this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2024
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I hear your point it’s just wrong.
It’s clear that you believe the government is the bad thing here. I see you completely skipped over all my points about how their market manipulation harms the consumer and the worker. That manipulation is purely from them having a bunch of money and using it to their advantage and does not require a government boogie man.
It’s not that I can’t see the point you want to make, they corrupt the government and then the governments power is the thing that hurts me. First it’s wrong because if we were some sort of anarchy society, bezos using investor money to undersell and falsely outcompete the rest of the market until he has a stranglehold on the economy and can exact a tax on every item sold would still happen.
The fact that you don’t think high speed rail can be built, despite it existing all over the world, is just your opinion. The fact that musk has said he promoted the hyperloop in hopes of pulling funding and support from high speed rail is a thing that happened in reality
Let’s say that we took the power away from the government. Poof just like that they can’t regulate how much rat shit is in your Amazon prime food or if Elon can dump the toxic waste from his battery production in your drinking water. The harm of regulatory capture and lobbyist power just gets replaced with capitalists directly harming you. How is that better?
I didnt ignore what you said, I am trying to redirect it from the rhetoric to the solid. Its not that the government is all bad or corrupt or even bad, its that it is used to benefit the people that can get that power. The more government there is the better it is for big business and rich people. Its not that Jeff or Elon can typically harm you, its that they can make the government do things in their favor and against your interests.
I get your points, but you I think that you are mistaking no government for less government. Is the price of necessities being so high good for you, or would you like inflation not to destroy your earnings?
What do you think they would do with less government? Do you think they would be benevolent titans of industry and not hurt you if it meant greater profits for them?
It’s not like we have to wonder. There is plenty of history to go read about what people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk would do without any restraints on their power. Factory towns where workers are paid in scrip and kept in effective indentured servitude were a real thing that happened.
What magical force brings down the price of necessities when there’s less government? Look at what the free market did with respect to Amazon. Investors are happy to play the long game, they bank rolled Amazon for 9 years to compete against retailers, when the locally owned hardware store has to turn a profit to keep the lights on but the capital class says Amazon can sell hammers at a loss for 9 years, then at some point the local hardware store goes out of business. An enterprise that doesn’t need to turn a profit can out compete one that does.
Why would investors be ok with Amazon not turning a profit for 9 years? Because they knew that once they crushed the competition, they would have a bunch of people locked in, habituated to using Amazon and they could slowly decrease quality while increasing prices and make a return on that investment. They created a machine that destroyed jobs and businesses and for a while the consumer got a great deal. Subsidized high quality goods conveniently delivered to your door.
That isn’t a gift though, it’s a Trojan horse. That subsidy stops at some point and Amazon has a nearly impenetrable moat. Every year they can increase the cost of prime, increase the cost of goods, and now half the search results are some jumble of letters company that was just formed to shovel low quality goods at you.
The end result is harm to you as a consumer, a worker, and a taxpayer.
Those retail jobs are gone, instead of dozens of local business each with a workforce in every town, there can be one mega warehouse with a couple hundred people serving a huge swath of customers. This is great for amazons bottom line but if you need to work to make money to buy food and shelter, it means fewer jobs. The law of supply and demand works for the labor market just like it does anywhere else, if the demand for jobs is the same and the supply is lower then the glut of workers means employers can pay less. If there are enough unemployed people they will be willing to accept lower pay, they will be willing to accept worse working conditions, and if they aren’t there’s a hundred more unemployed people willing to take that spot. Those are direct harms to people.
Those locally owned businesses use to make up the tax bases of communities. Now instead of buying that hammer from your neighbor, you are buying a Chinese hammer from Bezos. Towns still need fire departments, police, roads, so your taxes go up because it has to come from somewhere.
Now when you go to buy a product you get whatever you get from Amazon. Enshittification is a real thing. And people can’t compete with Amazon, with their scale and their reach and their logistics. The best you can hope for is that people will try to sell through Amazon, but amazon in control of the search and there are thousands of dropshippers working to get their slice of the pie pushing quality down down down as they import cheaply made goods from alibaba and resell it to you at a mark up.
So no, the price of necessities being high is not good for me, but the government isn’t doing that. Capitalism is about the accumulation of profits to those with the capital, and more money means more ability to buy the market. There’s a reason that monopolies form in capitalist markets. Greater profits allow for greater market capture which leads to greater profits which leads to greater market capture and so on.
Competition isn’t sufficient because nothing stops people with a lot of money from going “outcompete them for a while by selling at a loss, we can do that longer than them and then we can jack up the price once our competitors exit the market.” This is exactly what investors did with Amazon.
So yes, they have the power to hurt me and you. You keep talking about less government, ok fine, what part? Which function of government would you remove that would improve the situation? What mechanism replaces that function and how does it work?
The main flaw that I think you are making is that you see similar circumstances to something in the past and think the same thing will happen again. Its kind of like with the Ukraine war, people see a country invading another country and think russia is nazi germany and will take over the continent, but in reality the material conditions are completely different. No, we would not start having company stores pop up and kids losing hands on sewing machines, things are drastically different from the industrial revolution.
There is a lot here, so I will directly answer your questions - what part? Because the government is huge I will talk about what I know best - housing. The government(s) add over $100k for every single family house new build, on average. These are things that are not necessary but are required. I can explain in detail because this is going to sound crazy but it is not, I would eliminate nearly all government involvement in everything two story and under. All the government should do is verify location and then verify appropriate utilities (which is both gov and private). We should do a lot of this on most things and make it so people can afford things.
The other big thing would be ending the fed.
I gave you 3 concrete examples of things happening right now. I put them in the context you asked for. You said I’m over pattern matching the past, which tells me you got to company towns and quit reading.
Feel free to respond but know that I’m done engaging with you. If you can’t engage in good enough faith to read what I wrote then I don’t really feel the need to humor you any longer.
Your brilliant solution is to remove zoning laws and building codes. As an engineer I can tell you those codes are written in blood, they exist because people were hurt or killed due to some home builder thinking “do I really need to ground this, I could save a 50 cents and I would really like 50 cents”
You are sitting there thinking you’ve cracked the code and if you could just get people to understand you’d win. I understand your point just fine, it’s just wrong headed.
I didnt stop reading, but comments get too long and it gets lots in the noise. But if you want it
"Why would investors be ok with Amazon not turning a profit for 9 years?" Because they had vision that amazon would become one of the biggest companies in the world.
"What magical force brings down the price of necessities when there’s less government?" - Competition.
As a former engineer and current construction business owner that deals with actual codes, I can tell you that you dont understand what is happening. As someone who has been on both sides of regulations, I understand why they exist, but they either are ignored, are overkill, or have so low a probability of happening its not worth the cost. I can give you an example of each, but I absolutely promise you that you have a false understand of what is happening.