"These kind of people" might come across as wrong to a few, which is completely fair and justified. But as you said - "getting them back to Earth" is a wrong idea. That implies that current situation is completely fine and these people are eccentrics, which is most definitely not correct. Rather than silencing a few who speak their minds and getting things back to (ab)normal; we need to find our own ideas on how things can be fixed, if not by the ideology proposed by such people.
We need to collectively work towards a solution than silencing a few.
“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. government can’t pay its own bills. ... I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.” — Then-Sen. Barack Obama, floor speech in the Senate, March 16, 2006
> His statement mirrors what venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said last year, when he proclaimed, "I love gridlock!"
I doubt Marc Andreessen loved gridlock when he was working on Mosaic @ the NCSA
> The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering.
Yup. I was watching a video about the history of BSD recently and I was surprised at how closely DARPA was involved. Marshall McCusick was describing how he, Bill Joy and others were at Berkeley and literally implementing the Internet in BSD! They were funded by DARPA and were overseen by DARPA admnistrators. But they actually were not doing all of it -- DARPA was also paying private contractors for other components. (Which ended up in some technical disagreements as I recall.)
That BSD code is of course not only the foundation of the Internet, but of your iPhones and iPads as well. Actually I believe it is fundamental to Windows as well, since my understanding is that the TCP/IP implementation in Windows is BSD code.
Silicon Valley doesn't have the foresight for the technical foundations of society (and I say that having worked here for over a decade). The web wasn't invented by Silicon Valley either. Neither was e-mail. Neither was Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby. Python was actually government funded too.
Also don't forget that Bill Clinton and the government made all your location-based apps possible, by opening GPS satellites to the public in the 90s.
historic significance does not matter much. what it is doing now?
it is no wonder that someone who has private transportation, private insurance, private retirement, private everything... does not care about government. he is the embodiement of the capitalistic dream. government for those people is only for taxation. of course they would cheer.
the weird part is the middle class worker with the obama bumper sticker cheering for them. this i will never understand,
Key quotes around 8:30 - 9:00, but the whole thing is excellent. DARPA was funding all sorts of different networking and operating systems, which in those days were all incompatible. But they wanted them to cooperate, hence open source BSD and the Internet.
Silicon Valley doesn't get this kind of cooperation. In stark contrast, a proven business tactic is to undermine cooperation by poisoning open standards (e.g. embrace and extend).
As I recall, an ATT executive, when hearing about the early plans for ARPAnet, said something along the lines of "it can't work, and if it could, we'll be damned if we help create a competitor to ourselves".
It's not because the Internet was started by the DARPA that it's still the DARPA that controls it all. History only matters to some point until it does not matter anymore.
Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence, and capital structures that matter.
That doesn't sound like a better world. That sounds like a worse one. Governments tend to at least have some interest in keeping their citizens alive, healthy, and happy.
The primary purpose of a company is to make money and as history has shown time and time again companies in general are all too willing to sell people dangerous products, work their employees to death, and do other unsavory things in order to make money.
Sure the US government is seeming ineffective, and in many cases less than satisfactory. But a system in which companies have the power definitely isn't better.
But what gives the politicians the incentives to care about We the people? I'm just trying to challenge the notion that government inherently cares about The People because it's chartered to do so, whereas companies supposedly are chartered to care about only themselves.
Another way to think about it is to ask "Where does the incentive come from to keep members of your family alive, healthy, and happy?"
A government defines a group of people who tend to have some sort of patriotic emotional bond with each other, much like the emotional bond that ties a family together. This is why people all across America felt the pain of the 9/11 attacks despite the fact that realistically the vast majority of us did not have family members or friends that died in the attack.
At a fundamental level this patriotic bond alone seems to make the majority of governments considerably more altruistic toward their citizens than a company would be towards their customers.
After all the leaders of government are also citizens with that bond of shared country and patriotism that they share with other citizens. In a company there is a much larger "us and them" divide between people in the company and people the company is selling to.
So in this light the grandparent's response of "We the People" though short is pretty meaningful and accurate. Governments tend to have interest in their citizens because of this patriotic bond which says that both the leaders and the ordinary citizens are "We the People".
