If investors don’t like the dual stock structure, they don’t have to invest. What am I missing? Why should congress step in to ban something that by virtue of these existing investors, some people are fine with?
Total deregulation is every bit the same silly extreme as a command economy and should be treated with the same withering contempt. The question should always be "Is this regulation effective in making things better for more people over the long term." If that answer is now, we have a regulation that should go. Deregulation extremists somehow take the exact opposite point of view when it comes to property rights, regulations that protect them. And of course every single large company shouting de-regulation is really engaged in a massive amount of regulatory capture. Those regulations need to go and we need to fight back in a big way on that. Variations on that theme are why Bernie and Donald are so much more popular than Hilary and Jeb. Still no progress.
Anyway are these tech billionaires able to command super-voting rights with their stakes because they're so great and wise and wonderful? Or is it because they've secured a beachhead that commands a lot of economic rent and that beachhead gives them the power and strength to get their way. I don't find Zuck super impressive as a person, strategist or engineer. But hey he fought off google trying to muscle into his beach head so he must be amazing unless he, um, "has the high ground" OB1 stye.
Did Rupert Murdoch push the super voting rights regulations through so he could keep total family control of news ltd & fox?
That's the Communist worldview. Complete utilitarian totalitarian morality.
-- Noam Chomsky
Like making this hit job, and then slinking away not responding to me? Prove me wrong.
> As far as he's concerned if you don't agree with him you're lacking in empathy and moral fibre by definition.
If you don't care about other people, you do by definition.
> Didn't the Soviet union go well?
What does that have do with anything he said?
> Thanks for your input Noam!
All your comment is just padding playing cute. All you're saying is it rubbed you the wrong way but you got nothing.
It's a reasonable position for a person to take that the state should stay out of decisions made for oneself and family as far as it's practicable. I know what's good for my family and can get that far better and more effectively than giving my resources to a bureaucrat to waste, returning a small fraction of it to me with a decision made on what they consider good for my family. (Maybe I'm wrong there, that's my right, and yours, to be wrong about such matters as pertain to yourself and your family).
Caring about such rights for others does necessarily mean one is incredibly selfish. Just as espousing socialism does not necessarily mean one is selfless. Incredibly selfish people will exist in both camps.
Those who disagree with me (of whom some are socialist) are capable of having merit as people and could be warm, lovely caring, empathetic people, even if that's clearly not all of them. Noam has no empathy for me, I lack merit for disagreeing with his brand of socialism in his eyes. I can live with it. I think he's arrogant. He can probably live with that too fwiw...
You're just playing word games. IF you don't care for others, you are selfish, by definition. If you only pretend to care about the right of others to not help others, so you don't have to help others, you're selfish and dishonest. And that's your right, but don't twist the words of others because you can't even stand behind your own position.
> I know what's good for my family and can get that far better and more effectively than giving my resources to a bureaucrat to waste
That's all great and also completely besides the point.
> Noam has no empathy for me
Can you stop making this about Noam Chomsky for just one second? Here's the same point from someone else:
We've changed. And we've become contemptuous of the idea that we're all in this together. This is about sharing. And about, you know... when you say sharing, there is a percentage of the population, and it's the moneyed percent of our population, that hears "socialism" or "communism" or any of the other -isms they wanna put on it, but ultimately, we are all a part of the same society, and it's either gonna be a mediocre society that, you know, abuses people, or it's not.
-- David Simon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL6Jv2Jpnpg&t=6m50s
The person I initially responded to clearly has no empathy for people more (supposedly) more unfortunate than them, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18419729
So instead you now want to talk about how Noam Chomsky is "the one actually lacking empathy"? You should disabuse yourself of the notion you're being generous and patient, the way you instantly talked about Chomsky displaying arrogance -- you know, send him an email if it upsets you so, but in this context you're responding to me -- and then tried to throw up more mud to get away from the actual context. I'll repeat it, because it still holds true: something rubbed you the wrong way, but you can't really name or refute it.
And like most critics of Noam Chomsky, you do anything but address what he actually says, but only face him "in your own words", which are "not even wrong" and not worth addressing at all.
Direct cut and paste from the Chomsky quote:
"...you don’t care whether other people’s kids can go to school, or can afford food to eat, or things like that. In the United States, that’s called “libertarian” "
Don't be taken in by the reverse ordering in the phrasing. He's just equated libertarians with total uncaring, self-centred selfishness as being their only possible motivation. In this world view libertarians are foul human beings.
