> The beauty of capitalism is that it allows society to thrive even when all actors are irresponsible. Which we, humans, are.
I think the laid off tech workers and people of Ohio might have a few things to say about that..
I’ll play the smallest fiddle for those who didn’t save during the good times.
Yes, I work for $BigTech and I save a significant portion of my income.
Curious how you glossed over the folks in Ohio.
Government rarely has incentives to be efficient. It's mistakes are always covered by taxpayer money, effectively punishing those who are efficient.
Why are we always comparing real thing that has downsides with magical thing that's perfect? I don't disagree, magical thing is indeed perfect. The only issue is that it doesn't exist.
The government also covers bailouts for banks using taxpayer money, effectively punishing everyone.
> Why are we always comparing real thing that has downsides with magical thing that's perfect? I don't disagree, magical thing is indeed perfect. The only issue is that it doesn't exist.
Again, the original claims were 1) that corporations pay for their mistakes with blood and 2) that the beauty of capitalism allows for a thriving society with an entirely irresponsible set of actors.
All that's being said here is that 1) private business do not in fact pay for their mistakes in blood and 2) capitalism doesn't allow a society to thrive when all actors are irresponsible, in fact, you only need to have a select few actors to be irresponsible in order to degrade the state of society.
What's the alternative? Other than more scrutiny and harsher punishments for banks, which very few people are against.
> private business do not in fact pay for their mistakes in blood
Just because 0.1% of businesses gets bailouts, you're going to ignore 99.9%? Are you the type of person that says vaccines don't work because people still get sick?
> capitalism doesn't allow a society to thrive when all actors are irresponsible, in fact, you only need to have a select few actors to be irresponsible in order to degrade the state of society.
The "degraded state of society" is still orders of magnitude better than the alternatives I heard of. I'd say it still fits whatever the definition of thriving you can come up with.
Nothing is perfect, it's quite easy to criticize anything. But if you're criticizing without offering any alternatives, your criticism isn't worth much.
So I'll ask again, what is alternative that you're offering?
Few people are against it, yet we didn't hear about too many bankers getting sent to the locker, did we?
> Just because 0.1% of businesses gets bailouts, you're going to ignore 99.9%? Are you the type of person that says vaccines don't work because people still get sick?
Not sure where you're getting the 0.1% figure but "privatizing gains and socializing losses" is hardly a new idea.
> Nothing is perfect, it's quite easy to criticize anything. But if you're criticizing without offering any alternatives, your criticism isn't worth much.
I think we're some ways apart from being close to perfect, no one is asking for perfection just that things not be awesome for 1% of the population at the expense of the rest.
> So I'll ask again, what is alternative that you're offering?
I won't give you a primer on different economic models, at the risk of bringing too much taboo magic into the discussion, just know that not all models depend on the exploitation of workers, labour pressure via unemployment, and minimum wages that require government subsidized food stamps in order to allow workers to live while working multiple part time jobs with no benefits.
edit: In the spirit of hn guidelines and for the curious, I think some of the discussions with B. Sanders may be appealing to some.
Privatizing gains and socializing losses is what happens when governments are corrupt. That isn't a private sector problem, that is a public sector problem, if your politicians is giving away your tax money to corporations then the solution isn't to give those politicians even more money or power.
Please.
Lobbying + gerrymandering > deregulation > look ma, government inefficient let's reduce spending > reduced government capacity > look ma, government inefficient let's reduce spending > reduced government capacity > ..
Ever heard of the revolving door or regulatory capture?
Who is served by a reduction in government spending? In what world is "let's cut government spending and further provide privatized corporations with the means by which to provide the necessities of life for the population" a sound objective when the stated goal of corporations is to maximize profits and provide infinite growth?
Just this week: Eli Lilly announced [1] that it would cap insulin prices at $35. Why is that? In order to maximize profits.
California announced [2] that it would start producing it's own insulin. Tell me why, in an efficient market, the government would need to step in and start it's own production [2] or even mandate [1] price caps? What does this say about the state of competition prior? Did EL just recently find efficiencies that allows it to _still_ profitably produce and sell a vial of insulin, which costs $10 to produce, at a reduced price of $35 (from "over $300")? Of course not!
Free market at work. It only took the inefficient guberment to step in for _competition_ to materialize.