Accountability to the electorate isn't just theoretical. Politicians are faced with elections every 2, 4 or 6 years. No, this isn't a perfectly efficient model of accountability, but there's been this meme going around recently that electoral accountability simply doesn't exist, which is just ridiculous. You don't even have to go hunting for examples: the dramatic shift in who held the power in the recent debt ceiling/shutdown hostage negotiations was 100% because of the way polls were shaping up. Contrast that with the 2011 shutdown when 1) Obama was facing an election and thus had to tread more carefully and 2) public opinion was split roughly equally against both sides. In that case Republicans were able to extract relatively significant concessions based entirely on the fact that Obama didn't want to blow up the world economy (depending on your level of cynicism, perhaps because he knew that he'd get flak for it in the upcoming election).
tl;dr: Gov't isn't assumed to care about the people's needs "because it's chartered to do so", but rather because they have specific and explicit dependencies on public approval. By contrast, companies have an explicit dependency on their customers (and shareholders). Everyone else and the externalities that they face are completely irrelevant as far as incentive structures for a company.
Well for what it's worth, I don't think it's a new meme, it's probably as old as libertarianism itself.
I'm glad your argument isn't about how the government is supposed to represent The People "at least in theory", I find that one rather funny given how people of my stripe are usually accused of only thinking in theory.
As much as I want to, I can't convince myself of the aforementioned meme wholesale, there must be some counterbalance or we'd all be slaves. But I want people to break out of what at least seems to me to be the notion that while private companies are selfishly motivated, they can invent the institution called government that's free of perverse incentives and selfishness just because they think society needs it to function.
Your point about nationwide approval of the government versus specific approval of companies is a good one. Consider some counterpoints: 1) the politicians need not pander to everyone, only those who care to vote. 2) expanding on the reluctance to bother voting, there's reluctance to be informed, since your vote had miniscule chance of effecting your life. It's known as rational ignorance, Bryan Caplan has a lot to say about it if you're interested in looking it up. In contrast, choosing one company over another always has immediate effect.
The sole interest come from the their own interest. It's a career. A politician has to do something to keep themselves elected. So if they can keep enough supporters alive, they will be re-elected.
A small group of people who have decided that government is ineffective have managed to get themselves elected with the help of a couple billionaires and have managed to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as long as a small group of people who have decided that government is ineffective are in power, that government will be ineffective.
Any time you hear "profits are X" remember that is the vocabulary used by our aristocrats as shorthand for "standards of living for the proletariat are X."
In other words, we should be grateful for the gifts blessed upon us, rather than greedy children asking for a seventh or eighth serving of ice cream.
What specific power(s) do you object to companies having? The power to voluntarily exchange with others?
Companies don't make money killing people, they make money improving the lives of customers and employees by offering them something they value more than their money/labor. If someone is working under poor working conditions, it's because their next best alternative is even worse.
I think I understand your point, but the statement has been falsified many times throughout history. Many corporations have prospered on human misery and death.
Often with government backing. The modern nation-state is founded on the premise that the state has a monopoly on physical force; it is hard for a corporation to cause misery and death without that.
I would be more scared about cozy relationships between government and corporations. That is when you get the most egregious offenses, eg. British East India Company + Great Britain vs. India and China, oil companies + US vs. the Middle East, Chinese government + Baidu in censoring their own people, Blackwater Associates + US in Iraq, etc. It is sometimes good to have the interests of corporations and government diametrically opposed, because that means they are not conspiring against the people they serve.
This is why we have regulations, by the way. So when amoral idiots find themselves in a position to do serious harm, there's some external force to compensate (as much as possible) for their lack of suitable ethics and working moral compasses.
If by regulations you mean enforcing property rights and laws against murder, I agree.
In a free market the initiation of force is not tolerated. The Bhopal disaster you cited is a perfect example of an initiation of force.
The government legitimizes the initiation of force on those who have done nothing to violate the rights of others -- similar to the disaster you cited. It seems you have a problem with companies initiating force, but not the government. Why is that?
> That doesn't sound like a better world. That sounds like a worse one. Governments tend to at least have some interest in keeping their citizens alive, healthy, and happy.
Oh really ? Are you really so naive? I'm sure the people in Syria and Libya are certainly happy about what their government is doing for them. Oh, and in modern democracies, apart from raising taxes every year and making more debt for the future generations to come, I fail to see the "good deeds" provided by governements.
But it it makes you happy, I guess that's what matters.
Yeah all those poor mopes on food stamps should just starve to death. What have they ever done for you, right? Fuck everyone except yourself, that's the way to a successful and balanced society!
Haha, I always like the allergic reaction where one guy pulls a strawman. By the way, you ought to read Losing Ground on the negative effects of the Welfare system. ANd this came from a guy who wanted to sum up the positive effects of it in the first place, who ended up being shocked by the data he gathered.
Your sarky and condescending parent comment made it clear that you believe the US government is useless and should be abolished. As you did not propose any alternative support systems, this would mean starvation for those on food stamps.
That's not a strawman, comrade - that's called a logical conclusion.
