Your second point is incorrect. There are plenty of trade agreements without free movement included. Indeed the EC (forerunner to the EU) was precisely free trade without free movement.
The first point is debatable. There is a lot of political power to be gained by the person who pulls the trigger if they do it succesfully. I think it is 50:50, but there is a lot of upside to be had if it is done well and with plenty of stability and adjustment time. Anyone in the Conservative party who refuses to pull the trigger will be subject to endless criticism and undermining from the significant base of people that wants it done.
Leaving aside heritability, the environment in which the child will grow up is more or less set in concrete by the time they are born. This includes the parents socio-economic level, but more importantly to that, their attitudes towards relationships, learning, critical thought, reading, victim vs control personality and plenty more. A house without books doesn't fill with books when the child arrives.
Pretty much by the time the first cry is made, a huge chunk of their future is already written. The margin is small, but, having said that, small changes at the margin can make a big difference in individuals.
The margin is larger IMHO. I'm a professional scientist and I have no one remotely resembling an academic in my extended family. Now I'm not a textbook example of success but I've read about many other scientists in similar boats: Feynman and Tesla both come to mind. Feynman had an electronics hobby as a kid. Tesla's father was fairly set against him becoming an engineer.
I know some people with amazing private school education flounder because of it. They saw crazy competition early in life and it seems decided to settle. I had very little competition in my early years. Being the smartest kid in your undergrad makes you feel really good, and motivates you to do better. Where I really needed guidance is going from the sheltered world to reality (early 20s .. when I entered the workforce and subsequently made the decision to get a PhD).
What I want to try to do is teach my kid to have her own hobbies and be generally happy in life.
> Being the smartest kid in your undergrad [...] motivates you to do better.
I've known a number of people to whom it did the opposite—they were always the smartest person in the room, so when they said something, people just assumed they were correct. And they began relying on it; nobody would call them on their bullshit, so they never felt the urge to think very hard about things. Whatever they came up with, they'd think "well, I'm the smartest person around, so I must be right", and that's as far as they'd get.
One guy got very argumentative about it; he'd say the stupidest things, and didn't know how to handle being wrong. Other people figured it out.
That might be your specific interests but I'd wager you didn't come from a family with anyone in jail, your parents sent you to school and stressed its importance, and were well read for their education level.
Of course outliers exist and some very successful people come from very dysfunctional families. But if you look at enough people, they come out in temperament and attitude very similar to their family. The really surprising thing is how often one family will produce two top level musicians or sports players.
Don't forget the extra taxes paid to provide the schooling and hospitals!
It's a good thing for these to be spread out - otherwise those who don't have kids are free riders on those that do. A healthy educated child not only supplies a lifetime of taxes paid, they also provide the labor to care for the ageing who didn't have children.
The article seems to be wandering down the tangled nest of errors called the labor theory of value, or one of its offshoots. This bedevilled people for a long time who could not explain why a diamond was worth so much when it cost little effort to make and is objectively useless.
Modern children are diamonds. They are not that difficult to make, mostly useless but give great utility to the parent. Modern children are also rare, thanks to birth control. Most affluent societies are below replacement rate, while 1800s societies had kids everywhere. The most spoiled and indulged children are the ones who don't have any siblings.
So...
- kids give their parents pride and joy (like a diamond)
- kids are relatively rare compared to the prior period
- the upbringing of a child is 20 year project for parents now, so the loss of effort as they get older increases the pain of loss
Most of these points are in reverse to the prior period, when you'd have 5 or 6 children in the hope of getting 2 or 3 to adulthood, which was onset much earlier. You had more, invested in them less, and everyone else had more as well.
I agree that people should be more connected to their food supply, even if for no other reason than to be able to select better produce for themselves.
I was witness to a cattle being slaughtered while staying on a beef property. It is confronting, I'll give you that. However I still enjoy eating meat but I strive to always eat locally produced and I try and eat what is in season. Again this is more of a quality preference than a moral stand. I worked in a butcher for a while and that taught me a lot.
