Rules for thee, but not for me, as always. All big established companies want to ensure that nobody coming after them has a fair chance.
Maybe they aren't looking to maximize the same things you are? You know, a different perspectives?
It is the same kind of "truth" as "Might Makes Right" and "He who has the gold makes the rules". While these phrases accurately describe the matter in some situations, they do not create a society that is sustainable, desirable, or any value of ethical (even for the abuser/autocrat, who must always watch their back).
So, yes, to the extent that it is an open admission of being an abusive exploiter of the system and people, it is not hypocritical.
But if that same person makes any statement or pretense that they are an ethical or good person, it is hypocritical in the extreme.
It accurately describes our society that is not sustainable, desirable or ethical.
Pretending that it is doesn't help us with evolving it towards some noble goals. To evolve the system you need to understand it.
For example you can't progress society untill you understand that the one we got after thousands of years of societal evolution is the one entirely based on the concept of monopoly for violence. Some people feel very offended about this. I have exactly zero hopes for their revolutionary attempts at transformation working out.
Spot on!
However it is not all black & white, but a gradient of high trust to almost zero trust. For example, the US is definitely degrading in the last decade, but is still nowhere near the levels of endemic and systematic paranoia of Russia or North Korea.
It all comes down to this: if you want to live a self-determined life in a society with a self-determined government, you must personally and as a nation be better armed, prepared, and allied than the abusers and autocrats who want to steal from you and rule you. Giving the equivalent of nukes to the abusers/autocrats is not a smart move.
It’s interesting to observe the number of people who will post about capitalism and competition and not consider the fact that for any rational actor, competition is existentially horrible and should be avoided by all means necessary. Perfect competition exists purely as a mathematical model and not as an actually observed outcome of a “natural” system for a reason.
In your simplified economic world, I'm not convinced that profits would be pushed below the cost of capital.
>Economic profit does not occur in perfect competition in long run equilibrium; if it did, there would be an incentive for new firms to enter the industry, aided by a lack of barriers to entry until there was no longer any economic profit.[0]
Your issue isn’t with me, it’s with what’s taught in every economics department in every country around the world.
(I also never said “profits would be pushed below the cost of capital”, my comment does not imply that at all. See: “nominal profits aren’t zero”)
The difficulty is knowing which checks are necessary and which are "big government". Which is why we vote.
Being anti big government is not the same thing as being anti all government. Characterising it that way is either lazy or ignorant, take your pick.
But just as the winners write the history books, the richest libertarians like Thiel and Koch seem able to define what the ideology looks like in the popular imagination, because they can afford to shape the debate via think tanks, media ownership, campus outreach, lobbying, etc.