
Stephen Hawking Says We Should Really Be Scared of Capitalism, Not Robots - albertzeyer
http://usuncut.com/news/edit-complete-hw-stephen-hawking-says-really-scared-capitalism-not-robots/
======
tnorgaard
To be fair, it's not really capitalism he is arguing against, but rather
Special Interest groups misusing their position in a capitalistic system.
Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize winning liberal / "capitalist", spoke against
monopolies and Special Interest groups for ~30 years [1].

I would have loved to see a Milton Friedman and Thomas Piketty debate
although. :-)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2T2Ee8zm6s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2T2Ee8zm6s)

~~~
nhaehnle
Are you so sure about that? Capitalism is at its core about the (private)
accumulation of capital in the sense of means of production. This capital is
used by human labour to produce things. Technological change is ultimately a
process by which the ratio of capital input to human labour input
increases.[0]

In a sense, robots (automated machines) are the perfection of capital, where
the ratio becomes arbitrarily high: human labour becomes decreasingly needed
until it's basically unnecessary.

Private ownership of this capital - which is what capitalism is all about - is
then absolutely the problem, because it pits a small group of capital owners
against a majority which depends on the products produced by that capital
without having anything useful to trade left.

[0] How you measure this ratio is an important but difficult topic, and in
fact one must be careful not to let an implicit definition of measures frame
the discussion.

~~~
scotty79
> Private ownership of this capital - which is what capitalism is all about -
> is then absolutely the problem

It's only a problem if you can't/won't tax. If you can tax owners of the
capital and give away that money to other people (bureaucrats, army,
unemployed, everybody) everything still works just fine. Everybody still has
money to buy stuff and this keeps the game that capital owners play between
themselves live.

The only way we can screw this up is to weaken the governments and strengthen
the corporations to the point that governments won't be able to tax. So
probably private armies are bad idea, also neglecting people so that they
pummel their own governments.

So it's ok if billionaires own all the robots, that make stuff, sell stuff to
poor (everybody who's not a billionaire), as long as government can tax
billionaires 98% tax and bomb them if they don't pay up.

~~~
Floegipoky
Is that just a thought experiment, or do you really think that would work?

Because I don't think it would work. Why would producers give bombs to the
government? Why would they give food to the populace? Why would they submit to
taxation when they have more power than the entity trying to tax them?

~~~
scotty79
> Is that just a thought experiment, or do you really think that would work?

That's how it already works. Money is taken from capitalists and redistributed
to bureaucrats and military and some expended to appease the populace.

> Because I don't think it would work. Why would producers give bombs to the
> government?

Because it's good money and government has already plenty of bombs to force
people to make more bombs for them.

Similarly you could ask, why on Earth any company supplies stuff to IRS.
Because it's profitable and because you could face consequences if you openly
refuse.

> Why would they give food to the populace?

Because populace will pay them with money, for the cheapest, best quality food
they can make. Money will come almost in full from producers pockets, but it
won't be a problem for them because as long as competition pays the same or
more then it's all good.

> Why would they submit to taxation when they have more power than the entity
> trying to tax them?

Wait!? US capitalists have more firearms, bombs, tanks and planes than US
army?

What I am saying is that it's not some scheme that will get established. I'm
saying that it's already the case. Governments are still stronger than
corporations, same way North Korea is stronger than South Korea.
Technologically and socially way behind, but with huge army.

I'm basically saying that monopoly on violence
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence)
is the factor that keeps capitalism from eating us, and right after that,
itself.

~~~
tsujamin
This explanation seems to rely fairly heavily on the current, potentially
unknown state of the system, and the ability for the military to respond
without delay to stockpiling of weaponry by producers.

> Because it's good money and government has already plenty of bombs to force
> people to make more bombs for them. If the military could express force
> against a producer the moment they refuse to supply weaponry, and before
> they stockpile it for themselves, then this is true. However if the period
> of delay between producer non-compliance and military intervention is too
> great, the producer may have an opportunity to stockpile enough force to
> mount a realistic defence.

The government, nor the military, controls the means of production that their
Monopoly on Violence depends upon, let alone the responsiveness and
potentially not even the stockpile (I'm not sure of the figures) to mount a
sustained defence against cooperating producers.

EDIT: The idea of producers acquiring legitimacy greater than that of public
institutions is also an interesting idea with respect to Monopoly on Violence.
Immediate self interest of citizens (taxation minimisation) could potentially
lead to a "tragedy of the commons" type outcome for public services; leaving
the private sector as the only viable and legitimate provider. This could also
undermine the legitimacy of public institutions perhaps?

