Idk, I think this characterization is a little on the naive-idealist side.
Access to people in positions of power has always been an important part of the game. Those gatekeeping peddlers of access and influence can be financiers, politicians or corporate bosses. Often, it's all mixed together.
In the west, it's sometimes been considered faux pax to emphasize the political component publicly. That generally doesn't apply to certain endevours, where the idea of doing anything big without such support is absurd. Banking, large scale construction and military industry comes to mind. If you can't get in a room with the big boys, you're not a big part of those.
I'm not against idealisation. Like power in the hands of the people, building your fortune by the sweat of thy brow is admirable and attractive morally. As ideals, they can and do shape society and history. But societies and economies are not really built like that, never have been. Power matters.
When gatekeepers are corporate bosses or financiers it's fine, the most they can do is to say no. In case of state and authority, there's much more power imbalance. If something goes wrong, or entrepreneur falls out of favour of authority, it becomes a no-rules game. Prosecution, seize of assets, state sponsored media witch hunting.
The clear distinction between private and public is (in my estimation) more of an idealisation of free market economic systems than reality.
In practice, money, power and influence at sufficient scale are the governing system. The idealisation is built on (a) very abstract idealised example (like Adam Smiths charming world of bakers and miller's) and (b) real world examples where free market dynamics work well, the way they are supposed to. For example, much of the SV-2.0 world before the money and politics got to the scale it's at now. But even here, connections always featured prominently at certain choke points like fundraising.
The world of finance in particular is (I feel like I need to keep emphasizing imo, I do not have absolute proofs and I'm speaking in very general terms) more a part of the "public" governing system than the "private" realm of free individuals. Like I said though, I think these terms are not as clear as many HNers do.
The quintessential counter example is Putin's Russia in the early 2000's. The oligarchs wouldn't play ball with the state, so Putin put the richest one in a cage on television. The other oligarchs immediately caved to work with the state on severely disadvantaged terms.
In a power struggle between money and the state, the state always wins. It has the authority to instantly justify its seizure of the money, whereas the money will have to work in pretty visibly ugly ways to justify why it should seize the authority.
This is why you see billionaires that become political officials more often than revolutionaries.
This thread is interesting and I'm far from entrenched in any of the position implied above.
But... I don't think we can make a lot of progress without a Guinness and some banter at this point.
That said, I would call the post Soviet oligarchy and it's intrigues a game where corporate interests (formerly "industry") finance and government are deeply interlinked. Those power struggles are internal to that (very young) form of "government" which you (and most people including me) call an oligarchy. The oligarchs control different pieces of all three, including Putin the senior oligarch.
If you ever find yourself in Zurich, I'll take you up on that Guinness. :)
I agree, it wasn't an ideal "free market" "free government" scenario. That's probably the strongest argument against this example. But it does provide an interesting use case nontheless!
I don't feel as though this proves some golden rule on world affairs.
I think Russia is like this because of their unique past and I think other countries do things because of their own pasts, there is no one rule like gravity that ties human behaviour on a mass scale together across cultures.
If anything I find I can turn your argument into reverse by, the reason why you see so many rich politicians in America is because Money is greater than State and this is why billionaires become political officials rather than revolutionaries. But I wouldn't say that because it would rather simplify a complex situation
There are places where money is greater than state. That's where countries that have bribes as part of their governmental interactions - money literally circumvents the states' authority. Having a billionaire politician means they're playing ball with the states' rules - they are not circumventing the rules. They may rewrite the rules within a legal framework - but they're still playing ball with the state's power, not hiring thugs on the street to stuff ballot boxes.
I think I just take a different view than you, who writes the country's rules, the people in power, who has the power, the people with money / property to protect, I think we are both describing the same loop just diverge on where this loop began.
> The clear distinction between private and public is (in my estimation) more of an idealisation of free market economic systems than reality.
Let's look at mall cops vs real cops. A real cop has the authority to blow your head off, a mall cop not as much.
A clear distinction between private and public should be something to hope for. Otherwise you end up with prisons being run by for-profit companies, and leaders of industry writing the laws. That isn't a free market, that's corporatism.
