In what hypothetical world are these not the exact same thing? Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action. That's the point of it, and is just another way of saying "power over others". A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
Like yes I think if money didn’t confer incredible power over others and distortionary effects over the shared environment, and allow crazy-wide reach for one’s possibly-nutty beliefs, lots of people wouldn’t have so big a problem with the ultra-rich. Like if the money were just a score on a pinball machine high score table. Cool, you hit a billion, good for you, glad you’re so good at the game, that’s nice. Not a lot of people would mind that so much. But that’s not how money works.
The average person today is much wealthier than many rich people from generations ago, even if they have less social power.
Being disproportionately powerful is tautologically a direct measure of disproportionate influence.
Tin pot dictators of resource-poor nations may not be especially wealthy compared to the very wealthy in the US, but typically have more disproportionate power (within their own country at least).
First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money. That leaves only one logically possible version of your statement and the correction looks like this: "A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where big money isn't big money"
In that form, your statement is perfectly logical, if somewhat tautological, but there is another problem with it and it's a real huge one: No textbook has anything like that and no school teaches it either, even the media is vary shy of talking about it.
At a first glance, that's not your problem but it definitely has to be, meaning, you and the people who gold similar views, should become loud public proponents of Speaking Truth to the Powerless (tm).
We can no longer have this cognitive dissonance economics that teaches that money is means of exchange, unit of account, etc, but skips the most important truth: that big money is, first and foremost, a tool of power over small money.
Only after this educational task is complete, your explanation will have the right to exist and be heard.
That's not true. Depends on your wealth bracket of course, but money certainly is the power to compel.
Let's say you have a neighbor whose dog is a nuisance barker. With money you can hire an attorney to go after them. If you don't have money, you have to suffer. There are millions of examples... this is just one not-particularly-good one.
That doesn't mean you can force them to work for you specifically because you have the amount of money you deem sufficient for a specific task.
It feels like a lot of people have forgotten that this is how nature works, not that all of your needs are the responsibility of everyone around you.
There is nothing natural about being compelled to work to live It is an artificial and constructed state.
It’s why there are people who have NEVR had to work to live and never will have to.
I will never understand why people believe that should change when a person lives around others.
Of course it does. Call the cleaning service, see if your money can't compel someone to come clean your house while you sit on your ass. Or more indirectly, try to picture the chinese kid making your shoes for a meager wage, and try to explain what, if not your money, is compelling them to do so this menial, repetitive and unfulfilling task for you.
> First off, my money doesn't grant me power over anybody and it's still money.
Sure, but it doesn't invalidate the sentence you quoted. At all. You can't "educate" people if you don't understand basic sentences. Let me quote it again, so that maybe you can try to understand it properly:
> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
I wasn't talking about hell but about logic, apparently our areas of expertise aren't the same.
> A world where being rich doesn't grant power over others is one where money isn't money.
You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money without the rich, in other words, you falsely claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.
Your claim is obviously false, plus there have been closed and open societies, since antiquity to this day, which used money giving no additional powers to the rich - the simplest case - when all the power was concentrated elsewhere.
I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.
What this means is that they can't imagine a world where having an extreme amount of money does not grant you power over others. As in, if you build a world that has something called "money", but where having more money than a whole country does not give you power over others, then that thing you call "money" is so different from the one we have in our world that it would not count as money in our world at all.
> You cannot claim money in general not to be money if the money for the not-rich still function as money
That is not what they claim, you misunderstand the sentence. It's like if someone said "A implies B" and you answered with "no, because B does not imply A". You would be lacking basic logic skills there.
> you claim that in order for money to work as a means of exchange, it has to grant the rich power over the not-rich.
Nope, not at all. You misunderstand the sentence.
> I didn't invalidate your claim, I demonstrated that it's invalid on its own.
You did nothing of the sort: you just seem to genuinely not understand the sentence you quoted.
And don't get me wrong: it's fine to misunderstand a sentence. What I reacted about was your tone. If you want to talk like this and "educate" people, you better be goddamn right.
That might be the case, there's no point in arguing about details which depend on definitions that aren't necessarily shared. Besides, we're using money in a very vague sense that includes wealth - not a good foundation for detailed analysis.
As I originally wrote, can money-in-general exist without power is a minor nitpick, I can readily accept both answers, more so given that money as it exists today can definitely grant power under certain conditions.
The real problem here is the lack of awareness about it, the lack of anything approaching a clear formulation of it and the absence of that topic from education and public discourse in general.
I would love to see the proponents of "more power to money" approach go public and explain their ideas while emphasizing that foundation.
A world with laws against monopolies, anti-competitive practices, and media ownership concentration. Not all uses of power are equivalent.
Standard Oil wasn't tamed by taking money from its owner. In fact, even if ownership over the company was dispersed among 10x as many shareholders as before, so long as the company can continue to act as a single entity, the abuse of its monopoly would continue.
Not in a free market. In a free market, people have the option to refuse to accept your money if they don't want to give you what you want to buy from them with it.
It's like saying that humans can fly unassisted. Sure, we can jump in the air and for a few milliseconds remain completely in the air. But we can hardly call that process a flight, if it can last for extremely short period of time. Same with free market.
A free market is not unregulated. It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants.
The alternative is to have the market regulated by those who aren't participants--i.e., who have no skin in the game and who suffer no consequences if the regulations are bad. That's basically the situation we have now. Anyone who thinks that's a good thing isn't living on the same planet as I am.
> will be quickly monopolized by a biggest player
The claim that this is a problem of free markets, as opposed to non-free ones, is historically false. Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players. THe original meaning of the word "monopoly" was permission from the king to be the sole seller of a particular product or service.
So, what do you think would happen when the biggest market participant makes a choice incompatible with choices of the smaller participants? I can tell you - the biggest player would win. Or it would slowly destroy competitors (slowly mean just a few years), and then start imposing it's rules. Basically any free market would turn to feudalism, which would then turn into a bloody and crude proto-government. Basically the same we have today minus any pro-human and pro-free market policies we have managed to carve for ourselves over centuries. It is impossible that free market would be anything different.
