Comment by CodeMage | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CodeMage | Hacker News Reader

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> I find this essay to be extremely frustrating

Thanks, I was worried I would find HN readers to be largely in agreement with it and I'm glad I was wrong about that.

I also find that "we need to want these things" is the key problem with the article. I agree with your conclusions, but I think you've understated the case a bit.

I believe that all of this has happened the way it happened because we live in a society -- and a system -- that has been steadily lowering the value we place on human life.

When I moved to United States in 2013, what shocked me the most was the incredible number of homeless people in Seattle. This is an immensely wealthy, developed country, arguably the most powerful in "the first world". And yet, two of the "five most homeless cities in the world"[1] are in this country.

One of the big problems with the lockdown measures in several parts of the US was "what about homeless kids who depend on their schools". Do you people understand what that sounds like?

So yes, the problem is capitalism. No, not "crony capitalism" or any other variation of No True Scotsman defense of capitalism[2]. This is what you get when you build your whole system around the optimization of one variable -- profit -- and put essentially religious faith into the unproven idea that the Invisible Hand of the Market will make everything work.

Marc ends his essay by saying "instead of attacking my ideas, conceive your own". He's essentially asking people to express their disagreement in a way that validates his ideology. Sadly, the answer to his question about what we should build isn't anything he or the rest of the elites would like to hear.

What we need to build is awareness. What we need to build are societal "firewalls" against the ubiquitous propaganda[3] that inundates our society. What we need to build is a movement.

EDIT: Fixed some formatting problems that I didn't notice initially.

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[1]: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=e56c...

[2]: It's usually the same people who won't accept that "real socialism hasn't been implemented yet" as an answer that deflect critique of capitalism by saying "Oh, that is not capitalism, that's crony capitalism."

[3]: The US doesn't have state propaganda like North Korea or China, and that leads people to believe it's free of propaganda. It's not.

> This is what you get when you build your whole system around the optimization of one variable -- profit -- and put essentially religious faith into the unproven idea that the Invisible Hand of the Market will make everything work.

But this isn't what the whole US system is built around. That's (at least part of) the problem. As others have pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, many of the things Andreessen says he thinks we need to build are thinks that the free market would like to build, but can't because of legal and regulatory barriers.

That said, it is true that free markets are a tool, not an end in themselves. Free markets can help you to provide goods and services as efficiently as possible, but they can't tell you which goods and services should be provided and which should not. So free markets on their own are not enough to have a good society.

(Btw, notice that I said "free markets" and not "capitalism". They're not the same thing, although they are often conflated. "Free markets" means all transactions are voluntary--people cannot be forced into buying or selling anything, or prevented from buying and selling anything; it's up to them to decide. But "capitalism" means that capital is taken to be central to the economy, and accumulating capital is taken to be a positive thing. Historically, having a free market has often been the best way to accumulate capital, but not always: our present regulatory system might well be an example of the opposite, a society in which the best way to accumulate capital is to outlaw your competition through regulation.)

Interesting distinction between "capitalism" and "free markets".

> But this isn't what the whole US system is built around. That's (at least part of) the problem. As others have pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, many of the things Andreessen says he thinks we need to build are thinks that the free market would like to build, but can't because of legal and regulatory barriers.

Really? Which thing? I haven't really been sold a narrative that "regulatory barriers" are in the way of securing domestic manufacturing capacity or building high speed rail. It's securing the initial and sustained capital to build the systems.

> That said, it is true that free markets are a tool, not an end in themselves. Free markets can help you to provide goods and services as efficiently as possible, but they can't tell you which goods and services should be provided and which should not. So free markets on their own are not enough to have a good society.

Folks misinterpret the literature around free markets all the time. They do not make guarantees of efficiency. Neither does centrally planned economies. The idea that either one is inherently more efficient is the legacy of various propaganda campaigns.

> So free markets on their own are not enough to have a good society.

All that said, I do agree strongly that this is true. To some extent, no system inherently promises this. It's just that some systems guarantee equity cannot be sustained (e.g., capitalism or despotism).

As long as American society implicitly believes in the Hayek-ian notion that freedom exists to empower the hypothetical Galt's that they dream exist and imagine that America's moneyed aristocracy serves an important function of assigning value simply by virtue of their spending, no among of free marketspace will fix our problem. Folks have been duped into buying into a scheme where they think they need aristocracy to survive.

> I haven't really been sold a narrative that "regulatory barriers" are in the way of securing domestic manufacturing capacity or building high speed rail.

You don't need to be "sold a narrative". You just need to go read the reams and reams of Federal and State regulations that any new manufacturing plant or high speed rail system (not to mention any other business) needs to satisfy.

> It's securing the initial and sustained capital to build the systems.

But in order for that capital to be used for a new venture, the people who have it need to see a reasonable prospect of a return. If you don't think regulatory barriers are the reason why people with lots of capital don't see a reasonable prospect of return in ventures that, on the face of it, would seem to have an obvious potential for good returns, what do you think is the reason?

> They do not make guarantees of efficiency.

More precisely, the conditions under which a free market is maximally efficient are very often not satisfied in the real world. But I did not claim that free markets were always maximally efficient. I said they are as efficient as possible; in other words, under whatever conditions you have, free markets are more efficient than any other alternatives. Under conditions where free markets are not maximally efficient, central planning is even worse.

> Folks have been duped into buying into a scheme where they think they need aristocracy to survive.

I think there is a sense in which this is true, but it's not the one you describe. The problem I see is that people think they need to be governed by experts--an intellectual "aristocracy", not a financial one. The manipulation of the financial system by the government printing money and skewing the incentives of financial institutions is certainly part of that, but not all of it.

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