Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

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And ironically the capitalists always get blamed by the left for this unholy union between the state and upper class. There's a reason many pro-market people want smaller gov and it's not just personal selfish gain to save a few dollars in taxes but to prevent the predictable selfish incentives of the power players from exploiting the absolute power of the state for the benefit of a limited few.

No wonder there is a backlash against globalism and 'free trade' agreements when this same group of insular regulators and powerful market leaders are designing the agreements and calling all of the shots. Sweatshops are hardly the result of free trade but government controlled/financed trade that only prioritizes the interests of the mega corps, sometimes pushed to the point of exploitation in countries with poor legal systems and weak concepts of human rights.

The process of creating the TPP made this even more apparent to the public, they hardly even tried to hide the obvious favoritism and complete lack of openness. Clearly it has become so status quo that they didn't even bother with pretense.

> And ironically the capitalists always get blamed by the left for this unholy union between the state and upper class.

The reason is that capitalists (the economic class, not "advocates of capitalism"; the two have substantial overlap, but aren't identical) tend to be the power behind both business and government in capitalist systems.

How does smaller government help with sweatshops or unemployment or income inequality?

Basic income and small government can coexist IMO. As can a healthy legal system and charter of rights. The level of government involvment in everyone's day to day life has risen astronomically since the 1950s. That doesn't mean we have to sacrifice all social safety nets and human rights in order to have a healthy functional government.

Running a non-megacorp business and surviving without a job has not been made easier at all since the 50-60s. It's actually harder than ever as a result of government intervention and wasteful resource consumption for very little benefit to society. It makes you wonder who the government has been busy serving all of those years.

(Hint: the kind of business who wouldn't think twice about running a sweatshop via trade deals that never seem to involve clauses to require following the laws of the parent country) .

Regulatory capture allows large companies (espeically multinationals) to exclude competition.

Less regulatory capture. When companies reach the scale of increasing inefficiency of communication and regression to the mean, the natural barrier to their growth, they replace innovation and competitiveness with erecting barriers to entry into their markets.

Try staring a business in a market with large established players. You'll find that you cannot do many of the things they themselves did to get started -- they have erected legislative barriers preventing replication.

Easy -- just write "think of the children" legislation demanding egregious safety, accounting and legal overhead, trivial to bear at scale, but lethal to new entrants...

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