So yeah, because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control.
> Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players.
Correct. And do you know why that happened? Because there was no control and biggest market players could simply buy the poor politician they wish. And in the free market you describe these two step would be simply combined into one - the biggest market player would also perform as a pseudo politician, ultra monopoly with zero oversight.
No, that's even worse, because, as you admit, humans are shit at governing--and the "external control" is just more humans being shit at governing, but with a much bigger negative impact because the scope of their shitty governing covers many more people.
Advocates of free markets, like me, don't advocate them because we think they solve all problems. We advocate them because, given the fact that humans are shit at governing, free markets are the least worst of the alternatives open to us. Big market players who still have to make money through voluntary transactions do less damage than governments run by humans who are shit at governing. That's the lesson of human history. Unfortunately most of us still haven't learned it, and continue to cling to the foolish belief that somehow calling a bunch of humans a "government" magically makes them no longer shit at governing. It doesn't.
My point was that free market is kinda like unstable isotope, it can't exist for any significant length of time and will decay into a government. As soon as some corporation starts dictating its rules to an unrelated people, we can call it a proto-government. The department responsible for those unrelated people would be a proto-executive branch, the law department would be a proto-legislative branch etc.
And to address your second comment, about competition:
Competition can't work in the free market. The instant external control ceases to exist, the most shrewd and smart players would start employing all kinds of currently illegal shit. They will buy out all media and platform to blast their ads 24/7 and disallow all competition. They will swithch to currently banned practices and materials to save costs and undercut competitors. They will switch to slave work to save costs etc. As soon as one player becomes relatively bigger the rules of free market will allow him to accumulate more and more benefits of the kind I've described. Any competition would be woefully behind, outdated and overpriced relative to the bigger player. And that's assuming elastic market. As soon as market for some goods becomes inelastic, bigger player can do even more damage. For example they can completely buy out some resource or manufacturing capacity of a crucial component or resource and completely deny it to the competitors.
Basically the whole human history and law corpus is a list of examples how free market failed and how humans had to fix it via restrictions.
If this is true, I think we're screwed.
I don't think it's actually true, but it is true that in our current world, the number of people who understand the downsides of government and are willing to truly support a free market is miniscule, not even rounding error in the overall numbers.
> Competition can't work in the free market.
You're forgetting that in a free market, all transactions are voluntary. And in a society where that had been true for a long time, and people upheld that principle and acted accordingly, institutions would evolve that are very different from our current ones. David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom is a book length attempt to imagine what such a society would be like, in some detail. It would not be at all like what you would get if you took our current society and just eliminated the government. Of course that's a stupid idea, because our society has evolved for a long time under the assumption that it has a government, and its institutions have evolved accordingly.
> The instant external control ceases to exist, the most shrewd and smart players would start employing all kinds of currently illegal shit.
To paraphrase David Friedman in a similar context, unfortunately this sentence remains true if you take out the first seven words.
You're describing what happens now, in our current world, which has "external control" up the wazoo--just external control that does what the most shrewd and smart players want it to do. Google, Amazon, Walmart, etc. have all done "all kinds of currently illegal shit", and paid no real price for it. True, they've also made a lot of shit that should be illegal, technically legal, by buying the laws and regulations that favor them. But they've also broken the law, straight up, numerous times, and the government never makes them pay the proper price. They always get away with what for them amounts to a tiny slap on the wrist.
And the situation now is worse than it would be in a free market, because in a free market, at least no one would believe that there was some magical "external control" that would somehow protect them. They would know that it was up to them to simply refuse transactions whose long term cost outweighed whatever short term gain was being dangled in front of them. In our current world, people still believe, even with all the evidence to the contrary, that the government can somehow protect them from all the "currently illegal shit" that the big players get up to. And that "protection" simply isn't there. Government always ends up being just another tool that the big players use to get what they want at the expense of everybody else--and it's an easier tool to use than trying to do it in a true free market would be.
Again, it might be that humans are simply incapable of doing the things that a free market requires at scale. And if that's true, I think we're screwed. In any case, it's not a problem that is solved by having a government.
Regarding the last paragraph, I have a tiny hope for humanity, but I suspect that big change may happen only after some major world scale crisis (if we survive it too). Rebulding governance slowly just doesn't work, governance degrades fasted than we can do anything about it.
Nonsense. It was because the government had control, and could force people to accept that it was giving special privileges to certain players. For example, the railroad barons in the late 19th century US who got the government to give them exclusive access to key routes. The people had no choice about accepting that. In a free market, there would have been competition, and that would have ended up resulting in better service. How do we know that? Because that's what happened until the government stepped in and gave special privileges to certain players.
In other words, your view is exactly backwards to what has actually happened.
Really?
* Search: What special privilege for Google?
* Desktop OS: Microsoft?
* On line retail: Amazon
What am I missing? These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they?
They did and still do. They spend millions lobbying the government to make it harder for outsiders to break into their industries.
In other words, what's "compelling action" here is the government, and its power to do that is not based on money. But since the government is run by humans, who can be bought, the government's power to compel things ends up being for sale. And even if you magically took away all that money from Google and Amazon and spread it around evenly, that would just mean government favors would get curried in other ways. (Plus the fact that, even if you spread the money around evenly once, it wouldn't stay that way.)
No, the alternative is for people to realize that "regulation" provided by government doesn't work--that the only way to effectively regulate a market is for the market participants to do it by the transactions they choose to make and the transactions they choose to refuse. As long as people won't do that--as long as, for example, people continue to believe the fantasy that a valuable service like web search can be provided by Google for free with no downsides, or that everything can be magically cheaper on Amazon without them bullying their supply chain in all kinds of underhanded ways and treating their employees like shit--we're doomed. Government regulation can't save people from themselves. These big companies can only get away with what they do because we keep feeding the monsters.
This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.
But then the owning class has every incentive to reduce or remove the safety net. Not least because they will be paying a lot for it! But even more so because that safety net is what gives people some small amount of power to say no to them.
