Really disappointed more authors don't take on that topic.
I don't like the author's definition of "classic libertarianism" though. Classic libertarianism is anarcho-socialism. Liberty in all spheres of life: the personal, the political, the economic. Opposition to all forms of tyranny and concentration of power.
What the author is describing in the article is American "Libertarianism" which came about in the mid-20th century. It adopted the term from libertarian socialism but cleansed it of its critique of authoritarianism in the economic sphere (corporations are dictatorships).
It's as though a royal servant came up with a philosophy of "liberty to do whatever you want with your kingdom" and the royals embraced it, along with anyone else who aspired to it. It's a corruption of the term.
But the idea that anyone in Silicon Valley is an honest Libertarian (in the American sense) is ridiculous, given the massive amount of state spending that supports it.
In the US the word libertarian would be better replaced with neo-liberal.
Libertarians have to call themselves something - I figure they can keep the word 'libertarian' and old-school libertarians can keep calling themselves anarchists or, if they believe in some sort of government, 'libertarian socialists' (which is also a fun phrase to drop in front of the more ill-educated right-libertarians). The nearest alternative to libertarian in current use is 'anarcho-capitalist' which is problematic for right-libertarians in that most of them believe in some sort of government ('Anarchists who want the police to protect them from their slaves') and problematic for anarchists who think that the capitalist employer/worker relationship is entirely incompatible with any conception of anarchism.
Neo-liberal is already in use for more conventional political outlooks, as other posters have pointed out.
The term "Libertarianism" was appropriated in the mid 20th century by radical capitalists and completely eviscerated of its meaning. They turned a blind eye to the authoritarianism and centralized power of corporations. Even Adam Smith (another classical libertarian, pre-capitalist thinker) warned about this.
My opinion of Twitter has gone down after I learned they were given $22 million in tax breaks. This was in exchange for charitable work in San Francisco. Although the company has done some charitable work, the amount is a fraction of the cost of the tax breaks awarded them.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/justinesharrock/the-twitter-document...
The most ridiculous quote from the above article:
"The company also disclosed it spent over $750,000 on food items, all bought within 50 miles of the office in order to support local businesses, which it said constituted a sort of charity."
Tax breaks can certainly be seen as a form of public investment. But the $22M figure for the Twitter tax break is a bit of a fantasy.
That was supposed to be a break on local payroll tax to the city of SF. Think about that.. I doubt any company in the history of SF has paid $22M in local payroll tax. That would be absurd. So where did the $22M figure come from?
Turns out there was a change passed a few years ago in between the dotcom booms that added stock option gains to the definition of "payroll". Since there were no startups happening at that time, nobody paid attention to this obscure change in local SF law. And it was never enforced and to my knowledge has no corollary in any startup-rich city. (Because it would be insane and drive out all startups.) So that's where someone came up with a "$22M" calculation.. by taxing the gains on early stage employee stock options. Even though the city bears no risk like early stage employees do.
If you were to just look at paycheck amounts as "payroll", Twitter's tax break would be valued at far less than that.
To be clear I don't think Twitter should have gotten a total tax holiday and anyone who thinks they would've moved to Brisbane is a fool. I think the city should have just un-done that dumb stock option tax.
Hmm... ah yes, here it is:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/groupthink/2014/01/24/why-silico...
This header:
"Google, Apple and other tech firms likely colluded to keep their workers' wages down." then concludes: "So much for that libertarian worldview"
That assumes incorrectly that willful collusion is somehow anti-free market, or anti-libertarian. The free market has absolutely no position on collusion, except that force may not enter into economic transactions. If two parties choose to collude to set prices, the free market has no opinion on the matter as such; if they set prices incorrectly in the process of judging the market, they will lose. That is basic free market ideology.
A free market doesn't outlaw or in any way forbid collusion. Nor is it considered immoral in laissez-faire doctrine to agree to freeze or suppress wages across an industry. The use of force (eg to prevent workers from leaving their job for a better paying one) to control workers would be considered immoral and illegal. Otherwise, it's the responsibility of the worker to pursue a job that properly compensates their talent, not the responsibility of the business owner to overpay the worker (and if the owner isn't properly compensating the worker, and that worker leaves, the owner loses).
As a response to wage collusion by business owners, in a free market workers also have the right to collude to attempt to inflate wages; owners also have a right to fire every single one of them in response. Whichever group judges correctly about their value proposition, wins.
One can then move on to debating the merits of laissez-faire Capitalism versus other systems; or libertarian ideology; or 19th century free market economics. The author however is far off base in understanding even where the conversation would begin.
The reasoning of the article laid out explicitly: Peter Thiel is guilty of hypocrisy because (democrats) Larry Page and Steve Jobs failed to live up to Peter Thiel's libertarian principles.
[edit: CEO of Adobe, also involved in this mess, is a Democrat and selected by Obama to be on his PMAB.]
