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Comment by cjslep | Hacker News Reader

The quintessential counter example is Putin's Russia in the early 2000's. The oligarchs wouldn't play ball with the state, so Putin put the richest one in a cage on television. The other oligarchs immediately caved to work with the state on severely disadvantaged terms.

In a power struggle between money and the state, the state always wins. It has the authority to instantly justify its seizure of the money, whereas the money will have to work in pretty visibly ugly ways to justify why it should seize the authority.

This is why you see billionaires that become political officials more often than revolutionaries.

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This thread is interesting and I'm far from entrenched in any of the position implied above.

But... I don't think we can make a lot of progress without a Guinness and some banter at this point.

That said, I would call the post Soviet oligarchy and it's intrigues a game where corporate interests (formerly "industry") finance and government are deeply interlinked. Those power struggles are internal to that (very young) form of "government" which you (and most people including me) call an oligarchy. The oligarchs control different pieces of all three, including Putin the senior oligarch.

If you ever find yourself in Zurich, I'll take you up on that Guinness. :)

I agree, it wasn't an ideal "free market" "free government" scenario. That's probably the strongest argument against this example. But it does provide an interesting use case nontheless!

I live near the old Guinness factory. Same. :)

I don't feel as though this proves some golden rule on world affairs.

I think Russia is like this because of their unique past and I think other countries do things because of their own pasts, there is no one rule like gravity that ties human behaviour on a mass scale together across cultures.

If anything I find I can turn your argument into reverse by, the reason why you see so many rich politicians in America is because Money is greater than State and this is why billionaires become political officials rather than revolutionaries. But I wouldn't say that because it would rather simplify a complex situation

> there is no one rule like gravity that ties human behaviour on a mass scale together across cultures.

Self interest/self preservation is genetic.

I think you are right, self-preservation - the atoms of human motivation and behaviour

There are places where money is greater than state. That's where countries that have bribes as part of their governmental interactions - money literally circumvents the states' authority. Having a billionaire politician means they're playing ball with the states' rules - they are not circumventing the rules. They may rewrite the rules within a legal framework - but they're still playing ball with the state's power, not hiring thugs on the street to stuff ballot boxes.

I think I just take a different view than you, who writes the country's rules, the people in power, who has the power, the people with money / property to protect, I think we are both describing the same loop just diverge on where this loop began.

But in Putin's Russia, the operating principle is "l'etat c'est moi".

It's not some idealized state vs an idealized private sector -- it was very personal and personalized all the way through.

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