That depends on how the safeguards are implemented. If they are implemented through coercive taxation, you don't have a free market, because people don't have the right to refuse to pay taxes, even if they disagree with how the money will be used.
> Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.
Can you give an example?
> the owning class
What you're saying here is something different from what you said above. The problem you're now pointing to is not that rich people have power because they're rich, but that they have power because own too much other than just money. For example, they might own all the housing in the area you want to live in, so you either have to look elsewhere or accept renting on whatever terms they offer.
The solution for that isn't a "social welfare net". It's to restrict how much non-monetary property a rich person can own. And also to make it easier for people who aren't rich to own more things--for example, to own homes.
By the way, your use of the term "owning class" implies that ownership is somehow a bad thing, or that it's naturally restricted to a certain class of people. But that's not how things should be. Ownership gives you control. For example, if you own the home you live in, you're much better protected from various possible bad things forcing you to move, than if you rent. But that also means people need to be willing to accept the responsibilities that come with ownership. It appears that many people in our current society aren't--but they also don't want to accept the tradeoffs of giving up ownership. That's not a stable situation. You can't get something for nothing. And the best "safety net" a person can have is to own as many of the things they depend on as possible.
We've financialized servitude is all.
Capitalism is just the view that one should try to accumulate more capital, by hook or by crook. And there are lots of ways to do that that don't involve any kind of productive work, much less building wealth through cooperation, specialization, and trade. Buying government favors, for example, which is how most big-time "capitalists" in US history did it (for example, the railroad barons who got the government to give them exclusive access to key routes). Today they do it by buying regulations that favor them.
Citation required.
Money is an intermediary form of exchange. It arises organically because if, for example, you are a dairy farmer, there is no practical way for you to a) save enough milk to barter for a house (not only is it perishable but where do you store it all? Especially before refrigeration) and b) find someone with a house they want to trade for that much milk.
Money is just a commodity and in the absence of fiat currency it arises organically. People tend to seek intermediary forms of exchange that are non-perishable, easily divisible, transportable and difficult to forge/counterfeit because it is a necessity of life.
You simply cannot practically barter everything you'd ever want to trade. So instead we humans trade what we produce for something we can stash away and trade later more easily.
Money is not an invention to compel action. It is a natural product of trade that arises because most people, when they're not too busy spouting ideological drivel on Internet forums, have common sense.
An article treatment: https://archive.is/20250725000932/https://www.theatlantic.co...
A book treatment (that of course covers many other things): https://archive.org/details/DebtTheFirst5000Years
Pre-modern societies generally had very little currency and only used it for large transactions. Smaller transactions happened through debt and transfers of debt.
The transaction wouldn't be "I give you a bunch of milk and you give me a house" it would be "You give me the house and I'll give you milk every day for the next 5 years" or something like that.
Or it might be "Bob owes me a calf the next time his cow gives birth. I'll transfer that debt to you and give you eggs for a year and you give me the house."
Vendors who have debt relationships with a very large number of people would often get together with other vendors and swap debts to consolidate them into a more manageable number of debts.
Even if the debt was denominated in units of currency, it was typically settled in goods rather than currency because typical people just didn't have access to much currency.
There were times in history where having a lot of money was correlated to having all those powers. There are places in this world where that’s still the case.
Seeing the how flaccid "strong" laws have become, I prefer we go back to reducing the voice of money by taxing it away. Maybe our country could then finally have nice things.
The never come back bit solves the imaginary problem you mention.
if you put more effort into making your point, I'm sure you could get better engagement
People who assign billionaires as being the living manifestation of greed are somehow quick to hand wave away "billionaires will move to protect their wealth".
What might that be? California is still at the forefront of every technological innovation this country is seeing while Texas is at the forefront of theocracy.
California may be seeing a smaller share of the world’s innovation in the past, but that hasn’t moved to Texas, it’s moved to China.
Until the early 1980s, the highest tax bracket was taxed at 70%, and before that even more.
You think people living in NYC, for example, the financial (and one of the major cultural capitals) of the entire world (not to mention all the other benefits of US residency) are going to bother with packing up their lives and moving overseas because the taxes are too high? Not to mention these people will still have obscene wealth in all likelihood.
Some might, but I don't think we should wring our hands over it.
Rather than worrying about "capital flight" let's instead imaging all the good that could come of us having a more more equal wealth and income distribution.
A duty is a type of tax.
Yes and what makes it a tax is the intention. If it is to regulate a market to be more free, it's a tax, otherwise it's a duty.
Please reference any dictionary since you don't believe me.
Please provide a link to this dictionary.
> What do you think are the right words for stuff that e.g. needs to be payed to the government a) to regulate the market
People generally don't pay the government to regulate the market directly.
If you're talking about payment for permit approvals and things like that, most people would call it a fee.
If you're talking about the taxes associated with certain financial transactions or approval to import an item into the country, those are often called duty.
> b) to provide an income to the government?
Taxes.
$ apt show dict-freedict-deu-eng
Package: dict-freedict-deu-eng
Version: 2021.01.05-3
Priority: optional
Section: text
Source: freedict
Maintainer: Sebastian Humenda <shumenda@gmx.de>
Installed-Size: 25.3 MB
Provides: dictd-dictionary
Suggests: dictd | dicod, dict | kdict | gnome-dictionary | goldendict
Homepage: https://freedict.org/
Tag: culture::TODO, culture::german, made-of::dictionary, role::app-data,
role::program, use::converting
Download-Size: 17.7 MB
APT-Manual-Installed: yes
APT-Sources: http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye/main amd64 Packages
Description: German-English dictionary for the dict server/client
This is the German-English dictionary from the FreeDict project. It contains
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> People generally don't pay the government to regulate the market directly.
Huh, that's basic government behaviour. How do you call the mechanism of the government imposing money to pay to the state in order to internalize external costs?