"1.6 percent of the adult population owns 82 percent of all stock, and thus actually owns American business and industry. In a very real sense, that tiny 1 percent of the population faces the other 99 percent across a barrier of very real self-interest. That tiny 1 percent has been accumulating more as the years go on, not less. The key to that accumulation is assuring that the people who make up the other 99 percent are sharply restricted in what power and privilege they accumulate."
Again, that was written by an American libertarian.
Libertarianism is a family of philosophical viewpoints, that runs the gamut from the "Libertarian socialism" of Noam Chomsky to the "Geolibertarianism" of Henry George to the craziness of the "Tea Party."
It's noteworthy that Ayn Rand denounced libertarianism. I was excommunicated from the Objectivist club in college for espousing libertarian anarchist views.
It's also noteworthy that Tea Party founder Karl Denninger renounced the Tea Party, saying it was co-opted by the Republican Party, which shifted its focus to "Guns, gays, God." He sums up his feelings toward the Tea Party, saying:
"Tea Party my ass. This was nothing other than The Republican Party stealing the anger of a population that was fed up with The Republican Party's own theft of their tax money at gunpoint to bail out the robbers of Wall Street and fraudulently redirecting it back toward electing the very people who stole all the f---ing money!" Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/20/karl-denninger-tea-...
Someone who's really interested in the variety of libertarianism ought to start with the Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism
I don't believe for a minute that he cared about how much people made and was far more concerned with either employees leaving with secrets, or more likely annoyed that a revolving door of employees between his company and others took time away from getting his projects completed.
Apple has no problem paying people, but if they're trying to complete something for particular market opportunity, they probably don't want to waste time bringing new hires up to speed.
Sounds extremely right-wing libertarian to me! /s
[1] http://publicsphere.org/2014/02/02/the-asymmetric-zero-sum-g...
This confuses more than it clarifies. Economic injustice is a question of moral values; phrasing it as a scientific truth lends it a false air of credibility.
In the Preface to Game Theory Evolving, economist Herbert Gintis suggested that the mathematical methods of non-cooperative (and cooperative) game theory developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern, Nash and their successors–Gintis among them–have the potential to elevate social and political discourse above ideological debate.
Gintis does not take the step of applying game theory to the topics under discussion--but neither have most of the comments here, with the expected result.
So you think morality has no credibility?
Yet they are completely ignoring the main point of this article - big companies pushing down wages.
lol
Having said that, we don't live in a free market, the economy is ruled by central banks who do central planning, thanks to free money for them, taken from the rest of us.
In the technology sector, we live in a world with business and software patents, and with lawsuits costing millions, which makes competing against the big guys harder and harder for little guys.
These labels are entirely useless. Word games are stupid. To have a useful conversation, just agree on words, then argue ideas.
As long as there is a third party that can be made to help you, you will. The only reason there exists a relativly free market in the first place is that there is a balance between diffrent 'powers'.
Everybody individually would benefit from some policys in there faver but there are few policys that help everybody.
As soon as one groupe gets to much power (meaning political influance) the get a handout (Sugar Farmers, US Steel ...).
ANYONE in their position would do this. It's not a matter of belief or politics or even ethics. It's a matter of oversight. The people responsible for providing for the free market have failed to protect relatively less powerful market players.
Let's stop pretending that the "free market" isn't a dirty nasty place.
- kids believe in extra cookies at snack time
- dogs believe in steak and not dry kibble in the dog bowl
People (and animals) like things that they perceive to benefit them. How is this even news?
This case is striking on many levels, the most obvious being the effective theft of large amounts of money by some of the richest people on the planet from their employees.
UN must be libertarian! Damn!
So it's ok to exploit one's personal situation (family and financial commitments stopping one from moving to a location where the cartel is not in force, for example), but hey, no physical violence please, psychological one will do!
There is a main difference between the two actors: employers own original capital, employees don't. The penalty for employers (losing some profit if all workers quit or get fired) is virtually nonexistent: limited-liability companies are set up with the explicit aim of exonerating capital owners from responsibility beyond the invested capital. You lose the company, you lose a bit of capital; but in most cases, there is more where that came from. Workers don't own original capital (which is why they are workers, after all). The penalty for them is much higher, they could lose their house and/or livelihood.
Refusing to consider the fundamental imbalance of labor relationships is disingenuous at best. It's sad that we're still debating this same stuff in 2014.
>>> The penalty for employers (losing some profit if all workers quit or get fired) is virtually nonexistent:
Because in your world running a business carries no risk as businesses never go bust. I see. Must be nice.
>>> limited-liability companies are set up with the explicit aim of exonerating capital owners from responsibility beyond the invested capital.
And losing invested capital (for small business/startup - likely all one has and also a lot of borrowed money) is nothing. Again, must be nice to be a man for whom losing all investment is nothing.
