird. All 100% above board - I just made some good investments a while back.
I even had the feds come knocking because they decided they needed to check I wasn’t trafficking narcotics. We had a nice chat, they decided they didn’t need to search the place, and six months later I got a letter confirming the case had been archived. Like one of the folks in the article, I had weed on me when they rocked up. Thankfully, in Europe, that’s basically just a “shrug” by law enforcement, unless you’ve got clear intent to distribute. From how it all went, they had quite clearly decided this was a waste of their fucking time before they even arrived.
None of this is a good thing, and none of it is terribly new, either - reporting on finances has been going on for decades, but the integration is getting tighter.
The main problem as I see it is that it has a horrendous false positive rate, and you end up with innocent folks like yours truly having to waste their time and energy proving that they are innocent of a crime that a machine dreamt up.
It does sound like you should have been investigated though. Like, this sounds like the (or a) system working. What would the alternatives be? Don't investigate for money laundering? Or have so much info that they can eliminate you as interesting without even having a visit?
Wait for actual evidence of a crime (or even an anonymous tip) instead of going on a fishing expedition targeting anyone with an unusual lifestyle or weird spending habits?
I’m sure we could just put always-on cameras in every house to catch criminals too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
> I’m sure we could just put always-on cameras in every house to catch criminals too, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.
I use this type of point all the time, and every time to blank stares.
Me> The Flock surveillance network is bad - it is an invasion of privacy and gives way too much power to people that should not have that power. It _can_ be used to solve crimes, and does. But so could not allowing anyone out of their house without a permit. But that, too, would be stupid and harm society
Them> _blank stare_ But.. it saved a child once.
There is no evidence that Flock has ever saved a child once.
I’m not sure that informants are the way to go either. More often than not in history, this has just been used as a tool to mess with the lives of people you do not like.
False positives are never a _should_ thing, they're a "best we can do, and worth the cost" thing (or not). It's entirely reasonable to push for a better system, one with fewer false positives (and false negatives).
I think finding better systems with fewer false negatives and fewer false positives is very difficult and might even be impossible for many things. It might be my lack of imagination, but I often think about the measures taken to prevent child abuse. As I see it, you’re either going to get kids left in abusive situations or you’re going to have kids unjustly removed. Both are terrible. I’m not going to argue where the action bias should be. We live in an imperfect world.
I think preventing other crimes is similar. There will always be injustice on some side of the issue. And I’m not trying to argue that that means the status quo is great! But I don’t think we will eventually hone in a perfect system. Maybe just circle around some imaginary point, refining rules and processes until the whole thing breaks down.
Even if we can't find ways to improve, we should continue to try.
The actual money launderers don’t leave honking great big digital footprints everywhere, and so aren’t found by these systems.
palantir?
it's called malfeasance
One more reason the bail on the Visa/MC network asap
To what? Straight cash? Or do you have an alternate network?
Nothing global yet, but europe's regional wero network is making progress. Russia, China, India, Brazil etc all have national ones too.
It's late and slow but everyone is realizing that it's a good idea to move away from the US
Cash is still king. You have to figure all potential networks are backdoored by intelligence. They have things they could do with cash too but its a lot more real work no one has the budget to scale out compared to what you can do at scale in the digital space, thanks to the fact that it is a fungible physical entity already set loose on all corners of the earth.
Buy something or get out! /s
Another headline to trigger the comrades.
Do you not realize that all countries monitor capital movement so that, for example, the rulings of their judiciaries are enforced?
Wouldn't the comrades want financial activity to be monitored, to make sure that nobody is getting more then everyone else? (unless they're a party official, of course)
i have a feeling neither of you actually know what the comrades want
The comrades in the US want the existing system removed. So, for now, while it remains, they want no policing, no oversight, no enforcement because weak governance advances their goals. Later, when the system is replaced with their preferred system, they will want maximum policing, maximum enforcement, maximum purges of undesirable elements because strong governance advances their goals.
This behavior isn't a flaw, it's a feature.
Do you not realize last remnants of privacy died years ago?
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
FUD - the article literally says they don’t where the data came from.
Why should we not fear the government using data (any data, but especially incorrect data) to make up thought crimes?
Maybe we read different articles? This one suggests a drug dealer’s money laundering set off alarms that he was a drug dealer.
What's wrong with that?