~~~
scotty79
> the producer may have an opportunity to stockpile enough force to mount a
> realistic defense.

I think you are heavily underestimating capacity of armies. Hardware that
modern armies operate is absolutely horrific and knowing how to use it most
effectively is the only thing they do.

Capitalists know how to make money not use military hardware and I don't think
anyone could stockpile enough weaponry without any government organization
noticing to carve out any sort of tax independence.

Closest to what you are imagining is mafia carving out tax independence from
government in Mexico or wherever. But then you have another problem if
government is too weak to prevent you from stockpiling weapons, it's also too
weak to prevent your competition from stockpiling weapons and that's way worse
for the business than being taxed (even heavily).

> ... to mount a sustained defence against cooperating producers.

Why do you things producers would cooperate? They can cooperate to some degree
but they want to get ahead of each other. Having armed competition would be
horrible.

You might potentially imagine scenario, where produces stockpile weapons,
unite to abolish government (and army) that due to weakness haven't noticed
the stockpiling and haven't defused situation and haven't stockpiled
accordingly. Then they either fight among themselves or not and become new
government and army (because it's easier to tax than to manufacture and sell,
when you have an army). So even in catastrophic scenario everything is back to
status quo.

If you like SF I recommend "Beggars in Spain". Nice vision about what might
happen if 1% gets immensely more productive then the rest of humanity.

> leaving the private sector as the only viable and legitimate provider. This
> could also undermine the legitimacy of public institutions perhaps?

I know it's popular fantasy to think that governments are legitimized by
services they provide to (poor) people. While in truth they are legitimized by
armies that hide behind, them that give illusion by being civilly controlled
in exchange for inordinate amount of resources.

------
PythonicAlpha
He is simply right.

The global trend is, that governments in all nations loose more and more of
their former power and (partially) dump it to international corporations which
hold the real power in their hands.

There is an older documentary, that is still valid with the name "The
Corporation" which shows, how corporations have used the US constitution and
decades of lobbying and court cases to gain more and more power. So today, the
corporations are difficult to held liable for things they do (in many cases
they come away with small fees that don't even cover the harm they caused),
but enjoy many of the rights which where meant for real citizen.

This documentary comes to the conclusion, that many corporations behave like
psychopaths, because when a corporation has to decide, (for example) to keep
the environment clean or make more profits, the corporation rule is, to go for
the money and forget about the rest.

Anybody should watch this. Either on DVD, or I also spotted it on worlds
favorite video site.

With international treaties like TTP and others, the power of international
corporations is hardened and it gets more and more difficult to reverse this
global trend. With all their lawyers and lobbyists, the corporations are bound
to win over the democracies -- what dictators did not manage to.

This trend is undermining democracies and human rights, because corporations
are not democratic and have only one rule to obey: The profit rule.

 _So finally, we are all governed by money and nothing else._

~~~
hwstar
This is why some corporations should be forcefully converted to benefit
corporations which have more stakeholders than profit alone. Big Pharma,
Insurance, and Utilities should be converted first.

~~~
PythonicAlpha
I would agree. The current trend (at least in Europe) is the other direction.
In Europe we want to privatize more and more Utilities and other institutions
that belonged to the public sector. Schools, water, electricity ...

~~~
hwstar
Privatization isn't bad provided that key corporations are answerable to more
than just profit alone. This is the key aspect of a benefit corporation.

A lot of what is wrong with large corporations is that they don't place any
priorities on customers, employees, and the environment, when making the most
profit is what they are legally mandated to do.

Making a profit needs to be balanced with the reason the company is in
business, (i.e. the needs of its customers), its employees, and the
environment.

~~~
PythonicAlpha
> Making a profit needs to be balanced with the reason the company is in
> business, (i.e. the needs of its customers), its employees, and the
> environment.

I completely agree. I also don't think, that public sector is always optimal.
Public institutions some times tend to be inefficient.

The problem, I see in many privatizations, is that profits are the main (and
sometimes only) motive and any efficiency improvements are put into
shareholder value instead into public benefit.

------
dovereconomics
No.

TPP, huge inequality, centralization, unemployment ARE NOT a consequence of
free market capitalism.

In such case, automation just doesn't outpace the labor market.