>>> The penalty for them is much higher
You mean, they have to go to work to another place now? If they possess marketable skills of decent quality, it won't be long before they'd be paid for them. If not, now we know why the business went bust - they shouldn't have hired workers which are incompetent.
>>> Refusing to consider the fundamental imbalance of labor relationships is disingenuous at best.
Here we considered it and found you fundamentally misunderstand both nature of business and nature of employment, suggesting business carries no risk and employment only possible with single employer and if that goes bust the worker can not work anymore. Yes, it does sound a bit sad.
> Refusing to consider the fundamental imbalance of labor relationships is disingenuous at best
What makes it disingenuous? Isn't grandparent just disagreeing with some of your assumptions?
Sorry. Would you like a cool compress? ;-)
> So it's ok to exploit one's personal situation (family and financial commitments stopping one from moving to a location where the cartel is not in force, for example), but hey, no physical violence please, psychological one will do!
I don't know how to describe the ludicrousness of describing not cold calling someone as "psychological violence".
In general though, I'm no libertarian, but I'm pretty sure they'd be the first to admit that the libertarian model is without exploitation, immorality, or evil. They'd just argue that the use of force to exert controls would invariably be a greater exploitation/immorality/evil.
> employers own original capital
At least with startups in the valley, they most certainly don't.
To clarify: investors by definition are risking original capital, so they always own original capital... of course with a typical investment model, once they invest that capital, they no longer own said capital and in fact may no longer own any original capital.
Employers are generally the businesses themselves, and so don't necessarily have original capital and statistically at least are disproportionately likely to either be in debt or at least have negative cash flow, particularly with startups.
Employees on the other hand, have almost no capital at risk tied to their involvement in a venture beyond equity/warrants in the company. It is entirely possible (and particularly in the case of the tech industry, and particularly in the case of senior employees like those targeted by these practices) that they'd have original capital, and in fact in I think every case of the named companies they have opportunities to contribute original capital into their employer at better than market rates, as well as having sweat equity translated in to options or straight out equity/grants in their employer. So they are more than encouraged to have either original capital or at least the equivalent thereof.
In short, the power dynamic you are implying as universal to the employer-employee relationship isn't universal and most importantly is a particular ill fit to the context in question.
> employees don't
At last with startups in the valley, that is far from necessarily true.
> The penalty for employers (losing some profit if all workers quit or get fired) is virtually nonexistent: limited-liability companies are set up with the explicit aim of exonerating capital owners from responsibility beyond the invested capital.
Yeah... but that limited liability is very hard to escape and often significantly outweighs the relative penalty for employees of quitting or getting fired. Again, at startups... most employees don't recoil in horror about the economic (psychological is a different matter) consequences of quitting or getting fired.
> Workers don't own original capital (which is why they are workers, after all).
Again, at a startup up, it'd be a huge assumption to think they are working there because they don't own original capital.
> The penalty for them is much higher, they could lose their house and/or livelihood.
Assuming there is demand from other employers, the penalty is almost 0. Particularly as a logical consequence of the hiring practices alluded to in the article, an engineer who is laid off is going to get snatched off the market almost immediately. In fact, they are likely to not even miss a single paycheck and could very well end up with a raise out of the whole thing.
> Refusing to consider the fundamental imbalance of labor relationships is disingenuous at best.
Refusing to consider the full impact of distortions on labor relationships is disingenuous at best. Engaging in a debate about this same stuff in 2014 without considering the market & economic realities that motivate these practices in the first place is beyond sad.
Yes, because physical violence is provable, psychological violence is easier to fabricate. If the state cannot satisfy a certain level of probity, then it should stay out for the risk of making the accused a victim of physical violence.
That doesn't make psychological damage is morally acceptable, it just means as a society we should find another means of punishing it that doesn't involve the state.
This is a nice example why free markets are not optimal, zero regulation is not the best amount of regulation.
The question to ask here is why do you think your preferred outcome is better than mine and what gives you right to force it on me.
I was under the impression that, to be allocatively efficient, market participants have to be 'price takers' (along with a bunch of other assumptions) - anything other than this creates an inefficient market.
I also think it is incorrect to assume (even in theory) that this kind of market failure will always resolve itself by the price makers, i.e. those engaging in collusion, being priced out of the market. The alternative, which seems to me to be more likely (otherwise why would people collude?), is that the price makers capture an inefficiently large proportion of the market's productive output.
In short, market theory absolutely does have a position on collusion - it leads to market failure.
You should update your economic belives. Look at the 2002 Nobel Price by V. Smith for this one.
> In short, market theory absolutely does have a position on collusion - it leads to market failure.
The existence of market failure is no position. Just for the fact that there is market failure does not have any implication on what to do about it.
No (almsot no) free market economys belvies that there is no market failure (however you want to define it). That is simply something that is often assert because it makes for good propaganda (makes it possible to laught at the idiot free market people without really listening to them).