For your information, I don't think government should be abolished, I'm rather a partisan of small-government more than anything else. The government still has some roles to take care of, but I am certainly not a big fan of government-sponsored welfare and I have provided you with some material to read to further understand my point of view.
I don't really know why you focus so much on food stamps (which I never mentioned - that's why I called your comment a strawman- i.e. "informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position" which is exactly the case here), and do not focus on any of the points I raised in my first comment above. If you don't even bother making a point...
A person's desire to not want to fund extreme violence of states and to not want funding obtained by the threat of violence are two ethical positions that are wholly separate from whether said person wishes to promote social welfare through nonviolent means. In a more humane society, all social safety nets would be decoupled from the institutions and industries of force, violence, and war.
What of the people on food stamps, you ask.
They are very important people. They matter. People in need of food and shelter are of deep concern to many people. It's good of you to ask such a fundamental question. Social welfare is critical in many areas. However, the means by which it exists is open to great evolution. Peaceful transitions are critical. Increasing the amount of care in the world and increasing the ways with which people can leverage their individual and collective power (not through violent systems) is critical. Likewise, it's critical -- to many people -- to reject systems and methods one cannot ethically abide by, and to not increase the size and scope of what one recognizes as the unbridled power of suited machines and ulterior, menacing interests.
If you actually care about what someone else thinks, you shouldn't make statements for him or her. For instance, at the very least, you could've instead asked, "Are you proposing that the state should wither away? Do you think the only other way food can be provided is by it trickling down?"
That would've still been a leap to conclusion from what I said, or possibly display a lack of understanding of what I said, but at least it'd be your asking.
I would've asked you to elaborate on what you mean by a state withering away. There's a difference between social safety nets in the context of free choice vs. involuntary constraint. There's a difference between "the state" at present vs. how "the state" can be reformed to justify itself to more humane roles. Finding major faults with [current state systems] is not the same thing as believing [all state systems] must vanish. I would've explained how I'm an advocate of peaceful, open systems wherever the public's trust is at stake. Territorial systems can have net positives in certain domains, such as in violent crime. However, the current system of US criminal law/code is devastatingly unethical. (I find nothing ethical about imprisoning human beings for nonviolent crime, especially when it's a state serving corporate law.) At best, the US system is a stepping stone best understood in historical context, for people of good conscience to step above on a path to something better.
I would've wondered why you're implying that the alternative to food stamps is food "trickling down" [from the rich]. The status quo of US taxation is very akin to "trickle-down" economics. Mass forced funding of a public -> flows into centralized pools governed by small bodies who have the capacity to serve personal, secret, and corporate interests in often closed contracts and closed courts -> devaluing and siphoning value and labor -> distributed fractionally to a public that waits for crumbs to flow back (hopefully) to people in need, pennies to the dollar. It's one of many forms of trickle down economics; it's a form that happens to overlook a great amount violence and corruption of the system by increasingly putting society at the mercy of the system. Nationalists, large corporations, prison systems, and warmongers love it though. The answer to your non-question here is that what I want society to aspire to is ultimately neither approaches -- for both are violent and narrow. We can do better. My aspiration for a freer, more peaceful society is not a switch I can flip on and off. It does, however, start with at least promoting peace and benevolence in culture, for people to begin to aspire to social problems solved by more directly open, fuller democratic (when democratic), voluntary, consensus-based models. Where there are pooled resources, I prefer that they be within a transparency that's more likely to arise when people are able to revoke funding, disassociate, and take part in reformation. The ability to assemble and disassemble is one area where a state can play a greater role in: preventing people from suffering the tyranny of involuntary systems.
My views are not binary. Presume nothing. I ethically value systems that cut out corrupt interests and increase free choice. I like more bottom-up solutions. It requires time. I choose to be a part of increasing the amount of social support on an ethical, voluntary basis by showing people that their actions can have definitive, accountable results and real-world feedback. I strive for a continued cultural shift in how people can empower themselves. Nothing happens overnight. Like I said, I don't want to flip any switches on people most in need.
I want peaceful evolution.
Most of my time is focused tirelessly on a project in this area. I hope to someday help people act upon their better and freer instincts. The least of what I can say ...
You are the first libertarian I've talked with who actually has a coherent philosophy and positive ethical intent backing up their statements. Respect.
Thank you. I respect you for caring, likewise. I suspect you'd be pleasantly surprised, and might I even say inspired, by possibilities that can and will exist. Though it's a small number of people to a whole, I see many more people stepping outside boundaries of depressive political ideologies that this current system promotes. You may come to find that you have more in common with 'liberators,' especially where it matters in human rights and ethics, than with those who currently claim to represent some supposed interests.