Now, when tech companies are partying with an artificial economy controlled by
the government, they have more than enough money to that.

~~~
TeMPOraL
People seem to be assuming that free market capitalism means companies are
perfectly happy about competition, because competition is what we expect to
see under perfect free market conditions. No, companies do not like
competition; any sane (not to mention rational) actor in such a system will do
anything it can to ensure its own monopoly. Pitting various actors with such
tendencies against each other is kind of the core idea of market economy. It's
pretty obvious that some actors will temporarily get ahead, and then
capitalize on that to get further ahead. Hence inequality, centralization and
TPP, which is another stepping stone towards companies being in charge of
governments, and not the other way around.

As for unemployment, there are many things that give rise to it, but part of
it is definitely market optimizing things so much that people are being pushed
under minimum survivable wage and have to rely on (the bad, communist) welfare
to survive. Automation is playing a serious role here, even companies know
that (hence the "don't vote for increased minimum wage, or we'll have no
choice but to replace our workers with robots" ads that started to appear).

~~~
pm90
Of course _established_ companies do not like competition, it is the startups
that do. If we didn't have free markets, then MS would not have risen up to
replace IBM (for example; maybe not the best example). What we hope is that MS
is better at doing what IBM used to do.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_If we didn 't have free markets, then MS would not have risen up to replace
IBM_

Considering the United States was (and remains) a mixed market economy at the
time, your statement is incorrect.

~~~
lkjhgfd
A mixed market means some markets are free, some unfree - right?

------
pdkl95
David Simon described the problem very clearly:

    
    
        That may be the ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, that it
        has achieved its dominance without regard to a social compact, without
        being connected to any other metric for human progress. [...]
    
        Capitalism stomped the hell out of Marxism [...] but the great irony of it
        is that the only thing that actually works is not ideological, it is impure,
        has elements of both arguments and never actually achieves any kind of
        partisan or philosophical perfection. It's pragmatic, it includes the best
        aspects of socialistic thought and of free-market capitalism and it works
        because we don't let it work entirely. [...]
    
        Labour doesn't get to win all its arguments, capital doesn't get to.
        But it's in the tension, it's in the actual fight between the two, that
        capitalism actually becomes functional, that it becomes something that every
        stratum in society has a stake in, that they all share.
    

[http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-
cap...](http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/david-simon-capitalism-
marx-two-americas-wire)

(the original talk
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNttT7hDKsk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNttT7hDKsk)
)

------
mpweiher
Yesterday's discussion of the Huffington Post reporting the same thing:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10361314](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10361314)

------
rumcajz
The real problem is how demand curve behaves when the price is approaching
zero (which is what you eventually get as productivity increases).

Traditional economics assume that if the price of an egg is $1 you'll eat one
a day. If the price drops to 1c, you'll eat 100 a day. But: Would you?

In other words, at some point we are going to live in the world where
consumption cannot catch up with the production. What then? Surely, economy
would collapse: Goods won't be purchased and people producing them would be
fired. Those fired would not have money to buy goods. The demand would
decrease. More people will be fired. And so on until last human being dies of
hunger.

I would even argue that in developed world we've already reached the limit and
the economy is kept afloat only by desperate measures such as whipping up the
consumption using ads, lowering the productivity by employing large numbers of
paper pushers and so on.

~~~
TeMPOraL
And all of that doesn't even begin to address the resource limits of our
planet. We can keep artificially sustaining the system by making more
throwaway products for ad-driven consumption; we can keep people employed by
inventing more bullshit jobs, introducing more managers of managers of
managers into advertising industry, etc. - but at that rate, we'll soon hit
the energy limit and the entire system will collapse back into middle ages. Or
we'll all starve and die as the planet says "fuck it, I had enough" and shuts
down the ecosystem for a while.

~~~
rumcajz
That's an interesting question as well. We may be saved by the fact that as
literacy and wealth increases, natality rates go down. I've heard all kinds of
estimates of when we'll reach the peak, ranging for 30 to 100 years. Whether
the ecosystem will support us until population grows smaller and more
sustainable is unknown.

~~~
reagency
Nope. Westerners with 2 babies consume 100x as much resources as rural
Africans with 7 babies. And they can continue to consume more as the
productivity increases. And we have room (in the population, not in resources)
to double the number of high consuming people eveery 30 years for many
generations.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The westerners aren't as scary as the developing nations are, actually. We're
starting to care about our energy sources, (sometimes) pushing for clean
alternatives. Compare with the rest of the world, in the process of rising
from poverty. They need cheap energy, and they will need even more. What will
they turn to? Coal, probably. And who are we, the rich west, to deny them
access to things we treat as basic human rights - like wash machines or hot
showers?