Alcohol causes sickness -> tax on Alcohol, cigarettes -> tax on cigarettes, car usage wears roads down -> tax on fuel, car usage causes congestion -> fees for car usage, CO2 causes climate change -> tax on CO2, income causes wealth imbalance -> tax on income, land ownership causes inefficient land usage -> tax on land ownership, high frequency trading causes energy waste -> tax on high frequency trade, foreign products cause local unemployment -> tariffs, ... . The list is endless, because it includes every "tax".
At least that's what they told me in basic economics class. But then again I'm maybe mistranslating "Steuern". The German term for b) is called "Abgaben" which I thought would mean "duties".
They are equivalent, but your English description of the definition of Steuern is not accurate, so I'm not sure what to tell you.
Your English is good enough that I wasn't 100% sure you weren't a native speaker, but there are a number of misunderstandings in the rest of your post that I don't think I'm going to be able to explain.
You're also just inventing reasons for taxes in many cases, rather than just accepting the government sees them as activities that create an opportunity to collect revenue.
I've found the term that I'm looking for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_tax . It's a bit weird, that most examples there seem to be from Germany or Switzerland. Maybe we just like that concept. But Piguo was a Brit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigouvian_tax
> but there are a number of misunderstandings in the rest of your post that I don't think I'm going to be able to explain.
Too bad.
> You're also just inventing reasons for taxes in many cases
Most of these are also listed as examples in the Wikipedia articles, the other are very much the official reasoning for these taxes, so I don't agree with that. Of course the government doesn't mind taking some money.
The concept of taxation predates the concept of equality or economic influence in society, and there is no "official" reasoning for things like property taxes or income taxes in the US (or anywhere else I'm aware of).
Originally, the government decided how much revenue it needed, and told the subjects of its rule how much they owed, and that was it.
The government still needs to raise money for e.g. funding the roads. This is not, because the government wouldn't be able to direct the resources of the economy towards this goal otherwise, but because the costs of that goal should be part of the beneficiaries of that goal. This should prevent inefficient pursue of goals.
For example when you get too less money for roads, it can be because all the foreigners use it for transit, but don't actually fund it, meaning the government subsidizes another governments economy, or because too less people drive on your roads/ people don't care much for the roads, so maybe you are building too much of them. When on the other hand you have to much money for roads, then maybe you are not building enough roads.
However this is not the only measure, as roads also create induced demand/economic activities, i.e. you need to put up roads to foster specific activities, before you see the demand. In other words it's complicated and you need to be an expert in the field you are governing and governing itself.
But while money on its own is (nearly) free for a government, once you have handed it out it isn't free anymore, since it now represents resources, that are also restricted for the government. This means that it still makes sense to be frugal with money, just not for money that was just created by it, but with money that comes to the government for the second time, and is now to be spent again, since this already is a proxy for specific resources.
> governments often act and talk like like their goal is to maximize revenue
I think this often comes from business people who promote (themselves) to government, but don't got the memo, that they aren't working for a company anymore, but instead decide on the framework for companies to thrive or not.
Politics, literally the art to govern [a city], is really the art of creating hard rules that still don't prescribe anything but instead control the famous invisible hand of a free market towards the right behaviour.
Eventually you'll run out of other people's money to spend, and will be forced to face the reality of your own self-sufficiency.
Europe figured this out long ago and has a very broad tax base (aka higher taxes on the middle class) to fund their social welfare programs but somehow you never see that proposed as a solution by the middle class in the US...
I think once someone gets to a billion dollars net worth, they should get an AmEx black card, and 99% of their assets moved into a sovereign public wealth fund. They can have anything they want, they lose the power of extreme asset allocation, and if they just like competing, they can start over and try to ring the bell again (and can give the second AmEx black card to a person of their choosing).
To who, politicians?
Leaving the large business intact and just changing the leader doesn’t seem like it changes anything.
That's not what I understand from the GP. What they say is taht if your business is extremely successful, it can keep being extremely successful and you can keep control over it.
You just cannot accumulate more money for yourself. Like if the highest amount of money in a video game was 1 billion. Once you reach it, you don't go back to 0, you just can't go higher.
Makes sense to me.
* though I guess newer builds are defaulting to 64-bit signed ints?
> You just cannot accumulate more money for yourself.
If that's what it means, I don't think it makes sense, because the point of taking away the money was to reduce the ability of the rich to unduly control and influence others. If they can still do that via their company that they still control, it doesn't much matter whether they have money or not.
Of course it does. It's very different to be the head of a company and to privately have more money than an entire country.
People put limits on what they should be able to own, but if we extend that idea globally (i.e. don't discriminate based on simply where you were born), then most of us in the first world would also be liable to give up our TVs, cars, latops, houses etc. And then suddenly seizing assets is bad...
The problem is not simple or straightforward. It's mostly people who want more complaining about those who also want more.
Nobody says it's simple or straightforward. I personally just admitted that there is an amount of wealth that is too much.
You sound like you're telling me that because it's a hard problem to solve, I should just shut up.
So yeah, generally I think that would be a good idea.
Of course, control of a very large company is itself the sort of power that wealth caps are supposed to curb, like when people buy newspapers / social media platforms / etc - so you could also just proclaim it a feature instead of a bug, but it still warrants a defense.
From WSJ and The Economist, to CNN, BBC and FOX, right on through to Youtube podcasts.
This consistently happens in a very specific way. A corporation that dominates a concentrated market becomes excessively large, which makes its early shareholders billionaires.
In other words, if you want to change this, you need to enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations.
You have a lot of thoughts on something you know very little about.
For the rich, yes. Across societies. Despotic regimes have ridiculously high nominal tax rates because they just steal stuff, but that only applies to the poor.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
Basically flat since WWII, despite significant growth in GDP per capita, and before that it was lower.
The high marginal rates in the mid-20th century were fictional because at the time there were so many loopholes that nobody actually paid them. If you think there are a lot of loopholes now, you have no idea. When the marginal rates were lowered, enough of the loopholes were closed at the same time that if you tried to guess when it happened by looking at that graph, you wouldn't be able to tell.