I'm not a libertarian, by the way. You could've called me a true/classical liberal and have been just as accurate. I don't mind the term voluntaryist occasionally. It declares a healthy focus, which I like: consensual interaction. I'm sure that term will be deluded too.
Placing a political label on oneself or another is a sure way to be misunderstood and derided once that label is used by even one other person who doesn't share one's views. Terms like liberal, conservative, libertarian, democrat, and republican are inept. Today, few proclaimed "liberals" seek to truly "liberate" people from oppressive systems. Today, few proclaimed "conservatives" seek to conserve "liberty." Now these labels sometimes help to exemplify those who are possibly inclined to cling to parties or ideology rather than ascend to their own humanity, mindfulness, skepticism, self-assessment, openness to diverse thoughts, and change/growth.
Call me a person.
It will do for now. I hope you'll stay in touch. :)
Read the first paragraph. Executives are expressing concerns on their influence over Republican, primarily over the Tea Party. As TP is constantly fighting with the other Republicans, these executives see poor prospect in Republican's re-election.
Take immigration for example. Sure SV excutives have moved a bunch of people to start working on the immigration reform bill early this year, the group is broken. I believe all but one Republican is left in the group of 7 drafting the bill. Which means the bill will not get through neither House nor Senate in the next 6-12 months unless the seven congressmen sit together again.
Surely government is relying on the Internet to spread their agenda and is constantly working with new startup to make government operation "more efficient", but these people, IMHO, don't really make politicians move.
On the other hand, bankers continuously influence economic policy. This is an extremely specialized area (and since Federal Reserve board is made up of bankers around the country).
SV is still not close enough. They shake a President's hand, but that's pretty much it.
>That doesn't sound like a better world. That sounds like a worse one.
It sounds like a dystopian cyberpunk nightmare. And who better to lead us into the world of High Tech and Low Life than Silicon Valley Zaibatsus? I can never really tell when art and life are imitating each other.
The cyberpunk genre has existed for almost three decades. His embrace of the fears of that dystopian movement is pretty disconcerting.
Not to mention inaccurate. Companies are certainly powerful, but what is the power or influence of Silicon Valley compared to the titans of industry such as IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon, and yes, the financial firms and banks of NYC?
This is a ridiculous article. It leaps from a couple of government-critical comments to declaring a "fetish" for "dysfunction"? Based on what, exactly? Why aren't the people tirelessly defending the clusterfuck that is democratic government in most of the western world the fetishists?
And for the comments on this thread suggesting that silicon valley can't be critical of government because government once had a hand in the valley? That's roughly the same level of hypocrisy as a government-fan shopping at Walmart.
I am curious about: "That's roughly the same level of hypocrisy as a government-fan shopping at Walmart."
I try not to engage in political discussions on HN so please do not interpret my question as me challenging your point. I am merely interested in what you find hypocritical in the Wal-Mart shopping example.
Somebody in favour of the government benefiting from the services of the private market = not very hypocritical at all. Just like I don't think it's very hypocritical for someone who once worked for a company that got a subsidy from the government to be against the government.
We live in the world we live in, and failing to live a perfectly pure life should not disqualify you from having opinions.
For all the rhetoric in the article, Mr. Roose never actually refutes this belief:
"For them, government is mostly a hindrance — a regulatory obstacle to the kinds of disruptive start-ups they fund, and an enemy of a looser immigration policy that would allow their portfolio companies to recruit more talented foreign engineers."
Kevin Roose clearly misunderstands what "functioning" means in Congressional terms. Perhaps he was absent on the day that his 4th grade class learned:
- The Executive branch enforces laws.
- The Judicial branch interprets laws.
- The Legislative branch makes laws.
Think about that: The Legislative branch's ONLY JOB is to make laws. Now, I'm a big-government-loving bleeding heart liberal, but even I have to admit that it's completely ridiculous to put 535 people representing 3.8 million square miles of land into one building for 11 months out of every year for the sole purpose of making new laws. How could you not end up with tons of unnecessary cruft and bloat?
What this means is that the only time we aren't adding more restrictions to our lives is when Congress is gridlocked. Gridlock is the system functioning as designed. What's not to love about it? We don't want a government that moves fast and breaks things. For startups and lean companies, it can be a real pain in the ass! It's hard enough to keep up with compliance issues when you're just starting out; having to change your policies every 6 months due to the whims on Congress would be practically anti-business.
I personally believe the following things should happen:
1) increase the # of representatives. Why was the # capped? Now I believe there are an average of 700k per representative. I am going by memory here. But I know the original recommendation was 35,000 per rep as per the Constitution. This needs to be allowed. So what if we end up with about 6,000 representatives! At least we would have a more direct access to our rep.
