Santarchy
2 HN recommenders · recommended in 12 months, 2014–2020
2:01:00 · 544K views · Feb 3, 2011
A 1997 Noam Chomsky talk at Northeastern University about the gap between free-market rhetoric and practice. He argues that business relies heavily on state intervention, and he discusses trade, NAFTA and labour versus capital mobility.
Linked repeatedly in threads on monopolies, protectionism, and subsidies, usually as a source for the argument that free markets are an ideology more than a reality.
20 comments from Hacker News
I don't believe in the ideologies of the time, call me a doubting thomas that the human race is actually intelligent. I know too much about how human beings and corporations actually function to believe in free market mythology. See here for if you want more acedemic take: this video There are all sorts of things wrong in reality with how capitalism actually functions. The reality is most people are too irrational and too stupid for any market to function as a "market". The videogame "market" is a perfect example. For the first 20-30 years of PC game history, we were getting good software for a fair price. Then the masses got internet and shit went sideways. AKA people started buying software they didn't own, nor control, giving super powers to corporations to extort them and engage in all sorts of abusive practices and raise prices astronically because the internet now gave them access to people with addictive tendencies and impulse control problems 24/7 and in order to gather the worlds evolutionary unlucky regarding gambling addiction all games now have microtransactions. I watched my hobby be destroyed, my software robbed and my os infested with dishonest code because stupid got internet. Before the internet Microsoft and game companies had no incentive undermine software ownership because it was impossible to do so. The market for videogames today is a market for lemons, a total shit show of broken games, stolen games, etc. Because a rational game buyer would never buy a pi
This has been the case with several industries (manufacture, service to name a couple) ever since the capital was globalized beginning from late 80's. The difference is that the collusion is a part of some trade agreement (GATT etc.,) where labor movement between nations is severely restricted or banned altogether and capital movement is encouraged in the name of liberalization! This has resulted in industries being shut down at a massive scale in US where labor costs are higher and moved to a country where labor is cheap (China, India and so on) and also less regulated ("flexible" is the word used). As a bonus companies get to flout just about every environmental regulation which are non-existent in third world countries (think Bangladesh's textile manufacturing plants producing for luxury brands). The net result of this combination of "free capital movement + restricted labor movement" is reduced wages across nations and industries. And over the time you end up having no skilled labor in a company's nation of incorporation (Apple?). The supreme irony I see here is that the advocates of "free market" for capital tend to advance amazingly absurd arguments when it comes to having a similar free market for labor. I highly recommend watching this talk by Noam Chomsky titled "Free Markets?": this video
>The solution really is a revitalization of antitrust policy. It really isn't because the free market ideology never grasped the full complexity of how our world actually works. It's a false ideology that rulers preach to the masses, see here for a talk on "the free market". Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference. this video I'll give you an example of what happed to PC videogames. Over the last 20 years corporations have taken full control over PC videogame software by a campaign of propaganada and selling games where they fraudulently take advantage of the publics ignorance and irrationality to steal game software by rebranding this software mmo/online. It's a way to cheat the population of owning their own software. Games like Overwatch and world of warcraft and diablo 3 all normalized basically taking freedom away from customers. Markets can't work in a post technological society because corporations have all the power in the relationship to force policies. The human brain never evolved to live in a high tech capitalist society which is why we now have videogame dystopia out in PC game land. In the 90's we had full blown level editors and server executables, post mass high speed internet. Game companies can simply take the software hostage and chain it to a backend server committing fraud on a mass scale. No law or anti trust can prevent this shit since most people are too technology illiterate to comprehend how they ar
Your post is so full of inaccuracies. The rich have always preached free market to the masses while taking state subsidies for themselves. The human mind does not see reality as it is, see the science: [LINK] Energy subsidies [LINK] Interference in other states when the rich/corporations dont get their way [LINK] Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference. Testing theories of representative government [LINK] this video From war is a racket: "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10] "War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23] "The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24] General
>I've never even heard of this, Then you should read up on history. Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning: [LINK] Overthrowing other peoples governments [LINK] Wikileaks on TTIP/TPP/ETC [LINK] Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference. this video Energy subsidies [LINK] Intereference in other states when the rich/corporations dont get their way [LINK] From war is a racket: "I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil intersts in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested."[p. 10] "War is a racket. ...It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives." [p. 23] "The general public shoulders the bill [for war]. This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Back-breaking taxation for generations and generations." [p. 24] General Butler is especially