It would be in our best interest as a civilization to help them build solar
and nuclear infrastructure, to skip the fossil fuels. But the way things look
right now, I don't see it happening.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Fully Automated Luxury Communism is an alluring idea. Could it work?

~~~
barking
If you could explain to the people of an earlier time all our modern
conveniences and how many hours we work and how little physical effort goes
into almost every job, it would probably sound just like that to them.

~~~
mccracken
If you go just far enough back, the hours we work would sound ridiculous (but
I do agree about the effort).

~~~
Retra
You have to be careful what you are calling work when you make a comparison
like that. We might just be calling more things "work." How many people are
artists, musicians, writers, comedians, or chefs?

------
_up
And how convenient that worldwide TPP, TTIP, CETA and ASEAN are on fast track
to outlaw Robot Taxes. A lot of countries would otherwise probably try to save
their then imploding pension and welfare systems with Robot Taxes.

~~~
nyreed
Do you have a source for those robot taxes? Would like to read more, but
google doesn't yield much.

------
sktrdie
How is Hawking all of a sudden an expert in Economy? Wasn't he a physicist?

~~~
TeMPOraL
He is a physicist which means he likely understand the concept of feedback
loops. It only takes so much STEM education to start noticing some worrying
trends. Also, Hawking probably reads other smart people, including economists.
It's not as if he first noticed this problem. It's only that if you're famous,
media actually report on what you have to say.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
The problem is that when you only understand half the issue, you start
shouting "down with capitalism" instead of "down with corporate corruption of
governments and international trade agreements negotiated in secret by
unelected representatives", and there is no sensible alternative to capitalism
as an economic model, but there are sensible alternatives to government
corruption and unaccountability.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Yes, but another problem is that when you are too deeply involved with the
minutiae of the system you lose track of the big picture - it's not corruption
or trade agreements that's going to doom us, the real issue is with feedback
loops embedded in the basic idea of profit maximization and growth economy.
You may have zero corruption and perfectly honest people and market economy
will _still_ screw you over.

Our system was pretty good for bootstrapping humanity into a technological
era, and was pretty well aligned with our shared values for a time, but now
it's becoming less and less well-aligned, in dangerous ways. In the end, with
robots capable of doing anything, trying to keep people working for a living
is prima facie ridiculous _and_ evil. We need a way to avoid this future, and
focusing just on new ways to solve government corruption isn't, I think, going
to help us with this much. We need to stop riding the feedback loop.

C.f. [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-
moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/) for some
pretty good analysis of the problem

~~~
AnthonyMouse
I don't buy the argument that automation breaks capitalism. The predominant
cost of almost everything is labor. As things become automated, costs go down.
Food costs less, housing construction costs less, local production costs less
so demand for fuel is reduced, mining and recycling cost less so raw materials
cost less, etc.

The reduction in the amount of work available is proportional to the reduction
in the cost of everything, so the wages from fewer hours of working buy more
stuff. Everything is fine until we literally get to zero, which may not even
be possible, and if it is then we're living in Star Trek fantasy land where
everything is free and anyone can just press a button to get whatever they
want.

The only real trouble is unemployment as a result of demand for labor not
matching the skillset of the labor pool, but solving that is hardly rocket
science. Large grants for education (and food and housing for students). Send
everybody back to school until they're qualified to do the jobs that still
exist.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Even if things in fact balance out in the way you described, the problem is
that it takes too long. The market has intertia. Sending everyone to school
for retraining could be good idea if not for the fact that those people who
have years of training ahead of them need food _now_. Since they're
unemployed, they won't have money to buy it and they will die a horrible
death. Unless, of course, you propose for the public to feed them through the
process, at which point we've got basic income, so we may as well get rid of
the retraining part entirely.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> Unless, of course, you propose for the public to feed them through the
> process, at which point we've got basic income, so we may as well get rid of
> the retraining part entirely.

Why are we getting rid of the retraining part? We still need people to be
qualified to do those jobs.

Obviously we don't need to separately subsidize food and shelter specifically
for students if we have a basic income, and a basic income is a Good Idea. But
it isn't Not Capitalism. By all accounts it's more aligned with capitalism
than the ridiculous system of "subsidies for everything but not if you get
a[nother] job" that we have now.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I agree. I always thought of Basic Income as a first step towards switching
away from capitalism, but even a form that would replace current
ubercomplicated welfare system while leaving rest of the economy intact would
be a _really_ good idea and a step towards a better future.

------
timtas
This begs a question. Why are we listening to Stephen Hawking?