2) House of Representatives shouldn't run for 11 months a year. Make it 6 or 7 months. Let them come back to their districts for one month every 3 or 4 months. They need to spend more time with their constituents.
> The Legislative branch's ONLY JOB is to make laws.
I don't think that's quite right. Its job is to change the laws. That can mean adding laws, repealing laws, updating existing laws in the light of changing circumstances, etc. And "changing the laws" includes one-off things that do something once and don't leave much enduring cruft behind, like the Hurricane Sandy relief bill.
There's no reason in principle why they couldn't do their job while keeping the total amount of law constant or even reducing it. If in practice they do spend almost all their time (when not gridlocked) making new laws without trimming the resulting bloat, the problem isn't simply that their job requires them to do that.
> There's no reason in principle why they couldn't do their job while keeping the total amount of law constant or even reducing it.
Actually, there is! The reason is because Congress can only make laws -- that includes laws that repeal other laws! Note how we still have the Eighteenth Amendment despite it being nullified by the Twenty-first Amendment.
While there can be, in theory (and again, with such a large mass of people, it's really only in theory) laws whose sole purpose is to repeal other laws, such laws almost never make it to the President without a sizable layer of pork slathered on top in order to gather enough votes.
It's frustrating that someone with such poor critical thinking skills can become so rich.
Anyone with even mediocre critical thinking abilities and a general knowledge of markets would understand that the reason the stock market went up during the shutdown is because investors know the government will be back. This understanding and expectation is obviously priced into the market. If they are implying that the stock market would remain resilient if the federal government disappeared overnight never to return, they are quite simply idiots.
The #1 reason the US and other western nations are able to attract capital and have sophisticated economies is because of their predictable, reasonable legal systems and regulatory environments. Capital commands extremely high rates of return in risky legal frameworks, when an investor doesn't know whether they will be hit up for a bribe or seized by a populist government, they are obviously going to demand much more. A well-developed legal system and the power of the government to enforce laws and judgments is the reason the US is a "safe haven."
>because of their predictable, reasonable legal systems and regulatory environments...
Isn't there a argument, then, that increasing the number of laws (or pages in any given law) beyond a certain point begins having negative returns on your predictability and reasonability, because of the power-law increase in interactions between laws?
Strange that there seemed to be no mention of why the US government shut down in the first place: they failed to raise the debt ceiling on time, right? And who has primary interest in US debt? Other governments, like China for example.
So if Silicon Valley were to become the true seat of power in the US, how would they approach international relations? And how would they handle the military? And what would they do in the event of a war?
This does seem like an article written about an off-hand, not so serious comment. But it touches a nerve on something I hear echoing around my world (and I don't live in California) -- people believe Tech companies are the new driving direction of the economy and they think that makes them the new direction of power. I can't help but feel it's the wishful thinking of a new middle class.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadWe need to collectively work towards a solution than silencing a few.
I doubt Marc Andreessen loved gridlock when he was working on Mosaic @ the NCSA
> The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is an American state-federal partnership to develop and deploy national-scale cyberinfrastructure that advances science and engineering.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Center_for_Supercomput...
http://steveblank.com/secret-history/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
That BSD code is of course not only the foundation of the Internet, but of your iPhones and iPads as well. Actually I believe it is fundamental to Windows as well, since my understanding is that the TCP/IP implementation in Windows is BSD code.
Silicon Valley doesn't have the foresight for the technical foundations of society (and I say that having worked here for over a decade). The web wasn't invented by Silicon Valley either. Neither was e-mail. Neither was Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby. Python was actually government funded too.
Also don't forget that Bill Clinton and the government made all your location-based apps possible, by opening GPS satellites to the public in the 90s.
it is no wonder that someone who has private transportation, private insurance, private retirement, private everything... does not care about government. he is the embodiement of the capitalistic dream. government for those people is only for taxation. of course they would cheer.
the weird part is the middle class worker with the obama bumper sticker cheering for them. this i will never understand,
I'll trade my roads, my Linux, my Android phone, whatever in exchange for the ending of killing those overseas and domestically.
Key quotes around 8:30 - 9:00, but the whole thing is excellent. DARPA was funding all sorts of different networking and operating systems, which in those days were all incompatible. But they wanted them to cooperate, hence open source BSD and the Internet.
Silicon Valley doesn't get this kind of cooperation. In stark contrast, a proven business tactic is to undermine cooperation by poisoning open standards (e.g. embrace and extend).
http://video.pbs.org/video/2332168287/
That doesn't sound like a better world. That sounds like a worse one. Governments tend to at least have some interest in keeping their citizens alive, healthy, and happy.