The question is not if the market is perfect, it is clearly not. The question is (a) can we do something about it, do we know enougth (b) given the power to do something about it, will the goverment actually do it, or will it use that power to do the oppiste.
Now I would assert (hince my free market views) that both (a) and (b) have to be answer with 'most likly no'. We often do things because we think we can and it turns out that it also has tons of other effects that we did not wish for (law of unintended consequenses). Next even assuming that understand everything about some action, given the power is it not more likly that something else will be done. A quick glance at history clearly shows this, how often is a given regulation used to help buissnesses instead of people workers.
Why do you think you coke is made out of mais sirup instead of cain sugar.
Also the should be allowed to strik, but the employer should also be allowed to fire people who dont show up to work.
"If humans are such a great species, how come I don't like rabbits?"
"Mother Theresa talks a good game. If that's true, why was Hitler such a bad person?"
This is a terrible essay.
These people are about as libertarian as my cat and we certainly didn't need this article or this court case to know that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
What the article sort of draws attention to indirectly is the fact that these CEOs are unfairly put up on a pedestal (especially Jobs) by so many people who adore them despite their less than stellar actions and criminal activity. Perhaps if they spent half their fortunes on charity, a la Gates, I'd be willing to be rethink my opinion of these scumbags.
Even for those of whom it is true, I would bet that they appear 'Democrat' only to help them sell stuff, as part of their brand.
Most people who use software are in the cities. And, city-dwellers are generally liberal-leaning. So, it makes sense for these leaders would try to seem liberal as part of their marketing campaigns.
[1] I'm only weakly libertarian, so I don't want to speak for them. My values are almost entirely left wing liberal, but I haven't drank the koolaid on economic theories designed to justify the status quo and protect party cronies.
There is no such thing as a 'true' libertarian, because many groups with only tangentially related credos have adopted the name as their own, and many groups have distanced themselves from the 'libertarian' label even though they espouse beliefs closely related to what is often understood as being libertarianism. It follows that, when you criticise people for being
We don't seriously expect Hacker News to mostly carry news about the newest exploits and defaced sites, do we? Same deal, talking about libertarians doesn't necessarily correctly identify the population you're targeting.
Anyway, do you know of any good Internet communities for left libertarians? IRC, message boards, blogs, etc?
no insults and no idea where to find people.
According to this version, Jobs was a leading figure in those payment-limitation-talks. Indeed, free markets exist in our minds only - until someone uncovers talks and transactions... Shouldn't accept that and a lawsuit is the right move. THIS is also a tool of the free market.
I have seen many people take her books from the point of view of the creator or individualist struggling against the collective. Some take inspiration from that, while disgorging the rest of her ideas. I know many people that blend up a sort of free market economics + social libertarian + limited socialism (eg healthcare) world view.
If your "social progress" is accomplished at the end of a gun barrel, it should be rolled back to the Victorian age, or even the Stone age. What good is social progress without freedom? If we institutionalize the use of coercive force to accomplish social ends, then we're a fucked society anyway.
Hmm, seemed more comprehensive in my memory :)
While this is true, it has nothing to do with supporting commercial enterprise. Not even a little bit.
DARPA funds stuff because it costs the military less money in the long run to do so. That's it, nothing more. It's the military, and they want advanced stuff. So they pay for it, and they do so as economically as they can. That means funding research.
FWIW Every last penny DARPA had spent on research until then was more than paid back during the first gulf war due to the logistics improvements that came from software. DARPA has (and continues to have) enormous success relatively to the money it spends. It is absolutely not some form of corporate welfare, as you seem to imply.
Same with the Internet. DARPA does what they do for themselves, i.e. for the military. That private enterprise takes what they learn doing research projects for the military and runs with it doesn't even enter into the calculation of whether DARPA would do what it does. It's not some kind of benevolent tech incubator spending Uncle Sam's dough on worthy commercial causes.
I guess what I'm saying is that "government" doesn't do anything to help the technology sector, and whatever help they do get is completely inadvertent. The government wants the best military they can get for the money, and that means that agencies like DARPA fund research, because it achieves that goal.
Furthermore, it's not government at large, it's the military, and its entirely so that the military can do a better job with the funding citizens are giving them. I, for one, think they're doing reasonably well and specifically believe that the money DARPA spends is very well spent, and would still be well spent even if generated $0 in secondary economic activity.
What we're both describing is the Pentagon system. The pretext for investment in high tech is that we need it for defense. And then we can just give it away to the private sector because, hey, it's like military surplus.
But it's highly unlikely Silicon Valley would exist without the hundreds of billions in government investment in core high tech. The government invests in nascent tech at a much earlier and riskier stage than venture capital, often billions over a period of a decade or more. There's also the critical role of (usually military) procurement in creating a market for early tech. This is orders of magnitude riskier and broader scale than any private VC fund.
