
The stealth libertarianism of Silicon Valley bigwigs - aarghh
http://www.salon.com/2014/06/06/techs_toxic_political_culture_the_stealth_libertarianism_of_silicon_valley_bigwigs/
======
wyager
Uh oh! Gotta watch out for those stealth libertarians! They might secretly try
to let you do things!

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doctorpangloss
I think what's more amazing is that his opinions are so simple and undefended
that they fit in all of 17 tweets.

This isn't the stealth libertarianism of Silicon Valley. This is its naked,
obvious politicization.

Given how extraordinarily little substance his opinions have, we agree or
disagree with him entirely based on whether or not we like him, not whether or
not he is fundamentally right.

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wycats
> Getting out of the way of Silicon Valley and ensuring a strong safety net
> add up to a political paradox. Because Silicon Valley doesn’t want to pay
> for the safety net.

> There is very little evidence that the people who are getting rich off
> technological innovation are eager to pay for a robust social welfare net,
> no matter how rich they get. Quite the opposite. Translated into a political
> program, the Andreessen solution has no constituency.

These statements are totally unsourced and contradict what Marc tweeted. I am
in this allegedly non-existent constituency.

~~~
glenra
You feel like this sort of liberal should be asked: _how much is enough_? When
will we know that the government is spending _enough_ on the safety net, or is
your answer always that we need to spend _more_ , no matter how much we're
spending already? Does evidence on spending _effectiveness_ even matter to
you?

The problem here is _not_ that the US is spending too little on a safety net,
it's that we don't get much effectiveness for what we do spend and we have all
sorts of policies that work in the other direction to actively make things
_worse_ for the disadvantaged classes. Like the "war on drugs", the "war on
terror", import protectionism, immigration restrictions, high minimum wages,
and farming price supports - all issues where the libertarians are practically
alone out there in trying to make things better.

Here's a nice series of video shorts describing some of the issues where
libertarian economist-types differ from everybody else:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-89qFWVrrmc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-89qFWVrrmc)

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kev009
This is about as silly as "The stealth liberalism of Salon"

~~~
RottenCoder
Salon mastered the art of clickbait.

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glenra
Measured in terms of _individual_ income, inequality levels in the US have
been surprisingly _constant_ for the last 50 years.

The _appearance_ of an upward trend is purely a demographic artifact -
"household" and "family" sizes have changed since the 1970s so when you look
at incomes collected into bundles based on those units it looks like there is
greater diversity of income than before. But that sort of trend has a limit
and isn't really something you can fix via income policies. So it's not worth
the weight people like Piketty put on it.

[http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/06/sorry-krugman-piketty-
and-s...](http://www.aei-ideas.org/2014/06/sorry-krugman-piketty-and-stiglitz-
income-inequality-for-individual-americans-has-been-flat-for-more-
than-50-years/)

~~~
lawtguy
That blog post looks highly suspect to me. The AEI is reposting the work of a
blogger who has taken data from two different sources: a paper on the GINI of
individuals, and GINI as calculated for households and families by the CBO.
There are two big problems I see:

The data on families and households includes capital gains, but the data on
individuals doesn't (it includes only regular income). He hand-waves that away
by saying, without proof, that capital gains are proportional to income, so
that part doesn't matter. Given the differences in how we tax income vs.
capital gains, I think excluding them from a GINI calculation is a big deal.
Frankly I could simply interpret his chart as showing that rich are
increasingly moving their gains away from income and towards capital gains to
avoid taxes.

Second, for his graph of GINI for individuals, he's picked the GINI only for
people that have an income. So again we're not comparing the same kinds of
numbers. In that same paper, the one that includes everyone (not just income
earners) shows increasing inequality in the last 30 years.

The idea is an interesting one: is the way we're structuring our families and
households leading to increased income inequality? But unfortunately, the data
he has is not good enough to show us one way or the other.

~~~
glenra
You left off the other side of the equation. He says the CB income data
understates income on the high end because it exclude the value of capital
gains, but it ALSO understates income on the low end because it excludes the
value of non-cash benefits. These effects work in opposite directions; it does
thus seem plausible that the resulting Gini is in approximately the right
ballpark. Furthermore, note that we don't actually care about the Gini AMOUNT
here, we just care about the TREND. So unless the ratio of normal income to
capital gains is changing quite a lot (and in the appropriate direction) it's
not going to produce the result you want.

> Frankly I could simply interpret his chart as showing that rich are
> increasingly moving their gains away from income and towards capital gains
> to avoid taxes.

You are expressing a hunch. Got any data to back it up?

> Second, for his graph of GINI for individuals, he's picked the GINI only for
> people that have an income.

Isn't that the normal way of calculating it?

> In that same paper, the one that includes everyone (not just income earners)
> shows increasing inequality in the last 30 years.

Do you happen to have a link for that paper? (Or even just a chart showing
that result?)

------
bowlofpetunias
I don't like the way tech is being used as a false argument to paint the
opposition as anti-tech.

Nobody is opposing technological innovation or suggesting it should be slowed
down. It's the business models that leverage that tech people have a problem
with.

With the same bull shit straw man arguments Andreessen uses you could claim
that people opposed to governments excessive surveillance are "anti-tech". Or
since guns are tech too, you could argue people in favor of gun control are
anti-tech luddites.

Utter nonsenses. The ultra-libertarians are trying to prevent a real debate
about ethics and social problems.

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pikachu_is_cool
I used to be a libertarian. Then I moved out of the Silicon Valley.

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ataggart
A good indicator for the seriousness of an article is how quickly the corpse
of Ayn Rand is draped over the subject's policy positions.

~~~
glenra
True. But on the bright side, Salon just managed to publish an _entire
article_ without claiming the Koch brothers are secretly behind every single
view the writer dislikes. That's got to be some kind of record, right?

"Salon Article Bingo" needs to be a thing.

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vixin
Has anyone ever attempted even the very roughest estimate of the indirect
wealth created worldwide by communicative technologies like Google and
Facebook - in other words, aside from that directly generated for those
companies?

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notacoward
Stealthy like a parade float.