Also, some of the loopholes are still there, but what does that imply for the theory that lower rates are the relevant change? When Richie Rich (or Microsoft) is claiming no taxable income, 60% of nothing is the same as 20% of nothing.
But if that isn't the change, what is? Well, in 1995 the largest company by market cap was GE at ~$92B. In today's dollars that's ~$197B. The largest company today is $4154B. More than 2000% bigger even adjusted for inflation.
And it's the corporations buying the politicians anyway. Who is paying the money, Larry Page or Google? It's Google. If the company is that big, it doesn't matter if it's owned by one person or a million, the CEO has control of enough resources to buy the government, and then does.
Make business small again.
"Effective Income Tax Rates Have Fallen for The Top One Percent Since World War II" https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/effective-income-tax-rate...
That link has an agenda. Choosing the height of WWII as the baseline is cherry picking. Effective rates were higher during WWII than they were before or since, but that was eight decades ago, not for very long, and for an obvious reason.
They're also achieving even that much difference by applying speculative math to capital gains, which is meaningless because doing that in real life would result in major behavioral changes.
And it's still not clear how any of that is supposed to solve it. Suppose the founder of MegaCorp has to sell more of their shares to pay the money in tax. They sell them to BlackRock or China or whatever. Is that going to cause MegaCorp's lobbyists to stop trying to capture the government? How? You need there to be more, smaller companies, not change who owns the shares of the predatory megacorps.
What about the federal government gives you the impression that they'd be responsible stewards of the money you want to confiscate and redistribute?
The government does lots of things well. That's why those in power are trying to destroy it right now.
Here's where you go "But it's not perfect, therefore it can't work." or maybe "all taxation is theft".
It's clear you have very little historical or economic knowledge about taxation, and it seems like the sum total of your thoughts on the matter is: taking money from people I don't like makes me feel good.
> enforce antitrust laws and break up large corporations
It is a sin to be poor
There being poor, is the sin of the rich
> The Gini index, or Gini coefficient, is a statistical measure of wealth distribution developed by the Italian statistician Corrado Gini. The Gini index is used to gauge economic inequality by measuring income distribution, also called wealth distribution.
It's a kinda big red flag if they say that income and wealth are the same thing!
There are a few notable cases of European countries having very high wealth inequality despite lower income inequality (my take which may not be shared by many: having low income inequality makes it hard for people who aren't generationally wealthy to overcome old money). Notably, Sweden has a higher wealth inequality than the United States.
However, I don't think it's true that Europe in general has higher wealth inequality than the United States. Here's the wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_we...
Wealthy and old people love when income is used as a stand in for wealth. It deflects political action onto the young and hard/smart working, and helps keep their dynasties and rent seeking assets intact.
The government has billions of dollars. Thankfully government officials are immune to the corrupting influence of billions of dollars.
Under our current system you have to be daft to not invest in buying the government--it's a great return on your investment!
The true billionaire doesn't have anybody else to ask and can finance the campaign to get somebody (not) elected.
Didn't Apple say that 1) they weren't interested in being in the Search Engine business 2) (in testimony) Google was by far the best search engine that they were going to use anyway ?
Certainly, $20B/Y weighs on the scale, but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weight to do what they wanted anyhow and get paid handsomely for it (<waggle waggle> "if you don't pay us we might start using other defaults and you'll lose that lucrative iOS market")
My point is, while Google is clearly at fault in this whole situation, it's not quite as moustache-twirling evil as Doctorow paints it.
As I learned it, since BMI & ASCAP v. CBS, in 1979, it's essentially been that the per se rule is applied when the courts have enough experience with an accused restraint to know that it is so plainly anticompetitive, and so often lacks any redeeming virtue, that further inquiry in any given case is almost certainly wasted effort
Bork and his acolytes really screwed us, basically, turning a half-baked understanding of economics into a justification to ignore legislation and 60+ years of jurisprudence, and that's carried the day since.
Judge Bork was proposed as a candidate for the US Supreme Court. While the Senate was reviewing his nomination they began discussing his actual views on various topics which were so abhorrent that the Senate voted not to confirm him. The conservative community complained he had been treated unfairly and coined the term.
Bork was subject to attacks on his views of constitutional law. Many of the attacks were just not true. The Wikipedia write up on this is quite even-handed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Bork.
Apart from that, “abhorrent” is not a word that makes sense in discussing legal interpretation. It’s a category error. For example, Bork believed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which his party got through Congress) was unconstitutional. To this day, the law rests on shaky Commerce Clause footings with all sorts of exceptions and caveats to avoid conflict with the first amendment freedom of association and to overcome Congress’s lack of authority to regulate morality directly.[1] The attacks on him over it was midwits having an emotional reaction to a complex legal debate that was beyond their understanding.
Bork’s antitrust theories, and its foundation in armchair economics analysis, is far better target for criticism. Ironically, that wasn’t the subject of Ted Kennedy’s speech against his candidacy.
[1] You can see this tension in the laws themselves. Why doesn’t the Fair Housing Act apply to small, owner-occupied rental properties? Because Congress lacks the constitutional power to force people to not be racist in their choice of who they live with. In more than half a century, liberals haven’t even seriously attacked these carve outs even though they would seem like low hanging fruit.
Um: You're massively overstating the case for GOP involvement in the Civil Rights Act. The Act was muscled through by President Lyndon Johnson — a Democrat and protégé of LBJ; liberal congressional Democrats; and a few (and now-extinct) liberal Republicans. The racist, segregation-forever southern Democrats, who as powerful committee chairs had blocked civil-rights legislation for decades — mostly died off or became Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s thanks to the GOP's "Southern Strategy."
Why would racists mad about Democrats supporting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 respond by switching to the party that had pushed through every other Civil Rights Act before it? Of course, they didn't. Of the 21 Democrat Senators who had opposed the Civil Rights Act, just one became a Republican.
The landslide GOP wins in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988 obscure subsequent trends, but in 1976, Carter still won the usual southern states. Even in 1980, a generation after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Reagan won New York by a larger margin than he won Alabama and South Carolina.