The primary purpose of a company is to make money and as history has shown time and time again companies in general are all too willing to sell people dangerous products, work their employees to death, and do other unsavory things in order to make money.
Sure the US government is seeming ineffective, and in many cases less than satisfactory. But a system in which companies have the power definitely isn't better.
Where would such an interest come from?
A government defines a group of people who tend to have some sort of patriotic emotional bond with each other, much like the emotional bond that ties a family together. This is why people all across America felt the pain of the 9/11 attacks despite the fact that realistically the vast majority of us did not have family members or friends that died in the attack.
At a fundamental level this patriotic bond alone seems to make the majority of governments considerably more altruistic toward their citizens than a company would be towards their customers.
After all the leaders of government are also citizens with that bond of shared country and patriotism that they share with other citizens. In a company there is a much larger "us and them" divide between people in the company and people the company is selling to.
So in this light the grandparent's response of "We the People" though short is pretty meaningful and accurate. Governments tend to have interest in their citizens because of this patriotic bond which says that both the leaders and the ordinary citizens are "We the People".
tl;dr: Gov't isn't assumed to care about the people's needs "because it's chartered to do so", but rather because they have specific and explicit dependencies on public approval. By contrast, companies have an explicit dependency on their customers (and shareholders). Everyone else and the externalities that they face are completely irrelevant as far as incentive structures for a company.
I'm glad your argument isn't about how the government is supposed to represent The People "at least in theory", I find that one rather funny given how people of my stripe are usually accused of only thinking in theory.
As much as I want to, I can't convince myself of the aforementioned meme wholesale, there must be some counterbalance or we'd all be slaves. But I want people to break out of what at least seems to me to be the notion that while private companies are selfishly motivated, they can invent the institution called government that's free of perverse incentives and selfishness just because they think society needs it to function.
Your point about nationwide approval of the government versus specific approval of companies is a good one. Consider some counterpoints: 1) the politicians need not pander to everyone, only those who care to vote. 2) expanding on the reluctance to bother voting, there's reluctance to be informed, since your vote had miniscule chance of effecting your life. It's known as rational ignorance, Bryan Caplan has a lot to say about it if you're interested in looking it up. In contrast, choosing one company over another always has immediate effect.
A small group of people who have decided that government is ineffective have managed to get themselves elected with the help of a couple billionaires and have managed to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as long as a small group of people who have decided that government is ineffective are in power, that government will be ineffective.
It's almost tautological.
In other words, we should be grateful for the gifts blessed upon us, rather than greedy children asking for a seventh or eighth serving of ice cream.
Companies don't make money killing people, they make money improving the lives of customers and employees by offering them something they value more than their money/labor. If someone is working under poor working conditions, it's because their next best alternative is even worse.
I would be more scared about cozy relationships between government and corporations. That is when you get the most egregious offenses, eg. British East India Company + Great Britain vs. India and China, oil companies + US vs. the Middle East, Chinese government + Baidu in censoring their own people, Blackwater Associates + US in Iraq, etc. It is sometimes good to have the interests of corporations and government diametrically opposed, because that means they are not conspiring against the people they serve.
No, they don't make money killing their CUSTOMERS. But they can make a lot of money by not giving a fig about people impacted by their operations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_disaster
This is why we have regulations, by the way. So when amoral idiots find themselves in a position to do serious harm, there's some external force to compensate (as much as possible) for their lack of suitable ethics and working moral compasses.
In a free market the initiation of force is not tolerated. The Bhopal disaster you cited is a perfect example of an initiation of force.
The government legitimizes the initiation of force on those who have done nothing to violate the rights of others -- similar to the disaster you cited. It seems you have a problem with companies initiating force, but not the government. Why is that?
Why does it seem that way? I don't know, it's your impression. You tell me.
Oh really ? Are you really so naive? I'm sure the people in Syria and Libya are certainly happy about what their government is doing for them. Oh, and in modern democracies, apart from raising taxes every year and making more debt for the future generations to come, I fail to see the "good deeds" provided by governements.
But it it makes you happy, I guess that's what matters.
http://www.amazon.com/Losing-Ground-American-Social-1950-198...
Come back after reading.
That's not a strawman, comrade - that's called a logical conclusion.
I don't really know why you focus so much on food stamps (which I never mentioned - that's why I called your comment a strawman- i.e. "informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position" which is exactly the case here), and do not focus on any of the points I raised in my first comment above. If you don't even bother making a point...
What of the people on food stamps, you ask.
