Not sure what your point is, but wealthy people are the source of investment capital. Less capital investment means a less prosperous economy, which negatively impacts about everybody.
Eh, I take your point but I think it’s at least debatable.
Bell Labs via sanctioned, de-facto subsidized monopoly gave us everything from the transistor to the laser to Unix (you know the list, some readers might not). DoD/ARPA/DARPA funding was responsible for countless innovations, notable to this readership TCP/IP etc. (again, you know the list probably better than I do).
Public funding for innovation demonstrably works extremely well at least under some circumstances.
Private investment capital has been demonstrably effective at growing that pie somewhat, but it’s arguably been privatizing the resulting wealth even faster than its grown it, and almost definitionally privatizing it into the pockets of people with significant equity portfolios.
We’ll obviously never know what would have happened if Bell had been broken up and parceled off in the 1930s instead of the 1980s, but it’s far from obvious to me at least that it would have been better.
> Private investment capital has been demonstrably effective at growing that pie somewhat
Compare the success of the free market at raising the standard of living as opposed to other forms of government - by a lot.
> arguably been privatizing the resulting wealth
The only way that wealth would have grown is if that investment paid off in providing goods and services that the rest of the country preferred to buy, and they would only prefer spend their money on it if it made their lives better.
For example, people like to rag on Amazon, but Amazon's products and services has personally benefited me greatly. Shopping online saves me a ton of time, and wear and tear on my car.
As for equity portfolios, anyone in America can invest in equities. Etrade, Robinhood, etc., have done a great job democratizing investing. Want a piece of the action? Buy some equities.
> Compare the success of the free market at raising the standard of living as opposed to other forms of government - by a lot.
Generally alongside massive government-directed/-financed social programs, often much higher tax rates than we’ve seen for decades, alongside a powerful labor movement, and alongside substantial regulation like antitrust. To the extent the raised standard of living has been anything remotely like equitable, anyway. To wit:
> For example, people like to rag on Amazon, but Amazon's products and services has personally benefited me greatly. Shopping online saves me a ton of time, and wear and tear on my car.
That’s great, for you. And the conditions their warehouse workers experience more closely resemble the conditions of workers in similar jobs a century ago, than the conditions of equivalent jobs which no longer exist many places Amazon operates warehouses.
In the same time that this more-free market has been allowed to grow such behemoths, wealth and income disparity have ballooned incredibly. To that point, if I said something like this to many family members and several friends:
> As for equity portfolios, anyone in America can invest in equities. Etrade, Robinhood, etc., have done a great job democratizing investing. Want a piece of the action? Buy some equities.
They’d either laugh out loud or stop speaking to me. Buy some equities with… what? They’re struggling to keep a roof over their heads. Given the circumstances, where I’ve taken over mortgage payments for my parents so they can have a home and where there’s hospital bills much larger than the value of the house, I suspect some of them would disown me for being so callous.
I sincerely am glad that you’re enjoying the benefits of the free market such as it is. But you shouldn’t be under the illusion that it’s anywhere near as available to others as you seem to think.
I want to tread a bit lightly on any disagreement with a living legend like Walter Bright who was navigating the complexities of public/private sector trade-offs via his aerospace work when I was knee-high to a grasshopper: experience and demonstrated ability like that deserve more consideration than they get around here.
With that said, my personal politics (I did self-identify as a “coastal leftie”) are such that I tend to agree with you that equitable surges in human welfare seem highly correlated with a deep partnership between the public and private sectors, strong labor organization, thoughtful and deliberate restraints on monopoly actors, and the Powers That Be taking a very long view on their own welfare by viewing it as a partnership with the working class.
I have also had to divert significant funds to family members both older and younger than me because people in both groups faced exceedingly bleak economic situations of comparatively new vintage: the older because of a collapse in traditional safety nets for retired persons (both public sector and community oriented) and the latter because of starting their working lives during the Great Recession, neither of which is anything to them but really bad luck.
I can’t speak for Walter, but in my lifetime I’ve observed a marked decline in what used to be called noblesse oblige among the asset-holding class, and given his greater experience it seems at a minimum plausible that my dissenting opinions are a product of a deviation from more typical conditions.
Consider all those hundreds of thousands of people that tramp thousands of miles just for a chance to get into the US? What do they know that you don't, or are they just fools?
Why is there not an exodus of hundreds of thousands of poor Americans tramping to other countries?
> Generally alongside massive government-directed/-financed social programs, often much higher tax rates than we’ve seen for decades, alongside a powerful labor movement, and alongside substantial regulation like antitrust.
Much of that occurred long before government social programs, high taxes, unions, anti-trust, etc. Take a look at things like height statistics for Americans throughout the 19th century. Height statistics are a good proxy for standard of living - people don't grow tall if they are malnourished as children.
Amazon has scores of millions of customers. They wouldn't be shopping at Amazon if Amazon was cheating them.
Amazon turnover is such that the average employee works less than a year. This is incongruent with being forced to work there at subhuman conditions.