Southern realignment was driven by economic development. The south voted democrat in 1950 for the same reason black people did: because they were poor and Democrats were the New Deal party. In 1950 Illinois's pre capita income was double that of Alabama: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?eid=257197&od=195.... Staring in the 1960s, the south experienced rapid urbanization and economic development (the "New South"). The south's competitive advantage against the north was lower taxes, lower regulation, and Right to Work laws--all Republican policies. By 1990, Illinois's per capita income was only 33% higher than Alabama.
This is clearer by looking at Virginia--the Capital of the Confederacy. Virginia was part of the Solid South in the early 20th century. It voted for FDR by more than double the national margin in 1944. But by 1960, Virginia was pretty reliably Republican, voting for Nixon in 1960 over JFK (even though JFK won deep south states like Georgia by 25 points). You can't explain Virginia's flip by pointing to racial politics. The reason it flipped was because Virginia industrialized earlier than the other southern states. In 1950, Virginia's per-capita income was already halfway between Alabama and Illinois. In 1970, Illinois was only 10% ahead of Virginia, but was still 50% ahead of Alabama. The other southern states followed the same GOP shift, they just did so decades later because their economies industrialized decades after Virginia's.
The "southern strategy" narrative is a tremendous example of white people's gullibility when it comes to race issues. It's based almost entirely on one 1981 interview with Lee Atwater, who didn't even work on the Nixon campaign, or on Reagan's 1980 campaign. And it's based on a premise that's simply absurd if you think about it for a minute. The south flocked to republicans in the 1980s to punish democrats for a law that Democrats had voted for in 1964 (but which Republicans had voted for by an even larger margin)--nevermind the fact that, during this time, the south built an economy on siphoning jobs from blue states through business-friendly GOP policies. Also ignore the fact that the major issue in the 1970s and 1980s when all this was happening was the threat of the communist, atheist Soviet Union, where southerners naturally fit into the GOP bloc.
Your revisionism is pretty glaring to anyone who was paying attention during the mid-1960s, as I was — my USAF dad was stationed in east Texas then, which was more deep South than Old West.
Let's just say we have very different takes on what can motivate humans, individually and in groups. At the risk of sounding condescending: I used to feel somewhat the way you seem to. My naively-rationalist and very-judgmental views evolved as the years went on. The evolution was driven largely by life experience, which drove home the brute facts of human inadequacy, irrationality, and just plain fuck-ups — principally my own, along with those of friends and loved ones — along with the pervasive role of random chance. It took quite a while to figure out how my rationalist, judgmental worldview could accommodate those brute facts (spoiler: it couldn't).
Imagine a robot or alien who has no moral reaction either way to individual prejudice. Do you think they’d analyze the history and reach the same conclusion? I think the robot would realize that you’ve got a part of the country that was building its economy on deregulation and low taxes. And it was also the most religious part of the country, at a time when the defining issue globally was the atheist, communist soviet union. Of course that region shifted to the GOP.
Let's get back to the topic at hand [2], namely your assertion that it was Robert Bork's party — the GOP — that supposedly got the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress. Yes, liberal northern Republicans such as Sen. Everett Dirksen definitely contributed — as I said.
But you appear to be implicitly memory-holing the (northern) Democrats who drove the process from the White House and the majority in both the House and the Senate: President Lyndon Johnson; Sen. Hubert Humphrey; and Rep. Emanuel Celler. The Senate cloture vote to end the southerners' 60-day (!) filibuster was 27 Republicans and 44 Democrats.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/States%27_rights_speech
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45132122
[3] https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/...
Carter being a Georgia peanut farmer made a huge difference in GA, AL, and SC voting in the 1976 and 1980 elections. You have to remember, he was the first deep south president since the civil war - white voters especially really cared about that. He was just also a disaster of a president, which is a big reason he lost anyway.
If you read Bork's work, especially The Antitrust Paradox, and if you study the caselaw prior to and post 1970's, you'll see a stark difference.
It was really a conservative idea at that point but I'd say it's more neoliberal, which has a strong backing in the democratic party and has for decades, beginning with Carter.
The per se analysis and application, particularly, is just massively different from the pre-Bork era. He's the single largest reason that the three main elements of cost, quality, and quantity as a standard for antitrust analysis has eventually boiled down almost entirely to cost, partially because it's so much easier to measure but also because he advocated for it as a mechanism to measure business efficiency.
One of the big problems of this is the change in fundamentals since Bork was writing in the 70's, particularly with union membership declining so heavily. He was countering a very strong and powerful union system and factored that into his analysis, and we just don't have that in the private sector any longer.
I've been working on a paper for a while about theoretically adding in wage and labor market analysis into the mix, particularly with monopoly and monopsony situations, but it's kinda stalled since I've been clerking.
Honestly, read the guy's book and read some cases if you're interested. You'll see it fairly quickly.
Anyone can swap the tires to anything they want, but the default is Goodyear.
Google didn't want Apple thinking about that. They wanted Apple to have an incentive to send traffic to google.
That testimony worked in favor of the government
It raises the question, "Then why pay them?"
Google had no answer
The company always has an alternative explanation for its actions that lacks any relation to advertising services, or profit motive
Aren't Apple getting 20 bln annually to say that? Google search quality has deteriorated drastically in the last decade, as evidenced by the court and numerous HN threads.
> but knowing Apple's negotiation tactics they could also have used their weigh
These two megacorps are parts of the duopoly and have no incentive to change that.
That Google has paid Apple to be the default search engine was a business deal that has been open knowledge for a decade or more. Other search engines could've paid to be the default. Apple didn't have a search engine when they created the iPhone, and why would they start? Ever? MS didn't do so well. And why would Apple want to make their own search engine? Even if Apple did, the reaction would certainly be that Apple was abusing their position to promote their own search engine and would be committing an anti-trust violation then.
Also I think it's safe to say there is no actual testimony about a quid pro quo arrangement to get Apple to agree to not make a search engine.
