Corporations use lobbyists to capture and corrupt-to-the-bone every important regulatory agency we have. The laws themselves are corrupt, what meaningful laws do manage to exist are not enforced correctly due to these revolving doors. So when corporations hurt the People in major ways on a daily basis, nothing from the government, in fact the government is systemically complicit.
But HEAVEN FORBID the People make the smallest transgression against corporate interests, suddenly the government is Johnny on the Spot and swings immediately into action, no stone goes unturned, no expense is spared.
The US Trade Representative publishes a literal naughty list of countries whose efforts to combat infringement it deems insufficient. The document is filled with language such as "stakeholders report this", "shareholders are concerned about that". Corporations leveraging the might of the US government to sanction other countries that have better things to do than police imaginary american property.
Many people say ACAB for this specific reason - cops work for moneyed interests. To be a cop is to defend the wealthy and corporate, axiomatically. Plenty of cops are nice people, but they're working for a system that fundamentally is bad.
The exact same way so many programmers can sign up for and continue to work for Surveillance Valley?
If you want to say ACAB go right ahead - there's certainly truth in that. But there is also a truth in seeing that many cops got into it because they wanted to help people, and you're going to have to work with that if you ever want to fix the system.
>The exact same way so many programmers can sign up for and continue to work for Surveillance Valley?
Your point has some merit, but there's a big difference between being an engineer working with systems that can be misused and waking up every morning ready to crack people's skulls (especially since those people are usually impoverished, gender & sexual minorities, marginalized in some other way, etc) or outright murder them.
Yes, both people contribute to systemic violence in a way, but I would argue that there is a vast gulf between participating in society (which is mandatory) and being at the tip of the spear of violent repression.
Imagine having coworkers who routinely committed murder and received paid vacations for it.
What's the solution, then? If central authority is Bad (TM), is it decentralized authority that is the solution? IE, everyone gets a gun, everyone is deputized, everyone is responsible for upholding the law as citizens and enforcers.
Offload most police duties to civilian organizations who are specifically trained to do them. Traffic enforcement doesn't need a gun. Mental health crisis intervention is made worse by cops. (A yelling homeless man doesn't need a cop, they need someone trained to help with this specific issue.)
Retain a small number of cops to deal with serious crimes (homicides, etc) and disarm them except in emergencies.
We also need to tackle criminal justice reform - ensure we have sufficient public defenders, ensure people have speedy access to trials, don't lock everyone in jail while awaiting trial, don't pressure people to plead guilty to crimes they didn't commit just so they can keep out of jail. Reprioritize minor offenses - who cares if someone has pot, why are we spending any time on it?
I don't even get how the hell copyright infringement became a matter of criminal law. If you're distributing a product that infringes on somebody's IP in a way which negatively impacts their profits, that is (by which i mean "should be") a matter of civil law and they can sue for damages. Why the hell should law enforcement get involved at all?
There’s a video of double dribble game glitch for the NES. Fox/family guy decided to rip it for their show and copyright struck the original video. So they don’t even do anything to corporations ripping of people’s works.
That's redundant and an invocation of the No True Scotsman fallacy. The cronyism is an inherent feature of capitalism, not a bug. There are no real-world examples of non-crony capitalism.
The cronyism always manifests itself from the beginning, and only gets worse.
The most honest capitalists (e.g. some AnCaps, some neoliberals) do make this point, but it's not very common. As much as I disagree with their views, I respect their blunt honesty about the system they endorse.
What I can't stand is the disingenuous whitewashing of capitalism, which boils down to "don't trust your lying eyes" and "it's not Real Capitalism, which is actually cool and good". One can't have a productive discussion with these sorts of evangelists, much like one can't have a productive discussion with fanatical cryptocurrency fanboys who insist that ugly monkey JPEGs and The Blonkchain will magically create a perfect society, if only we just Do It Harder.
"Crony capitalism" is a thought-terminating cliche. It prevents us from discussing actually-existing capitalism.
> "Crony capitalism" is a thought-terminating cliche.
There's theory and then there's implementation. What's theoretically "wrong" with capitalism is it promotes the "bad" parts of human nature, i.e. greed, ego, materialism, etc...
Cronyism isn't a theory, it's an implementation detail. You could implement a capitalist economy that discourages cronyism by capping the number of employees a company can have and limiting the radius they conduct business. Essentially force an economy with only small and competitive, locally owned ma and pa shops. This is, in practice, the way capital-driven economies worked in the far far past long before the dawn of megacorps. Communism has worked well too when communities are small and everyone knows everybody. The big problem with both ideologies is finding an implementation that doesn't suffer from "scalability" problems.
>Cronyism isn't a theory, it's an implementation detail.
I argue that it's a fundamental defect, an architectural one, and it won't be solved with infinite patches and workarounds.
You can patch a defective design until it's somewhat functional, but it will never compare to a properly architected design. In the case of economics, we need to consciously choose what we want to incentivize based on how we want society to look and function.