They are very important people. They matter. People in need of food and shelter are of deep concern to many people. It's good of you to ask such a fundamental question. Social welfare is critical in many areas. However, the means by which it exists is open to great evolution. Peaceful transitions are critical. Increasing the amount of care in the world and increasing the ways with which people can leverage their individual and collective power (not through violent systems) is critical. Likewise, it's critical -- to many people -- to reject systems and methods one cannot ethically abide by, and to not increase the size and scope of what one recognizes as the unbridled power of suited machines and ulterior, menacing interests.
If you actually care about what someone else thinks, you shouldn't make statements for him or her. For instance, at the very least, you could've instead asked, "Are you proposing that the state should wither away? Do you think the only other way food can be provided is by it trickling down?"
That would've still been a leap to conclusion from what I said, or possibly display a lack of understanding of what I said, but at least it'd be your asking.
I would've asked you to elaborate on what you mean by a state withering away. There's a difference between social safety nets in the context of free choice vs. involuntary constraint. There's a difference between "the state" at present vs. how "the state" can be reformed to justify itself to more humane roles. Finding major faults with [current state systems] is not the same thing as believing [all state systems] must vanish. I would've explained how I'm an advocate of peaceful, open systems wherever the public's trust is at stake. Territorial systems can have net positives in certain domains, such as in violent crime. However, the current system of US criminal law/code is devastatingly unethical. (I find nothing ethical about imprisoning human beings for nonviolent crime, especially when it's a state serving corporate law.) At best, the US system is a stepping stone best understood in historical context, for people of good conscience to step above on a path to something better.
I would've wondered why you're implying that the alternative to food stamps is food "trickling down" [from the rich]. The status quo of US taxation is very akin to "trickle-down" economics. Mass forced funding of a public -> flows into centralized pools governed by small bodies who have the capacity to serve personal, secret, and corporate interests in often closed contracts and closed courts -> devaluing and siphoning value and labor -> distributed fractionally to a public that waits for crumbs to flow back (hopefully) to people in need, pennies to the dollar. It's one of many forms of trickle down economics; it's a form that happens to overlook a great amount violence and corruption of the system by increasingly putting society at the mercy of the system. Nationalists, large corporations, prison systems, and warmongers love it though. The answer to your non-question here is that what I want society to aspire to is ultimately neither approaches -- for both are violent and narrow. We can do better. My aspiration for a freer, more peaceful society is not a switch I can flip on and off. It does, however, start with at least promoting peace and benevolence in culture, for people to begin to aspire to social problems solved by more directly open, fuller democratic (when democratic), voluntary, consensus-based models. Where there are pooled resources, I prefer that they be within a transparency that's more likely to arise when people are able to revoke funding, disassociate, and take part in reformation. The ability to assemble and disassemble is one area where a state can play a greater role in: preventing people from suffering the tyranny of involuntary systems.
My views are not binary. Presume nothing. I ethically value systems that cut out corrupt interests and increase free choice. I like more bottom-up solutions. It requires time. I choose to be a part of increasing the amount of social support on an ethical, voluntary basis by showing people that their actions can have definitive, accountable results and real-world feedback. I strive for a continued cultural shift in how people can empower themselves. Nothing happens overnight. Like I said, I don't want to flip any switches on people most in need.
I want peaceful evolution.
Most of my time is focused tirelessly on a project in this area. I hope to someday help people act upon their better and freer instincts. The least of what I can say ...
I'm not a libertarian, by the way. You could've called me a true/classical liberal and have been just as accurate. I don't mind the term voluntaryist occasionally. It declares a healthy focus, which I like: consensual interaction. I'm sure that term will be deluded too.
Placing a political label on oneself or another is a sure way to be misunderstood and derided once that label is used by even one other person who doesn't share one's views. Terms like liberal, conservative, libertarian, democrat, and republican are inept. Today, few proclaimed "liberals" seek to truly "liberate" people from oppressive systems. Today, few proclaimed "conservatives" seek to conserve "liberty." Now these labels sometimes help to exemplify those who are possibly inclined to cling to parties or ideology rather than ascend to their own humanity, mindfulness, skepticism, self-assessment, openness to diverse thoughts, and change/growth.
Call me a person.
It will do for now. I hope you'll stay in touch. :)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/10/us/business-groups-see-los...
Read the first paragraph. Executives are expressing concerns on their influence over Republican, primarily over the Tea Party. As TP is constantly fighting with the other Republicans, these executives see poor prospect in Republican's re-election.
Take immigration for example. Sure SV excutives have moved a bunch of people to start working on the immigration reform bill early this year, the group is broken. I believe all but one Republican is left in the group of 7 drafting the bill. Which means the bill will not get through neither House nor Senate in the next 6-12 months unless the seven congressmen sit together again.