While the payments were public knowledge and there was speculation about the amount being somewhere between $8B and $12B, the number had never been confirmed until unsealed in the case, was more than the previous speculation, and was something both Google and Apple wanted to keep under wraps: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147007/google-paid-apple...
Thus, it's a fact that was established in the verdict. "Slipping" is possibly a stretch, given the deal itself was at least publicly known? - though the fact both parties wanted to avoid discussion of the deal since its inception makes it feel at least somewhat evasive, so I can see what the word choice gestures towards.
> ...in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine.
From https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1402141/dl?inline=:
> Cutting off all search-related payments from Google to Apple would strongly alter Apple’s incentives. Rem. Tr. 3825:7–3829:2 (Cue (Apple)) (Apple’s SVP of Services “can’t say [he] would disagree” that “it was a disincentive for us to do a search engine based on the payments that we were receiving from Google”)
> forbear: politely or patiently restrain an impulse to do something; refrain
That seems like a reasonable description of what Eddy Cue stated to me. It certainly wasn't part of the wording of the deal, but if I were Eddy, I'd probably refrain from building a search engine in his shoes.
I mean Apple Maps happened. Is it the same scale of problem? No, because Street View is harder than search in some sense! In all seriousness it's not the same problem, but it's something.
$20B/year is real money, and I have a very easy time imagining that squashing the idea at all (even if the intent on Google's side is "simply" to maintain dominance, and not squash out competition from Apple specifically)
That's the calculus, right?
Google is a monster because people so heavily favor the ad-model over paying for things.
Kagi wonderful, but paying for search? Lol that shit is free!
Free internet existed before paid internet, true, but mostly because people did things for other motives (like fun). Altavista was a tech demo for DEC. Good information was found on personal web pages, most often on .edu sites.
Banner ads existed, but they were confined to the sketchy corners of the Internet. Thing today's spam selling viagra. Anyone credible didn't want to be associated with them.
What Google figured out was:
1) Design. Discrete ad-words didn't make them look sketchy. This discovery came up by accident, but that's a longer story.
2) Targeting. Search terms let them know what to ads to show.
I can't overstate the impact of #2. Profits went up many-fold over prior ad models. This was Google's great -- and ultra-secret -- discovery. For many years, they were making $$$, while cultivating a public image of (probably) bleeding $$$ or (at best) making $. People were doing math on how much revenue Google was getting based on traditional web advertising models, while Google knew precisely what you were shopping for.
By the time people found out how much money Google's ad model was making, they had market lock-in.
similarly there were free magazines which were basically ad booklets with some minimal original content in between a ton of ads
... there were ISPs experimenting with the model, both for users and for hosting
free email boxes were the norm, with 5-10MB storage
...
and just as now there was also HBO and fancy cable stations and encrypted stations, and many people did pay for magazine subscriptions
...
the real problem is that a hypergiant is cross-financing the development of a browser
these cross-financing setups ought to be firewalled, the browser should be in a foundation
(of course we know that in practice these are not super useful, see eg. OpenAI, but ... in the end California regulations seem to have helped to keep OpenAI as a "non-profit")
https://www.promarket.org/2023/10/27/google-monopolizes-judi...
But Judge Mehta turned his courtroom into a Star Chamber, a black hole whence no embarrassing information about Google's wicked deeds could emerge."
I did submit the Order to HN for discusssion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45109044
People read the Opinion, but probably no one read the Order that accompanied it
It seems the limited redactions in the Opinion somehow makes up for the trial's lack of transparency
Nor was Google ever sanctioned for its past discovery violations
The remedies hearing transcripts should be released to the public
There's a deeper problem with the way antitrust seems to work, though: it doesn't adequately deter prohibited acts, because in many cases the penalty is just that the bad actor has to stop doing what they were doing. This is a pervasive feature of punishment in "white collar crime" and civil suits for various kinds of regulatory violations. It's like, if you engaged in anticompetitive practices, the punishment is you have to stop doing that, and yeah maybe you pay a fine, but the biggest worst thing that can happen is they take away your monopoly after you've gotten the benefits of using it for a while.
We need to take the approach that everything derived from anticompetitive practices is ill-gotten gains. If you were a monopoly, everything you did as a monopoly is tainted and the proper remedy is a total rollback in all your gains since the beginning of your anticompetitive acts, plus penalties on top of that. This includes penalties against the individuals who directed and enabled the illegal practices (e.g., a personal fine against Sundar Pichai of several hundred million dollars).
What this means is that if Google has held a browser monopoly since, say, 2010, the punishment needs to be that they wind up worse off now than they would have been had they done the right thing and voluntarily taken pro-competitive actions at all times from 2010 until now. Everything they've gained from their monopolistic practices, every success they've built on that, every penny they've earned, every piece of IP they've glommed onto, every scrap of data they've collected --- all of it is forfeit. It may be that certain specific areas could be shown to be sufficiently insulated from the monopolistic practices to avoid such treatment, but the burden of proof is on Google to show that; the assumption should be that everything they accomplished with their monopoly power is poisoned by that wrong.
The penalties need to be so brutal that companies will bend over backwards to avoid becoming monopolies. As long as the penalties can be treated as just a cost of doing business, companies will continue to cheat.
"Google has stolen every fact about our lives, in service to propping up a monopoly that lets it steal our money, too."
I still have all the facts about my life and I don't think any money has been stolen. I get that this is rhetorical, but he's gone over the edge here.
Yikes, you are doing it too. Does accuracy in prose not count anymore?
When you have a strong case you shouldn’t have to bend the facts.
You changed what you wrote to make it accurate now, but refused to admit that and instead just prepended it with "literally"!
Wonderfully ironic given that we are talking about being accurate in your writing!
The second time you were much more accurate. You wouldn’t have even had to restate it differently if the first time had been accurate.
"Oh, a company knows literally everything about me and clandestinely sells that information to the highest bidder in order to target every facet of my existence so that multinational conglomerations can extract every erg of value from every heartbeat of my existence, but that's cool because I also know that information"
Geez.