> Consider all those hundreds of thousands of people that tramp thousands of miles just for a chance to get into the US? What do they know that you don't, or are they just fools?
This feels like a strawman, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that it’s asked sincerely. Nothing I said was intended to suggest that the disparity across borders wouldn’t justify their journey. Many making that journey certainly do know something I do not, and I wouldn’t call anyone a fool for it. I’d add that my own response to myself below might better address this than the comment you’re responding to.
> Why is there not an exodus of hundreds of thousands of poor Americans tramping to other countries?
Last I checked, more people cross the southern US border to emigrate out of the US in recent years. Not sure what the numbers are, not going to dig them up to win at being right, I just think it bears mentioning that people migrate for a wide variety of reasons and I’ll leave it at that.
> Much of that occurred long before government social programs, high taxes, unions, anti-trust, etc. Take a look at things like height statistics for Americans throughout the 19th century. Height statistics are a good proxy for standard of living - people don't grow tall if they are malnourished as children.
Alright, I’ll grant that people got taller around the same time they were likely to die in factory fires. I won’t grant that being taller is an aspiration I care about as much as not dying in factory fires.
> Amazon has scores of millions of customers. They wouldn't be shopping at Amazon if Amazon was cheating them.
> Amazon turnover is such that the average employee works less than a year. This is incongruent with being forced to work there at subhuman conditions.
I’m not going to bother responding to these paragraphs, because I don’t understand your reasoning, other than I don’t think they say what I think you think they say.
I don't believe that several hundred thousand people migrate out of the US every year. Such would certainly make the news. Yes, there are ex pats, but not many.
What would you say the number of people dying in factory fires were?
Since life expectancy went steadily up during the 19th century, it doesn't seem like factory fires had a worse effect than the positive effect of better nutrition, sanitation, housing, etc.
> I’m not going to bother responding to these paragraphs
Those numbers are easily findable via google. If they don't fit the thesis that Amazon is a hellhole for workers and bad for customers, oh well. The migrants that come here by the hundreds of thousands also are not turning around and running away once they discover how awful it is here.
I don’t think this is the correct way to look at it. That may seem harsh but humans certainly never have nor ever will think that way. For example, what is the risk of death associated with climbing up the tree to get the apple. How much are people willing to pay to buy a safer car? There will always be a tail risk. Mitigating the risk will eventually not be worth the cost, either it terms of resources or human years spent on reducing the risk. A much more recent salient example is that most societies on earth have decided that the risk from dying from COVID is worth it to continue living a normal life. If we applied your standard, we should never leave our house and do anything constituting a normal life.
Phew this went somewhere entirely different than I thought it would when I wrote the first paragraph. My original point was going to be that freedom of market wasn’t the ingredient that allowed standards of living to increase in anything like tandem. It was freedom of society. As our “rising tide” lifted all boats, our economic policies mostly resembled socialist countries’, and their effectiveness was mostly attributable to living in a society where you don’t get dead or put in prison or similarly punished for advocating things you think would improve your life or the lives of those with whom you have solidarity. That’s still true. The free market is an awful vessel for that. And there’s no reason to conflate social freedom with it, if anything there’s every reason to assume unfettered market freedom loves social constraint.
The free market is orthogonal to other measures of freedom like democracy. Voting rights are not required for free market to deliver prosperity, as China has demonstrated.
> there’s every reason to assume unfettered market freedom loves social constraint.
I don't know where that came from. I don't see any such relationship.
> where you don’t get dead or put in prison or similarly punished for advocating things you think would improve your life or the lives of those with whom you have solidarity. That’s still true. The free market is an awful vessel for that.
I'm not sure what you're thinking a free market is. A free market, to be a free market, does not put people in prison for improving their lives.
> The free market is orthogonal to other measures of freedom like democracy.
To the extent it is, it’s a failure which erodes or prevents those freedoms from thriving.
> A free market, to be a free market, does not put people in prison for improving their lives.
I was going to invite you to learn more about labor history in the US, but…
> as China has demonstrated.
Never mind, you clearly already understand the point that a state which has mass forced labor camps is compatible with what’s called a free market. But you certainly can’t say no one’s imprisoned with a straight face.
Fun fact, that was building on earlier work on switched packet networks at the UK National Physical Laboratory during the 60s, which is also a public laboratory.
Sorry, but I wasn't attacking wealthy people, nor capitalism (but would be willing to poke at 'em for fun some other time).
> that huge blocks of the rest of the country (and world) vote with their ballots or feet or both for very poorly-articulated policies and agendas
My point is that the policies and agendas seem to be driven more on anger than on structural policies that will enrich their lives.
I'm trying desperately to not engage in any sort of partisanship here, but I'm not aware of any significant policies from the previous administration that actually made their lives better.
There's plenty to discuss in depth there but let's just stick to enumerating high-level policy/programs that we're being voted for, e.g., "Vote for me and I'll give you X, Y, and Z!".
I'm trying to understand what X, Y, and Z might be.
