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by jparishy 403 days ago
my view of capitalism is that you can't remove the market. it will exist with or without you, so if you have some control you should incentivize the things that are better for everyone.

To me I think it's possible for Netflix and Amazon and whoever to exist and make a lot of money, but also not have nation-state level power. The latter is something we haven't decided we want yet, but I think we'll come around. If there were even just very small controls (that worked) on the size of a company, or how many industries it can go into, then things would look differently. But when we let so few companies consolidate so much power through money, the status quo is a pretty natural outcome. Imagine a world where there were regional amazon.com's, because we just decided at some point they got too big. Same for google. We'd have actual competition. Tech enables market consolidation in ways we didn't expect and we have to do some actual work to fix it.

2 comments

I agree with you, and this happened in the past. The entire system is designed to prevent this, and this newfound love of isolationism is a way to cement it in.

Let’s be real, these giant tech companies are becoming big stagnant bureaucracies. They can’t adapt anymore and want to build a moat to let them lumber along for a few decades.

The core assumption of the policy makers and business people was the idea that the Chinese are a bunch of dumb peasants working for scraps and unable to produce. They seem to be holding their own with AI, cars, trains, aircraft, etc. They may have a credible competitor for the B737/A320 — that’s a pretty big leap.

I love this comment. Please do not delete it. I'm saving this.

I wholeheartedly agree with you.