I am lucky to live in an area abundant in food, so I do feel for those trapped in a big city at the end of industrial supply chains. For dinner tonight I had freshly caught fish that were swimming around yesterday. The difference is amazing.
We often modify our speech for the audience - put someone in a party situation where they are the odd one out and it will be harder for them to follow along.
You can't use terms like 'useful' when measuring jobs or output. It's in the eye of the observer.
Apparently nail painting businesses are a viable industry, in my eyes they are totally useless.
Most of the businesses we recognise today would have been hilarious to our ancestors. Paying good money for a personal trainer? Paying someone to wash your car?
This is an age-old problem which keeps solving itself.
The "eye of the observer" in aggregate is what forms the invisible hand in a free market.
But jobs existing are a consequence of two things: (1) demand & (2) ability to price work output above a minimum.
UBI answers a world where there aren't enough of (2) to satisfy labor supply (whether through automation or increases in efficiency). Because bar repealing minimum wage statutes we're going to reach a point where for {minimum wage salary} there only exist X potential jobs (additional jobs not economically-feasibly offering a sufficient income), and labor pool > X.
The consumer surplus created by cheaper and faster goods will lead to people purchasing other products and services, which will create new types of jobs provided that nobody does anything stupid with regulation.
It's always been this way.
Besides the population of most countries is starting on the path to decline.
Monopoly is the natural end state of capitalism. Once a company is big enough it's easy to destroy or buy out all competition. It's only regulation that prevents all industries becoming monopolies over time.
You're confusing monopolies coopting government to maintain control with large government causing and maintaining monopolies.
Sorry, but no. Creative destruction is the end state of capitalism as has been proven time and time again. There are no examples of monopolies lasting more than a few years unless they have overt support from the state.
Large governments cause monopolies to happen. You said the same thing. Business co-opting a government to creat a monopoly is only possible when the large government exists. You could argue that water and dirt don't cause trees to grow, but without either there is no tree. The language definition is immaterial.
Increases in government size can only occur by taking over parts of the economy into state monopolies. The ultimate large government is a totalitarian communist government, which has a monopoly on everything.
The ultimate cure for monopoly behaviour is a smaller government and more competition by avoiding regulations that favour larger operations over smaller ones.
Standard oil? Microsoft? At a high level government and big business are very similar in scope. It's not a matter of one or the other - your analysis is too simple. Government created the baby bells, not creative destruction. Government circumscribed ms.
Standard Oil was never a monopoly, and even its 90% market share had already dropped to 70% two years later when the government even filed charged, and even more when the case was decided.
Microsoft's market position is inseparable from its support by government in the form of software patents. When their rent on Android phones is larger than their income from their own phones, and that rent is purely based on having a patent on an obsolete filesystem which is only useful because it was previously "the standard" (ie., imposed by them), the government is directly helping Microsoft take advantage from their dominant market position in other markets - exactly what they purpose to ban.
Microsoft was monopolistic in the 1990's, where they exploited their Windows monopoly to the expense of Netscape. That wasn't patents, it was market dominance.
(Not a fan of patents, but that wasn't the problem back then).
The claim I was supporting was "there are no examples of monopolies lasting more than a few years unless they have overt support from the state", not that no company ever gains an overwhelming market share. Yes, IE was once at the very top. And a few years later, it wasn't, thanks to competition.
Meanwhile, the government lawsuit not only did nothing to curb their position (IE kept rising at the same rate), as it gave Microsoft "a special antitrust immunity to license Windows and other 'platform software' under contractual terms that destroy freedom of competition."[1]
> The ultimate cure for monopoly behaviour is a smaller government and more competition by avoiding regulations that favour larger operations over smaller ones.
That would be the libertarian fantasy, but no, unfortunately that is entirely incorrect.
The "regulations" that you assume make monopolies possible is really unrestricted capitalism in itself, which leads to accumulation of capital in the hands of one or few, often colluding entities.