>Essentially force an economy with only small and competitive, locally owned ma and pa shops. This is, in practice, the way capital-driven economies worked in the far far past long before the dawn of megacorps.
This is the MAGA argument: "things were better in the old days". This is an appeal to false nostalgia and does not hold up to scrutiny. It also ignores the fact that every successful small company eventually becomes a big company.
Even in the days of small/pastoral/cottage capitalism there existed the same problems we have now, just more isolated and harder to root out because they were very numerous and too widely distributed. Abuse was very common, and any complaints were dismissed as "just the way things are" or countered with "then start your own business" or "get rich enough so you don't have to participate" or "you're gay/black/foreign so you should be thankful for a job" or simply "you deserve it because <X>". These things eventually improved, but every improvement was paid for in blood.
One worker at some 'ma and pa' business cannot effectively unionize, and has little bargaining power. In very small communities where everyone knew each other that worker may have more leverage by way of putting community relationships on the line (if they had some social power), but it never seemed to stop individual business owners from eventually buying up entire towns and running roughshod over the population.
Recent history and contemporary life is full of examples of this sort of thing — towns where everyone works at the same lumber mill or factory owned by That One Guy Who Lives In A Huge Mansion On The Hill. Now it's a Wal-Mart or Amazon fulfillment center owned by One Corporation that's distributed and faceless.
Companies are effectively dictatorships. Workers have little say in how a company is run, except in cases where they rebel against the system and go outside of it to redress their grievances.
Even then, this redress has never changed the fundamental relationship between worker and capitalist: the worker will always be a subject, because there is no democracy in the workplace.
It really amazes me how people can simultaneously support democracy and capitalism (dictatorship).
>The big problem with both ideologies is finding an implementation that doesn't suffer from "scalability" problems.
Even 'small capitalism' promotes severely undesirable incentives at its core, which appear at all levels of scaling. Can you provide an example of where it doesn't, or show that socialism/communism/whatever is just as bad?
I think you've misinterpreted me. I'm not a capitalists apologists, I just acknowledge the difference between theory and implementation.
Capitalism as a theory does promote undesirable incentives, that's why I wrote "it promotes the 'bad' parts of human nature, i.e. greed, ego, materialism, etc..." I think you also missed where I wrote "You could implement a capitalist economy that discourages cronyism by capping the number of employees a company can have and limiting the radius they conduct business." I thought I was implying it with 'ma and pa shops' but perhaps I should have used more exact numbers: capping the number of employees to 10 and then limiting the radius of business to 5 miles would make businesses so numerous, small, and presumably with a low enough startup cost that "disgruntled employees" could realistically strike it out on their own. Also, I only suggested the capping/geographical limiting as an idea/example. It's easy to imagine other ideas for discouraging the "bad" parts of capitalism, like forcing a wage ratio, e.g. the CEO cannot make more than 10 times what their average worker makes.
I never watch news so I cannot comment on anything topical. My thoughts are my own. If something I wrote has some sort of political connotations to current goings-on, then that's coincidence.
Personally, I dream of a Star Trek-ien utopia that promotes a pro-work culture with no money, no copyrights, no intellectual property, offers equal opportunity, and utilizes technology - like AI - to free folks to pursue a more meaningful existence. People should democratically vote on the services they want - food and shelter being the most obvious - and if there aren't enough volunteers for these services, then you conscript them. My thinking is if the military can conscript people to fight wars, then certainly you can conscript people to perform economic work; especially since it would be work that the majority democratically voted for! Everything we have today is because people built it; under the implementation I'm proposing we can still have everything - people just have to be willing to work for it in the absence of the "bad" parts of human nature. I'm not naïve enough to believe the implementation I'm describing would be immune to problems. At the end of the day, people have to "believe" in the system and want to make it work.
The first sale doctrine that libraries rely on doesn't exist for digital media, so how would you propose build a "morally acceptable" digital library?
* You can't do it by just buying ebooks because those don't come with distribution rights. This is essentially what zlib does, albeit with ebooks "donated" by others.
* You can't do it with interlibrary loan for the same reason.
* You can't do it by buying a distribution license because some of the largest publishers simply don't sell those.
* You can't do it by purchasing physical books and scanning them into digital equivalents ala controlled digital lending. Internet archive tried that.
The current situation today requires either paying perpetual, recurring licensing fees on every single ebook or piracy. If all we have is the former, libraries will never be able to stock anything beyond a small collection of topical books, as is already the case at most local libraries.
paywalling art & culture is wrong, imagine paying a license fee on the use of the italian pizza culture, on the catholic bible, on songs and works of arts like images of paintings bcs people could/should go to the museum and pay to see the paintins. Obviously commercial uses of third parties intellectual propriety should be regulated and enforced.
But HEAVEN FORBID the People make the smallest transgression against corporate interests, suddenly the government is Johnny on the Spot and swings immediately into action, no stone goes unturned, no expense is spared.
It's sickening to watch.