Why do we think that destruction of jobs by technology is something new? Do we
really think it's happening faster now than in times past? I call this
presentism. The cotton gin, the loom, the printing press, the steam engine,
electricity, the internal combustion engine, the assembly line, domestication
of the horse, the wheel -- each of these in it's time put a sizable share of
humanity out of a job. Compared to the steam engine, the self diving car is a
mere incremental advance.

Perhaps the time and place of the most rapid job destruction was the 19th
century in the U.S and England. During this period, the standard of living of
the average worker shot up somewhere between 10-fold and 100-fold. You will
not find a measure by which average people's lives was not radically improved.

In free markets, the blessings of technological innovation are enjoyed
disproportionally by the immediate innovators, but they cannot hold their
advantages for very long, not without protection from the state. Competition
levels. History and reason amply show this.

People see rising inequality and are told to reflexively blame capitalism. But
is what we have today in the U.S. really "capitalism?" If capitalism is "fee
markets bounded by private property rights," that's not what we have. The U.S.
system is best called crony capitalism[1], or corporatism[2], and lemon
socialism [3]. While some of the rising wealth of the rich today is earned,
much of it is scam. Bailouts, regulatory capture[4], and the Fed's serial
asset bubbles[5] -- these are just some of the zero-sum schemes which today
shift massive wealth from the middle toward the top.

Automation in free markets has always and will always make everyone richer.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crony_capitalism)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism)

[3]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_socialism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_socialism)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture)

[5] [https://mises.org/library/how-central-banks-cause-income-
ine...](https://mises.org/library/how-central-banks-cause-income-inequality)

~~~
anarchotroll
Do you believe we would be better off if we destroyed/prohibited all the
technological innovations you mentioned in your comment? Stop for a moment and
think about that. Then, read the article below:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window)

~~~
timtas
Um no. Read my post again s l o w e r. Love me some Bastiat!

~~~
anarchotroll
Oops! The high density of comments criticizing capitalism made me misinterpret
what you had said. My bad.

------
_yosefk
Indeed, technology leading to unemployment is happening right now while a
Skynet-style AGI is IMO tremendously unlikely.

However, "everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-
produced wealth is shared" depends on someone maintaining the machines and the
distribution of produce. (Because the opposite of Skynet - an AGI that
maintains itself and keeps every human satisfied - is even less likely than
Skynet.)

And who is going to work for free while keeping everyone else's best interests
in mind?

The fact that, well, nobody would, not really, is somehow missed by people who
blame "capitalism" or whatever instead of blaming human nature.

~~~
verbin217
I think basic income would do a lot to resolve this tension. People can work
towards their own interests with a flat tax on their income and capital gains.
Those tax dollars are redirected to an electronic deposit given to everyone
for the same amount every day. Lets say $35. You could vote to allocate the
usage of those dollars. Like 30% has to go to housing. Then everyone is free
to use additional income however they like. It's a sustained capitalistic
representation of basic human interests. I suspect it'd do a lot for the
economy too. Both by increasing demand (poor people actually buy things) and
decreasing fear.

~~~
_yosefk
IMO very few people who could become good engineers would choose to do so with
basic income available that essentially lets them live a so-called "life of
the mind." Just an opinion, of course.

~~~
verbin217
IMO those very few people would benefit tremendously from a less diluted
workplace. Such that they may actually seek it out were it not for the forces
that drive them away. The modern startup is essentially this. It just takes a
VC to make it a reality. We're a few technical iterations from essentially
deprecating everyone else. We ought to start talking about this. A "life of
the mind" in a world with seamless VR and other escapes could actually be
wildly more productive than our current life in the world. We should just
start trying to make people more comfortable. The engineering mindset seems
inherently rare. I suspect distributions converge such that it simply CANNOT
be pervasive in a population. What then? We're making everyone else redundant
to a degree that we don't even need the entire engineering-capable subset.
Honestly I think the money is and will-be potent enough to attract the
capable.

Ideally we would find creative ways for other people to work if they desired
it. But these may become increasingly rare and undependable. People need a
safety-net they can actually reason about. Modern welfare isn't it. They could
relax and think MUCH more productively if it were simply: I can live in this
tiny box and eat/sleep/internet indefinitely while I learn whatever I want.
$35/day buys you that.

------
joeyspn
We should be worried about Keynesianism and _Crony_ Capitalism. A free and
fair market is not bad per se... Too bad we don't have that kind of market
anymore.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _A free and fair market is not bad per se…_

Such a market is not obvious to set up. Take the internet for instance. There
are several ways to get a free markets, some of which lead to healthy
competition between many many providers, and some of which lead to near-
monopoly.