Capitalism favors larger operations over smaller ones through efficiencies of scale. There is no human-created regulations that do this.
Once a company is big enough it's easy to destroy or buy out all competition.
Can you provide one single example of this having happened? I'm willing to believe it, I just haven't found one. Typical examples provided fall short of that claim.
"Due to competition from other firms, their market share had gradually eroded to 70 percent by 1906 which was the year when the antitrust case was filed against Standard, and down to 64 percent by 1911 when Standard was ordered broken up"
Yes, Standard Oil is the typical example, which is why I remain unconvinced. They didn't "destroy or buy out all competition" (they had more than a hundred competitors), which is why - as joslin01 points out - their position of dominance was very short lived. And did they abuse that position by charging exorbitant prices? No, the evidence was that they had generally lowered them.
And finally, this little tidbit: "The dissolution had actually propelled Rockefeller's personal wealth." Hurray for the Sherman Act..?
I am constantly amazed at what gets written in the comments section of a site ostensibly focussed on startup companies and the tech industry. Quite frankly it can often be scary to see what people come up with in their outrageous outrage.
I find all calls to use the power of the state to destroy commerce unsettling. Seems to me the system, imperfect as it is, is functioning well enough in this case.
Certainly there should always be a constant review of regulation in light of events like this, but to confiscate and destroy an entire company for this type of cheat would be chilling for future investment and company formation. That directly leads to a lower level of living for everyone, far worse than the relatively minor increase in emissions in this case.
There seems to be an attitude around that corporations are some evil thing, and that is not healthy at all.
Not yours specifically, but yes, I find the 'herd stupidity' as displayed in your post and the many like it to be the single most scary/worrying trend and greatest threat to a prosperous, peaceful future.
One post like yours, I shrug my shoulders and/or roll my eyes and move on. A continuous barrage of populist drivel like it, anywhere 'the average voter' gets a chance to express their 'opinion' on anything really - I worry what goes through the minds of all those people I see out there walking through the city when I look out my window, and how stable they really are; and if that collective instability might culminate into a real societal upheaval given the right circumstances.
I think it's interesting that you consider my drivel "populist". I don't think I'm a populist, in the general case. And, I'm not sure I would put this in that category, either.
I'm not, at all, anti-corporation. I'm anti-criminal behavior. How is wanting the rule of law to apply equally a "populist" notion?
"Equality" is, admittedly, pretty tricky when talking about a fictional construct. But, when a company kills people we can't put the company in prison to protect people from it and to dissuade other companies from doing similar things. So, I think there should be other tools that can strip away the corporate veil that executives are hiding behind and stop the criminal company from being in a position to cause further harm.
Here's my "free market" question for you: Do you want to be in an industry where you're competing with companies that cheat on health and safety standards? They have lower compliance costs because they're cheating. What do you do? How do you deal with that? Do you want to have to cheat, break the law, and lie to customers, in order to compete effectively with them?
Dunno about the OP, but I do. I look at some comments and actually get the chills imagining what the poster would come up with, if he or she got hands on the reigns of power.
Personally, I think what was being proposed would be an awful idea, but not so odious that merely hearing idle conversation about it is disturbing. I mainly save that category for ideas with racist undertones and the likes. I suppose that's because in most such debates, an appropriate or at least plausible approach exists along similar lines to what's being discussed, albeit less extreme - in this case, what actually happened, fining a company over ten billion dollars, could be seen as a less extreme version of a corporate death penalty, and there are points in between that are at least not completely unthinkable - so the basic emotions behind the debate are a reasonable framework. Whereas with ideology motivated by prejudice, I think usually you should essentially throw the whole thing away and start fresh, because the premise is fundamentally irrational.
The first point is debatable. There is a lot of political power to be gained by the person who pulls the trigger if they do it succesfully. I think it is 50:50, but there is a lot of upside to be had if it is done well and with plenty of stability and adjustment time. Anyone in the Conservative party who refuses to pull the trigger will be subject to endless criticism and undermining from the significant base of people that wants it done.