You're biggest error I think is in missing the bigger picture of how this creates a (rather disturbing) feedback loop into war policy. Doing this all through the pretext of military spending means that the public has less control over how taxpayer funds are invested in the economy and the private sector can capture all the profits, using the logic that you articulate. But it also means that we have to keep finding new enemies and waging wars to keep the Pentagon system running.
In the ideal free-market theory, you do not need the anti-monopoly law. But you have to use it in reality to mantain the free-market from collapse. It is clear what author says. He attacks this childish free-market fundamentalism. He makes a right point. You attack him without the reason and defend the flawed ideology, support spreading the wrong beliefs. How can I believe that you is not a libertarian?
I don't know if morality has credibility or not. What would that mean?
Whether the characterization holds is an empirical question. Whether one ought to condone the systematic winning of asymmetric zero-sum games is a further question. It is in my view rhetorically important not to cede the "value neutral" conceit of (many practitioners of) economics to conservatives. Unfortunately many non-conservatives seem to lack the economic and mathematical background (not to mention imagination--pardon the paralipsis) to turn the "value neutral" conceit on its head. The term "economic injustice" could stand further refinement by explicit mention of its positive, game-theoretic aspects. That involves characterizing, in game-theoretic terms, economic phenomena that game theorists and economists have chosen, for various reasons, not to study.
A philosophical attitude isn't particularly helpful here, if this means the unfortunate Anglophone tendency to limit philosophy to "patrolling the border between sense and nonsense." But the historical fact that game theorists have tended to study empirical questions on terms that can be addressed in game theoretic terms is not a reason to dismiss what might appear to a philosopher concerned with "conceptual analysis" as some kind of private, special language.
What does your friend do?
It can't be too low as too "worry" the employee or to make him/her uncomfortable living in Silicon Valley
For the "paying less" I see it as backwards. Between working at Apple at X and SomeOtherPlace at X+Y the Y may not be worth it. And based on some places I worked, Y may be totally not worth it.
However, I don't think these advantages warrant capturing all the positive aspects in game theoretic terms. It makes the reading opaque, hiding the normative value judgments behind scientific-seeming jargon.
Instead of formalising the positive aspects, clarify the underlying normative choices. Then we will come closer to finding where it is we actually disagree.
Let me attempt to disentangle them: You assume collectives (not only individuals) have rights.
> approximately 0.1% of the US population has been systematically winning asymmetric zero-sum games against the lower 99%.
You treat clusters of individuals as players in a game, and infer injustice from systematic winning of these games; as though justice would necessitate "fair gameplay" between collectives, not just between individuals.
There's nothing to disagree with in your formalisation, but your formalisation is meaningless to anyone who disagrees with the underlying philosophy of rights and justice.
We are talking about Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe -- startups? Small businesses? No, market-clearing companies with billions in profit and rich dividends, quarter after quarter.
If they possess marketable skills of decent quality, it won't be long before they'd be paid for them.
As you put it, must be nice to be a man for whom losing a job is nothing. If you are a major investor in Intel or Adobe, chances are you are not going to lose your house over it; things tend to be different for most workers.
I am not saying business never carries risk; what I'm saying is that the type of risk is qualitatively different from the risk of losing a job for an average salaried worker.
>>> must be nice to be a man for whom losing a job is nothing.
I didn't say it's nothing. I said it's not losing your livelihood on permanent basis. If you have marketable skills, you will find another job, and unlike capital, your skills can not be lost. They can become stale and out of date, but there's an easy remedy for that - keep learning and improving - and that needs to happen even if you do have a job.
>>> If you are a major investor in Intel or Adobe, chances are you are not going to lose your house over it;
Unless you deal in trivialities like "if you're a billionaire, then losing a million does not matter", many people lost a lot on dotcom boost, and many lost their house quite literally betting on housing market. Unless you are a politician or friends with one, investment always carries a risk of loss.
>>> I'm saying is that the type of risk is qualitatively different from the risk of losing a job for an average salaried worker.
Yes, it is, investor risk what can be easily and irreversibly lost and can not be protected (I exclude bailout shenanigans of course, this is plain old robbery that our politicians facilitated) and the salaryman risks only a temporary dip in the cash flow in the most cases, and his skills can not be taken away or lost, indeed they are usually improving constantly (15 years of experience is usually better than 5). The nature of risk is substantially different. That's why most people prefer salary.
Cold calling is not necessary, a worker has networks of his own. Given a situation where the worker is trying to improve his condition by getting fairer compensation for his work, and is forced to renounce by a localised cartel of employers exploiting his conditions (i.e. that he can't leave the area), I'd say that's psychological violence alright... but I guess we'll never agree on the exact degree of intensity of such force.
>At least with startups in the valley, they most certainly don't [own original capital].
We are talking about Apple, Intel, Google etc; they are not startups anymore. Startups are not the ones who colluded, they already cannot pay market wages in most cases. It's the companies who could and should pay full wages, the ones who tried to scrimp on salaries.