Basically, it all starts at the handling of the last mile. There are _many_
last miles to cover, and it doesn't make technical sense to duplicate them.
So, one solution is have the state build the lines, then lease them to
providers at regulated rates that allow small providers (10-100 subscribers)
to use them at rates no worse than the big boys. That solution tends to lead
to the "free and fair" market you seek.

Another solution would be to minimise state intervention (because "free
market"), and thus let providers build their own last miles —and lease them if
they want to. The result? A local monopoly at worst, and an oligopoly at best.

Free markets require a proper set-up. That means prior intervention —by the
state if need be.

~~~
timtas
This oft told story is pretty clearly by now a myth:

[https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-
monopoly](https://mises.org/library/myth-natural-monopoly)

Any day now, Google will knock on my door to install Google Fiber in my house.
Funny how for 10 years I had the same Time Warner Cable modem, and they
recently sent me a new much faster one. Funny how, AT&T trucks are suddenly
appearing around my 'hood to upgrade their plant so they can offer higher
speeds.

As a result my service will be better, faster and cheaper. This is not
supposed to be possible.

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _Any day now, Google will knock on my door_

Yeah, _Google_. Not a smaller, local company.

Sure, it's not a monopoly. But when only big players (like Google) end up
servicing you, that's effectively an oligopoly, which is far from ideal.

Maybe there is no natural monopoly here. But there _is_ a natural "only huge
corporations may ever enter here". That's nearly as bad.

~~~
timtas
I disagree.

I've seen firsthand the huge investment it takes to wire a neighborhood with
underground fiber. A small company cannot do it. Okay, so what?

Google is offering free internet forever for a one time $300 construction fee
which you can pay off over the course of a year. I'm buying gigabit plus
premium TV package, 2TB 8-tuner DVR, etc, and my costs will be halved for a
massively better product. If this is oligopoly, bring it on.

With state created monopolies, prices rise and quality stagnates or falls. I
don't know anyone who would dispute that. But these so-called oligopolies
constantly innovate and drive prices down and quality up. Apple is part of an
oligopoly as are many other darling tech companies. The constantly innovate
and drop prices. Even in the days of the so-called robber barons it was so.
Standard Oil controlled 90% of the oil market for about 10 years, during which
time the price of a barrel of kerosene fell something like 300%. [1]

[1] [http://tomwoods.com/blog/beware-the-robber-barons-and-
more-t...](http://tomwoods.com/blog/beware-the-robber-barons-and-more-tales-
of-capitalism/)

~~~
loup-vaillant
> _A small company cannot do it. Okay, so what?_

So, have the state (or city) build the damn last mile. It's a public service,
just like electricity and water. (If it's not a public service, maybe it
should be.) Then have the state _get the fuck out_ by leasing the lines (or
the bandwidth in the lines) at some price (preferably without bulk offers,
which favour big providers).

I bet prices would fall _way faster_ with a scheme like this.

Also, I'd be wary of Google being my ISP. They spy on me way too much already,
I'd rather limit my interaction with them (I'm off Gmail, and use DuckDuckGo).
Not to mention the obvious conflict of interest created by the vertical
integration: they are ISP _and_ content provider. To name one example, the
temptation to make YouTube go smoother than Netflix is significant.

------
anarchotroll
If the so called "evil wealthy people" control all the machines that produce
goods and services, what would they use those goods and services for, since
the rest of the world is miserably poor?

Apparently not even Stephen Hawking understands the broken window fallacy.

------
drawkbox
Capitalism and free markets are fine with some fair regulation on the
outliers/abusers.

Capitalism is ultimately a human system. Humans are much scarier than robots,
the robots are only doing as other humans instructed (at least at the
beginning). Capitalism, a human creation and system, has become a force that
is ultimately good for advancement/innovation, but one that people can take
too far in greed.

Without some regulation, by design humans take it as far as they can go, it is
part of our programming. But, when the future depends on the good will of mega
rich humans to spread it around, that future is a very frightening prospect
indeed.

------
timetoswitch
I thought hacker news would have more libertarians than this. I'm saddened.

~~~
edc117
So write something for us, be that libertarian! The strongest sign of a robust
ideal is that it stands up well in discussion and dissent.

------
monochromatic
"Scientist who is an expert on X opines on Y and Z."

------
meeper16
I'm more scared of Democrats and Republicans than Capitalists.