Rant:
F() that right off. Put that quote with similar accusations that all socialists are unpatriotic traitors, posing to get laid or whatever other silly smear - there's plenty of such smears around. All such comments, including this one from Chomsky are puerile nonsense and deserve to be treated with contempt. Reasonable people who are kind, gentle, empathetic and smart can differ on the best way forward in policy informed by differing ideology in a way that is reasonable and assumes the good faith of their opponent until shown otherwise (at which point a reasonable exchange of ideas is not possible). I'm not a libertarian and I bristle from that Chomsky piece of nonsense. (Which it should go without saying, is not a comment on other points he might make about other things in other contexts, better phrased. That quote is complete rubbish in my opinion and I'm saying so. It should also go without saying I'm not claiming all libertarians are people of wondrous perfection or anything like it.)
Anyone who disagrees with me is a lesser human. That's an idea worth opposing across the entirety of the political spectrum including the centre, for mine. It's the worst kind of arrogance at best. Without saying anything at all about the rest of his life and works I believe Chomsky is guilty of it here where I'm calling it.
So yeah, it's about this Chomsky quote and not much else. I hate it. You obviously don't have to agree but I hope you understand my reaction.
> There are undoubtedly myriad intellectual, psychological, and political sources for our inaction, but I cannot help thinking that the influence of Ayn Rand, the Russian émigré novelist, may have played a role. Rand’s disquisitions on the “virtue of selfishness” and unbridled capitalism are admired by many American politicians and economists—Paul Ryan, Tillerson, Mike Pompeo, Andrew Puzder, and Donald Trump, among them. Trump, who has called “The Fountainhead” his favorite book, said that the novel “relates to business and beauty and life and inner emotions. That book relates to . . . everything.” Long after Rand’s death, in 1982, the libertarian gospel of the novel continues to sway our politics: Government is bad. Solidarity is a trap. Taxes are theft.
They've delegated that to trusted decision makers, etc. And those don't have to invest.
If on the other hand you believe the minority with special rights are actually superior managers of the assets and totally deserving of super voting rights to keep the assets out of the hands of others e.g. management consultants and bankers who've got no frigging clue then you'll take the opposite point of view.
Both points of view are reasonable and need to be supported with evidence by those arguing for them.
The idea that you can't have a point of view by any means other than exercise of the decision to invest in facebrick or not is a little simplistic. Systemic issues are a thing to consider carefully. The global financial crisis did happen, banks did have to be bailed out. (The decision to pursue prosecution and to exempt ratings companies and such from ramifications /may/ have been moral hazard and adverse selection but whatever). Total de-regulation of the financial system has a history of ponzis, tulips, south sea, etc. etc. that caused vast misery well beyond those who were direct victims of the frauds. It's worth remembering that if the financial system genuinely collapses millions will starve to death. The decision to regulate to protect against systemic collapse has been hard won.
Now should super voting rights be regulated away?
I'm kind of less interested in a power struggle between funds managers and Zuck, seems we should treat that as noise on making a good policy decision. But just what is that good policy decision?
Being and operating as a corporation is not some kind of natural right. It's a privilege, granted by citizens, via the the proxy of governments and their regulations.
Isn't it? Isn't being able to make decisions as a group "right to assembly" sort of stuff.
That's something entirely different than, say
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articles_of_incorporation
> the duration (perpetual by default)
Natural rights aren't granted nor can they be subject to limited duration. Even if the natural rights of someone else might mean that, say, someone "has to get locked up", that doesn't revoke any right, it's just overruled by the likewise unrevokable rights of others.
Nothing is stopping people from working together without creating a corporation etc., as the people they already are with the rights they have, but then you also don't have limited liability and all those other things.
Corporation is different from a group of folks in so far as a corporation limits liability.
The group of folk can take money out of the corporation while the going is good. When the going goes bad the obligations of the corporation do not confer the right to go after the "group of folk" and their assets.
Limited liability. It's been a crucially important thing in the funding of risky investments. I'd say on balance it's been amazingly good for the world but you could make the opposite case. No reason you couldn't end limited liability while retaining right to assembly and so on. It's an extremely radical policy to pursue in my opinion and would have very dramatic consequences.
Limited liability isn't a "natural" right.