I agree that the fundamental asymmetry in labor relationship is mitigated by factors such as business size and investor's own history, but it's still there (how often do we get stories on HN about startup workers being screwed out of rewards for successful business outcomes), and anyway these factors simply do not apply to Google, Apple et al.
>Assuming there is demand from other employers
That's a big assumption. It might be true for Silicon Valley as of 2014, but in most years and in most areas that's simply not the case.
> Refusing to consider the fundamental imbalance of labor relationships is disingenuous at best. >> Refusing to consider the full impact of distortions on labor relationships is disingenuous at best.
I agree, it's a complex matter, but you cannot take as fundamental principles for economic doctrine some localised, exceptional and very limited situation: you take the common scenario and build principles from it, then you tweak it for outliers. "Engineers in Silicon Valley" is the outlier, not the common scenario, and people trying to use that as the basis for "new" theories are, in most cases, just rehashing old excuses for exploiting the workforce.
You are making these company's arguments for them. Although the notion that these individuals would need to know someone to find gainful employment at a competitor is wrong.
> and is forced to renounce by a localised cartel of employers exploiting his conditions (i.e. that he can't leave the area), I'd say that's psychological violence alright... but I guess we'll never agree on the exact degree of intensity of such force.
Rather, I think we should agree that you have created a straw man that while it may very well be an accurate depiction of some circumstances, does not apply to the story you are commenting on.
> It's the companies who could and should pay full wages, the ones who tried to scrimp on salaries.
Google is known to compensate their employees at the upper end of the market. Once you factor in benefits and equity, all of these companies compensate well above median salary for their low level employees as well as the ones targeted by these policies. What you are saying does not reflect reality.
I think a very good case could be made that these policies may constitute unfair labour practices, but if you think about how much the bottom line of these companies would be impacted if the targeted employees had their wages and compensation even doubled, you might begin to appreciate that you are barking up the wrong tree here.
> That's a big assumption.
That's really not a really big assumption when the entire practice was based on there being demand from other employers.
> "Engineers in Silicon Valley" is the outlier, not the common scenario, and people trying to use that as the basis for "new" theories are, in most cases, just rehashing old excuses for exploiting the workforce.
One could paraphrase that as, "it makes sense to apply a common principle to a specific situation, asserting as postulates foundational characteristics of that common principle even when the specific situation directly contradicts those characteristics."
On that basis I could assert that since you and I are arguing on the web that we are both introverted and socially isolated juvenile white males expressing internalized aggression, regardless of the sounds of my spouse and child asking for help with homework...
Agree that labels aren't always the most helpful, but absent a better system, seeking ideas and kinship with those of similar political beliefs is still a good thing overall, IMHO.
Didn't think you did, I just was pointing out I intended none just as I failed to provide a reference for where to find a group / organization meeting your needs.
"Agree that labels aren't always the most helpful, but absent a better system, seeking ideas and kinship with those of similar political beliefs is still a good thing overall, IMHO."
Oh, I don't disagree with that, words act as banners to organize. It is just that labels seem to morph. Back in the day, writing a grant to the government that had certain words that worked 5 years before would be an auto reject. Its like fashion, except I have no clue how the words get drifted.
Currently, depending on company, I could go with the label "classically liberal capitalist" or "tea party republican". Of course, the problem with the later is the assumptions one makes based on what you've "heard" as opposed to what I and others actually believe. This seems to mirror your experience with "thinking libertarian is an oxymoron" insult for Libertarian.
The defense seems to be adding words or conditions that make people try to figure out the changed definition. I would bet you've heard the "I'm a little l libertarian". To which people go "uhm, explain that?!?".
Words come out and sometimes back into fashion. Opponents of a belief heap added (mostly untrue generally derogatory) meaning on a word until the definition changes. Then people get tired of defending that word and pick a new one to define them. I know its happened with Occupy and the Tea Party.
No, I make no such assumption. The assertion that I do is not warranted. Since philosophers like to find inferences their interlocutors believe they have not made: locate this assumption. Rousseau's vocabulary of "rights" has not been particularly helpful.
I do not "infer" injustice. The attempt is to characterize positive aspects of it. It seems to be characterized by the systematic winning of certain games by one group against another, especially when the utility obtained by winning is population dependent for one group (the "winners") and not for the other group (the "losers").
A general prohibition against allowing one group to systematically win asymmetric zero-sum games against another group would be a normative principle. So would some elaboration of special exceptions.
incidentally, you use the term 'meaningless' too loosely. Under what philosophical theory does a formalization becomes meaningful depending on who agrees with its "underlying philosophy"?
The reason for this is simple: government has power because it can use violence. Even democracy works because the majority uses threat of violence to get minority submission to law. (Otherwise, all we have is anarchy/consensus). When a non-near-100% majority of the labor force wants to unionize, it only works if had the power to use force-- its own, or the local/state/federal government. Otherwise, scabs will quite often undermine the union's bargaining position.