No, you don't. Google knows more about you than yourself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639261, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2840916, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1584589
If you want to break up google, you should break it into workable coherent profitable business units like youtube, maps and geo, search, adsense, android, google cloud (including email) or some combination of the above.
I think it makes little sense to sell off their loss leading platforms that don’t make up coherent business units.
Regardless of what you think of Google or this case specifically, this is an argument for authoritarianism: that it is legitimate for the government to "punish" any company at will, based only on them falling into political disfavor.
> ... the only punishment Google would have to bear from this trial would come after the government won its case, when the judge decided on a punishment (the term of art is "remedy") for Google.
Yes, this is called the rule of law. Punishment comes through the courts, after a guilty verdict. The government has to actually win the argument as to what remedies would be proportionate under the law. In this case the judge didn't buy it. It's fine to disagree with his reasoning (or with the law), but the fantasizing about extrajudicial punishment here is frankly un-American.
Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden?
For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
The public record argument is fine; it's just a different argument than the extrajudicial punishment advocated by the original post.
Suppose the government charges you with murder, searches your house, and finds your sex toy collection. At trial they present some elaborate thesis about how you used a sex toy to kill someone, but do not convince the jury, so you're found not guilty. The public has a legitimate interest in judging that the trial was handled with integrity and that the correct verdict was reached. They do not have a legitimate interest in judging you based on whatever private information presented at trial might in some way embarrass you (eg, photos of your sex toy collection). On balance, it could be that the public-record interest does in fact justify making public the evidence of the sex toys, but you have to justify it on those terms. The transparency is not itself intended to be punitive.
There is a definite public interest in understanding how Google conducts itself given the reach and impact it has.
There is no way for the public to have confidence in the trial process if it is conducted in secret, and given the outcome every reason to question the process.
I'm surprised anybody objective would defend this.
No its more like, the process of transparency harms the company enough that they will shift their own mentality to ensure they never have to participate in a transparent process.
The argument that we should cheer on the use of government power to target a specific company, to selectively expose their dirty laundry as punishment for a crime they have not been convicted of, is what I found noxious in the original post.
I do find it a bit curious however, where later in the article theres a discussion about explicit collusion between corporates and the government. I vastly prefer the state and corps to be at odds with each other, than in bed with each other. Do any of the allegations towards the end register on your authoritarianismometer?
Any unjust policy (including just dispensing with trials altogether and allowing the executive to arbitrarily break up companies) will get to the 'desirable' outcome in some cases. That doesn't make it a just policy.
The specific allegation in the post is that the Trump administration will not appeal the verdict because Sundar gave $1M to Trump's inauguration. As far as I know, the government has not yet indicated whether it will appeal, so the claim that "Trump just paid him back, 40,000 times over" is in fact not true. (whether it becomes true at some point in the future, it was a falsehood at the time the author wrote it). It's also quite plausible that a Republican administration wouldn't appeal the verdict just due to being more pro-business in general, even without explicit corruption. But it's precisely because we have such a corrupt executive that it becomes all the more important to stick up for the rule of law. The correct response to authoritarianism is not to advocate for more authoritarianism!
Maybe. But then why was the google case actively sheltered and hidden from the public. The optics were considered in at least one of these cases.
Sure, the easiest way you can do that is to move to Europe and petition its regulators to further tighten the screws. They might actually listen.
Because this can only be solved through legislature, and no matter what black swan event happens, there is no future in which the US legislature will take this problem seriously.
And so, if you have that goal--and I will again stress that I don't even think that is the correct primary goal to have at this point, due to Google having effectively taken control of the only browser that matters and being in control of the only video site that matters--breaking apart Google into a bunch of tiny companies along the obvious lines (Android, YouTube, Maps, Gmail, or even Chrome) wouldn't fix the situation, as that isn't going to suddenly allow anyone to create a viable competitor to Google search, as Google Search would still exist, it would still always continue to have more data indexed off the web than anyone else... forever.
You thereby have two options: you can try to destroy Google Search and make it so that no one has a search engine as good as Google--at least for a while--or you can figure out how to break up Google Search itself. The former is maybe a good outcome, but it is not only unrealistic, it isn't necessarily helpful in any external sense, which is where I get really confused about Cory's point here: the thing Google is searching over isn't my private data... it's my public data. Yes: they know a lot about my private data, and it could be cool to have that deleted, but that's kind of besides the point, as it has very little to do with Google Search; people aren't searching for my private data, and Google Search is going to find losing all of my private data as, at best, a minor inconvenience.
What you need to do, thereby, is figure out how to break up the Google Search product into parts, to separate the wholesale part of the business from the retail part of the business, whether by making it into two separate companies or putting restrictions on the combined whole to offer both services separately... and, it sounds like that is what they are going to try? Now, I don't know if this is going to work--as it might be extremely painful or confusing to actually build a useful search engine accessing Google's catalog--but it certainly isn't as if I have a better idea for how to create a competitor to Google Search.
(Again, though: I'm not sold on the idea that the actual problem with Google is that we don't have a competitor to Google Search. Hell: as of recently, my usage of Google Search has plummeted, as I've replaced most of the things I used to use Google for with various uses of large language models... and, yet, I still find Google to be too powerful in a way that distorts markets and should require some kind of antitrust intervention. :/ Maybe, then, the premise is that Cory feels that we should have tried to fix some other problem? But, he's saying that this result is itself a privacy breach... while simultaneously saying Google is going to skirt the benefit by redacting data so hard that they end up in court? I don't get it.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-...
> Judge Mehta was similarly cautious when forcing the company to share data. The company will need to share parts of its search index, the corpus of web pages and information that feeds its results page. But Google does not need to share other data associated with those results, including information about the quality of web pages, he added.
> Google must syndicate its search results to its competitors, Judge Mehta said, adding that the company could do so using the terms it already provides to commercial partners using the company’s results.
Well no. Europe just confirmed it yesterday.