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/01/health/eli-lilly-insulin-pric... [2]: https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/8/23200404/california-insuli...
Your lack of knowledge on the matter mixed with self-righteousness is astounding. I suggest you to research beyond newspaper headlines.
Insulin that's being sold today is very different from insulin that was invented a century ago. The reason it's so different is precisely because private businesses had incentives to innovate, which resulted in prolonged patient lives.
You know what slows down modern insulin from becoming cheap in the US, even after patents have expired? A government agency called FDA. By the time you can get your generic insulin to the market, it might become obsolete. Competition isn't materialized, it is artificially limited by the bureaucratic government.
(not to mention that patents themselves are also enforced by the government, but that's a much more complex topic)
In order to get cheaper insulin you need less government, not more. Evidently, that's why insulin is cheaper in India, China, or Mexico.
> Tell me why, in an efficient market, the government would need to step in and start it's own production [2] or even mandate [1] price caps?
Californian local production of insulin is an attempt, we've yet to see the results. It is quite possible that those funds would be better off spent on directly buying insulin instead of producing it.
Oh and by the way, you know how California plans to "produce" the insulin in the first years of the program? By outsourcing it to private companies. Isn't it convenient that those exist?
And, as illustrated earlier, price caps are a government "crutch" to cover a bigger government (FDA) inefficiency.
Before anyone accuses me of being a heartless business owner or executive, I’ve never in my 27 year professional career been in a position to fire anyone.
1) To entertain this point, maybe? If your optics of the situation was efficiency for the company, but why would you not look at efficiency as a whole and for whom?
As a society, don't you think we should be structuring things such that they are efficient? Is the company that doesn't end up paying for large ecological disasters "efficient" because it offloaded the cost of the cleanup onto the people/government? Sure? But I think society as a whole would benefit from adding resources to maintain infrastructure to prevent these types of ecological problems.
> Hiring and firing people who are only seen as "resources" when needed is efficient from a business point of view.
2) If the companies involved in the current layoffs are, by your definition, "efficient", what would you make of Apple [1] in this situation? Super really efficient? What's their secret sauce? Are the in/efficient because they didn't overly take advantage of the hiring craze? What are the costs associated with engineering layoffs and how are those costs manifested in society?
Line items like headcount on a spreadsheet are easy to quantify, organizational knowledge loss, loss of trust/moral, impacts of layoffs on mental/communal health, are harder to quantify.
I’m going to first answer that question by speaking about the $BigTech company I know best because I work their and my RSUs are worth half their all time highs - Amazon - and the industry I know best - cloud - because I work at AWS.
Amazon Retail thought that the Covid induced online shopping was going to be the new normal and over hired.
AWS didn’t really get hit with layoffs (https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/aws-employees-amo...). Azure also didn’t suffer layoffs (https://www.channelfutures.com/business-models/microsoft-lay...).
Google has so many useless money losing products and the attention span of a crack addled flea. No one ever accused Google of being well managed. I can’t speak about GCP.
Apple outsources most of the people who build its products. While Apple hasn’t laid off people, the contractors who create its phones who work for Apple for all intents and purposes have laid off people.
Facebook now is down to its employment level of a couple of years ago.
My moral would be fine if I was working for Facebook [1] for a couple of years at FB salaries. I would have saved more than I already do.
And many 2nd tier tech companies aren’t profitable. The easy money ran out. [1] I don’t hate myself enough to work for Facebook.
In government or union heavy industry they’d still be forced to pay them.
Let’s keep that in mind as we see Twitter still running completely fine months later after firing so many.
Not everyone has inherent value, many are being paid but not actually creating value the other side of the transaction and it’s silly to pretend that’s fine.
But it turns out to be 'thought' to be way more efficient on average. Or there's an actual number?
As opposed to government? The reason every government is so bureaucratic is precisely because it's incentives are structured to optimize for the short term. At least private business pays with blood for it's mistakes.
> In theory, a government will be efficient at allocating resources for that
In theory dictatorship is more efficient that any other form of government. In practice, humans are more flawed than we like to admit.
> We HAVE to stop thinking that business is always more efficient at everything
Nobody thinks business is always more efficient. But it turns out to be way more efficient on average.
> it is built on the back of responsible government
The beauty of capitalism is that it allows society to thrive even when all actors are irresponsible. Which we, humans, are.