Nowhere have I said that anyone's use of force is wrong! In the union debates, people often forget to ask: WHY is the use of force legitimate for the federal govt, but not for the labor pool for a factory? The answer is not obvious, the claim might not be true! "Because George Washington and Thomas Jefferson" is not a valid answer!
Now you're cherry-picking. There are several other laws that regulates what employees and unions can do, what they can demand and how etc. For example, the union must be open to everyone so the agreement can't be used to give preferential treatment to someone.
Can you please elaborate? I don't know enough of the details to understand the link you're making.
> The existence of market failure is no position. Just for the fact that there is market failure does not have any implication on what to do about it.
The first sentence is incorrect, and is not implied by the second sentence, which is correct. The 'position' is that, in order to have an efficient market, one should not do things that cause market failure. It is a negative position rather than a positive one (DON'T do X rather than DO X), but it is still a position. It informs you about what sort of things you shouldn't do if you want a market to operate efficiently.
> That is simply something that is often assert because it makes for good propaganda
Saying that collusion can lead to market failure, and thus must be proscribed if one wishes to have an efficient market, is not propaganda. It is the kind of thing that must be said, seemingly repeatedly, to illustrate the point that markets are not a magical solution to the allocation problem.
The argument you subsequently make, that "we don't know better", is both completely standard and completely wrong. We may well not know better than an efficient market - I'm not sure but it seems very reasonable. However, moving from that to suggest that imposing controls such as anti-collusion regulations (along with a whole host of other measures to avoid market failure), is unnecessary, is unsubstantiated.
If you examine your own argument, it is based by your own admission on an assertion. The foundation for why one might think that what you are saying is true (market theory) explicitly lays out the assumptions required for it to work, and you ignore these on a purely ideological basis.
With position I am talking about politcal position, witch is what it is all about.
> The 'position' is that, in order to have an efficient market, one should not do things that cause market failure.
"one should not" who is "one"? I dont understand what you mean. The goverment should defnetly not do things that cause market failure, and in my opinion the should do things against it either.
> Saying that collusion can lead to market failure, and thus must be proscribed if one wishes to have an efficient market, is not propaganda.
My point was to say that, its propaganda to say that free market people dont belive in market failure, nothing else.
> It is the kind of thing that must be said, seemingly repeatedly, to illustrate the point that markets are not a magical solution to the allocation problem.
Again, nobody is arguing for "perfect markets". This is what seemingly repeatedly has to be said.
> However, moving from that to suggest that imposing controls such as anti-collusion regulations (along with a whole host of other measures to avoid market failure), is unnecessary, is unsubstantiated
No it is not. Also you only addressed the first part of my argument. Its hard to argue the general case here, there is tons of litrature showing how for example anti-trust regulation was used to keep prices high. There are tons of cases where goverment was used to enforce cartels as well.
So if the goverment task of managing cartels would not exists then there might be less cartels overall.
> The foundation for why one might think that what you are saying is true (market theory) explicitly lays out the assumptions required for it to work, and you ignore these on a purely ideological basis.
You might be surprised but there no just the walrasian standard model (or Arrow–Debreu). Also just because the make these assumition and the need to be true in there model does not mean that it is the same for the real world. You are assuming that the standard model used in econ 101 is reality.
Well it is not, and everybody who studied economics a bit knows this. You need to bring in transaction costs, theory of the firm, information economics, you need to bring in instiutional economics, there needs to be a explaition market ajustment and so on. Also you need to model politcal economy, are you really so naive to assume that the correction of market failure is also just like in these models. A completly costless third party that only ever does anything when the model goes out of balance, interduce politcal economy into the mix, try modeling 'goverment failure' as well.
Again, I feel I have to say this again, I do not make the argument that a market always is or always reaches generall equillibrum very fast(as in Arrow-Debreu). The simple idea that you seam to have is that any diffrence between Arrow-Debreu assumtions and the real world must be corrected is not woreable in practice, and I belive no economist would still try this.
I was originally responding to adventured, who said "The free market has absolutely no position on collusion, except that force may not enter into economic transactions." I dispute both this statement as I understand it, with the argument I have already laid out, and also your current claim that the "free market political view" has no position on collusion.
On that, I don't think you can just claim to speak for everyone who considers themselves a proponent of free markets, and furthermore a lot of people who do so are very clear about the need for controls on those markets, mostly (it seems to me) with the aim of bringing them closer to the theoretical ideal.
> "one should not" who is "one"?
One here refers to anyone who is trying to engage in free market transactions, as opposed to someone who wants to distort a free market for their own ends. I apologise for my lack of clarity.
> My point was to say that, its propaganda to say that free market people dont belive in market failure, nothing else.
I understand that, however you are responding to a straw man - I didn't say that free market proponents don't believe in market failure, I said that they, meaning the most ardent supporters, believe that market failures are best resolved by the market - that regulators can't do better. You may wish to dispute this.