Surely government is relying on the Internet to spread their agenda and is constantly working with new startup to make government operation "more efficient", but these people, IMHO, don't really make politicians move.
On the other hand, bankers continuously influence economic policy. This is an extremely specialized area (and since Federal Reserve board is made up of bankers around the country).
SV is still not close enough. They shake a President's hand, but that's pretty much it.
It sounds like a dystopian cyberpunk nightmare. And who better to lead us into the world of High Tech and Low Life than Silicon Valley Zaibatsus? I can never really tell when art and life are imitating each other.
Becoming? Corporations have been the transcendant power in the developed world since the collapse of feudalism.
Not to mention inaccurate. Companies are certainly powerful, but what is the power or influence of Silicon Valley compared to the titans of industry such as IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon, and yes, the financial firms and banks of NYC?
And for the comments on this thread suggesting that silicon valley can't be critical of government because government once had a hand in the valley? That's roughly the same level of hypocrisy as a government-fan shopping at Walmart.
I try not to engage in political discussions on HN so please do not interpret my question as me challenging your point. I am merely interested in what you find hypocritical in the Wal-Mart shopping example.
We live in the world we live in, and failing to live a perfectly pure life should not disqualify you from having opinions.
"For them, government is mostly a hindrance — a regulatory obstacle to the kinds of disruptive start-ups they fund, and an enemy of a looser immigration policy that would allow their portfolio companies to recruit more talented foreign engineers."
What this means is that the only time we aren't adding more restrictions to our lives is when Congress is gridlocked. Gridlock is the system functioning as designed. What's not to love about it? We don't want a government that moves fast and breaks things. For startups and lean companies, it can be a real pain in the ass! It's hard enough to keep up with compliance issues when you're just starting out; having to change your policies every 6 months due to the whims on Congress would be practically anti-business.
1) increase the # of representatives. Why was the # capped? Now I believe there are an average of 700k per representative. I am going by memory here. But I know the original recommendation was 35,000 per rep as per the Constitution. This needs to be allowed. So what if we end up with about 6,000 representatives! At least we would have a more direct access to our rep.
2) House of Representatives shouldn't run for 11 months a year. Make it 6 or 7 months. Let them come back to their districts for one month every 3 or 4 months. They need to spend more time with their constituents.
That's basically how it is now.
> They need to spend more time with their constituents
That's what campaigning is, and they do it.
I don't think that's quite right. Its job is to change the laws. That can mean adding laws, repealing laws, updating existing laws in the light of changing circumstances, etc. And "changing the laws" includes one-off things that do something once and don't leave much enduring cruft behind, like the Hurricane Sandy relief bill.
There's no reason in principle why they couldn't do their job while keeping the total amount of law constant or even reducing it. If in practice they do spend almost all their time (when not gridlocked) making new laws without trimming the resulting bloat, the problem isn't simply that their job requires them to do that.
Actually, there is! The reason is because Congress can only make laws -- that includes laws that repeal other laws! Note how we still have the Eighteenth Amendment despite it being nullified by the Twenty-first Amendment.
While there can be, in theory (and again, with such a large mass of people, it's really only in theory) laws whose sole purpose is to repeal other laws, such laws almost never make it to the President without a sizable layer of pork slathered on top in order to gather enough votes.
Anyone with even mediocre critical thinking abilities and a general knowledge of markets would understand that the reason the stock market went up during the shutdown is because investors know the government will be back. This understanding and expectation is obviously priced into the market. If they are implying that the stock market would remain resilient if the federal government disappeared overnight never to return, they are quite simply idiots.
The #1 reason the US and other western nations are able to attract capital and have sophisticated economies is because of their predictable, reasonable legal systems and regulatory environments. Capital commands extremely high rates of return in risky legal frameworks, when an investor doesn't know whether they will be hit up for a bribe or seized by a populist government, they are obviously going to demand much more. A well-developed legal system and the power of the government to enforce laws and judgments is the reason the US is a "safe haven."
This is a much better instance of him speaking on various affairs, not just on government:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59uTUpO8Dzw
Isn't there a argument, then, that increasing the number of laws (or pages in any given law) beyond a certain point begins having negative returns on your predictability and reasonability, because of the power-law increase in interactions between laws?
So if Silicon Valley were to become the true seat of power in the US, how would they approach international relations? And how would they handle the military? And what would they do in the event of a war?
This does seem like an article written about an off-hand, not so serious comment. But it touches a nerve on something I hear echoing around my world (and I don't live in California) -- people believe Tech companies are the new driving direction of the economy and they think that makes them the new direction of power. I can't help but feel it's the wishful thinking of a new middle class.