People falsely believe that they can give the government more power, and in turn, the power will be used to regulate industry. Almost like raising a big dog to provide protection. But what ends up happening is, industry comes by with a big ole steak and wins over the dogs loyalty. And now agencies that were supposed to protect us are the ones selling us out.
If private and public initiatives aren't distinctly split, you'll end up with leaders of industry taking over the public sector and distorting the market for everyone else.
I assume your 2nd paragraph is at least a little tongue in cheek.
Otherwise, I think your trying to characterized things in clear public-private terms, the language of particular political and economic philosophies. What I was saying is that I think that terminology is flawed.
The public-private dichotomy is never a clean break. Corporations are a part of the governmental system, and this is not limited to influencing laws and their enforcement. That is, they are the deciders (often) of what does and doesn't happen, and how.
I happen to agree with you. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes to use computer-network terms to describe the human network. Because what we're trying to analyze is fundamentally similar - which is the rate consensus can be found, network uptime, security vulnerabilities, decentralization, failover, etc.
In a way democracy is a kind of p2p network. And then there's confusion when you ask "who is in charge" because you could say no one is in charge or everyone is in charge - and both could be correct.
Gatekeeping is the reason we wind up with Harvey Weinsteins and Donald Trumps. People working for the civil government have pretty cushy jobs, it's not too demanding to ask that they make it so non-connected people can achieve the same outcomes as connected people.
China is China and they can do what they want, but I expect better out of the west.
I'm all for it if someone has a good way of going about making it happen. But let's play fair... We can't appeal to the western tradition of societal fairness of that kind. It hasn't existed.
It's fair enough to want it to become a part of it, but it has to be invented first.
I think busting public sector unions would be a good start, making the public employees at-will would be even better. And citizens should have a feedback mechanism - surly DMV clerks and permit granters who don't follow up should hit the streets.
We have to incentivize service much more than we currently are.
Interesting thing about the Klondike gold rush: It was considered polite to collaborate with neighbors and inform them about good prospects. Robert Henderson snubbed George Carmack, because of Carmack's native/indigenous wife. Thus Carmack didn't tell Henderson about a major find and Henderson missed out on a great fortune.
Interesting that HN tend to swing between two extremes in this: "it is meritocracy, all is just about work" and "everything is corrupt and based on who you are friend with" (plus some who attempt to frame latter as former through it is not).
I was not implying cronyism (alone). Human lives are deeply affected by relationships - personal, business, or lack of. For example, what if Jobs had not known Woz? What if Bill Gate's family wasn't super established in the way it was? What if Softdisk had not employed the crew that became Id software? Etc.
This does not mean an individual contributor can't come up with something groundbreaking locked away in some closet. But generally, that is million to one even in a population of over achiever engineers.
Yes, but it as if the two groups never met, I don't recall discussion between the two. Also it is as if there would not be people in the middle (where I am) .
I think the point was that even at that level of business, where some people might think that money can get you access to everything, knowing the right people is __still__ important.
What if this seperation of government and buisness exist only in your head? What if china was not a government, but a cooperation? Would you even notice?
Would you complain about a cooperation doing a deal with another cooperation?
Or is that thought damaging the reference frame? If a government and cooperation would be the same. The whole artificial antagonistic distinction would break down- and you would just stand there, a ranting peasant in the lower ranks of a pyramid scheme, played to hate the east side of the same pyramid..
> There should be a Goldilocks zone between Laissez-faire economy and extreme regulation.
Arguably the US spent the past five decades in exactly that region.
Also, I'm not sure that "corruption" and "extreme regulation" are really synonyms. The latter is used as a tool of the former of course, but it's not the only such tool and not all oppressive regulations are "corrupt".
Even in Laissez-faire economy who you know is often more important than What you know. Does not matter if you are looking for millions in funding, or for a minimum wage job who you know can often be the difference between success and failure.
Some governments? All governments exercise control on all businesses to some degree and vice versa. Business exert control on government too.
Knowing the right people is easily the most important factor in your business succeeding, not just in china, but in the US as well.
Elon Musk's contacts in the US government is why he was able to get hundreds of millions of dollars to bailout a bankrupt tesla many years ago.
Elon's success, even with paypal, had more to do with knowing the right people and having the right information than anything else. The same with tesla.
There should be a Goldilocks zone between Laissez-faire economy and extreme regulation.