> ... Also just because the make these assumition and the need to be true in there model does not mean that it is the same for the real world. ... > ... You need to bring in transaction costs, theory of the firm, information economics, you need to bring in instiutional economics, there needs to be a explaition market ajustment and so on. Also you need to model politcal economy ...
I agree wholeheartedly with what you are saying here - it is indeed very difficult to model the economy, and the assumptions on which the models of principle lie most assuredly do not hold in the real world. I also share your understanding that most economists would not claim otherwise - they have much more pragmatic views of the economy.
Overall, I'm not sure I understand what your point is. Mine was originally that basic market theory gives a reason why collusion is bad, and has now been extended to include the notion that simply waving your hands and saying "I don't think regulation works" isn't an argument, for example:
> So if the goverment task of managing cartels would not exists then there might be less cartels overall.
Is a statement that is possibly true, and possibly false, it is not, however, a basis for decision making.
Yes
> It looks a lot like guilt by association.
Your political affiliation is your own choice, so it doesn't seem to have that unfairness.
(Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Marisa Mayer, Eric Schmidt and Steve Jobs all self-identify as "Democrat", not "[Ll]ibertarian". The president of Adobe is on Obama's PMAB. I can't find info on the others with 3 minutes of googling.)
1. The government froze wages in WW2, and companies got around that by offering free health insurance.
2. Unions often got the government to force workers to join the union, because otherwise workers would undercut the union.
3. There were numerous attempts to fix wages of black laborers artificially low after the Civil War, they would constantly fall apart because individual farmers would pay more under the table to attract better workers. See "The Strange Career of Jim Crow".
4. Government "price supports" are there because of the consistent failure of farmers to voluntarily comply with price fixing agreements.
If you look long enougth you can find some cartels and monopolys that are stable for some time. Even when most of these where not able to really raise prices where far.
If you look at goverment enforcment of cartel and monopolys you will find a unbelivable amount. If you add tarrifs to that (ie blocking import of steel from japan). You will find that regulation far more often helps big buissness.
This is what people dont understand about free marketers. I do not belive that it is impossible for goverment action to imporove short run and maybe even long run conditions, but I belive it is far more like that this power is misused.
So yes you can go out of your way and figure out some asymetiric cost for whatever groupe you like. You can then go on and argue that in order to rebalance this the state needs to do 'something' (perfeclty show in the thread by all the people point out that employes can easly switch jobs and therefore there wage is below equillibrum). Stigliz for the win. This all works out great in theory but runs flat against a wall in practice. When it does run against a wall its of course just because of 'republicans' blocking all sencible policy or whatever.
So this is the reason for free market views, it is not as some people seam to belive that 'the free market is always perfect'.
Kill the regulations helping the capitalists, not just the ones giving a hand to the worker, and then we can talk.
That seems like the sort of evidence that's actually useful when making policy decisions about whether we should increase or decrease regulation. Abolishing all regulations is not practical, so what political theorists think would happen in a complete absence of regulation is irrelevant to any real-world issues.
Well, then Steve had nothing to worry about, did he? Then why the secret agreement??
Exactly. The motivations behind this practice, the nature of the practice, and the individuals impacted by it are just horribly misunderstood and distorted because the story that big Silicon Valley success stories are making their fortunes by screwing over the "little guy" (whose base salary is at or above the 98th percentile nationally and well above the 99th percentile globally... and that's ignoring bonuses & equity) is just so easy to sell.
For one thing, it says that you are likely young. And I don't intend that as an insult.
As for what planet I'm from... it's the one where the world isn't black and white and employers aren't automatically the guilty of any and all claims they ripped someone off.
There's no such thing as magic. This is just as true in economics as in anything else. If wages are down, then either labor supply is up, or someone is cheating.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1982/02/have-you...
http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.ch/2013/08/diamonds-advertisi...
Well, that's the thesis of the article I linked: out there, in the free market, you wouldn't get much if you'd try to sell a diamond and weren't part of the supply chain.
I think Google has an extraordinarily high need for engineers due to their blatant attempt to take over the world by moving out ahead of everyone else in every industry they can reach.
When you're trying to corner markets that don't exist yet while also competing to keep other firms taking a slice out of your cash cow core business, you need a lot of R&D.
But in any case, if you think what would happen by abolishing all regulation is irrelevant to the real world, then you should be replying to RivieraKid, who was the one drawing such irrelevant (and, in my opinion, unsupported) conclusions.
So taking a few tens of thousands of dollars cut for ten years is that.
http://www.freetheworld.com/2013/EFW2013-complete.pdf (Page 22)
And in any case, if my position was opposed to yours, that argument wouldn't convince me anyway, since I find "economic size" and particularly "growth" to be little more than fetishes of mainstream ideologues. I'm much more easily convinced by what the economists call "consumer surplus", though I'd rather know the "worker surplus".
Like I said, its just the thing that I start with, just this statistic would not convince me either.