The commenter below is commenting on my recent post on Tech Bro capitalism. I love this commenter and he’s easily the most knowledgeable of my commenters, but I did disagree with him on a thing or two.

Commenter:

I think it’s a little more complicated than that (referring to my explanation for Tech Bro capitalism in the linked piece). For a start, Tech Bro libertarianism began as anarchic civil libertarianism which quickly morphed into economic libertarianism when they became successful.

The government originally envisaged the Internet as a mall with a small library for academics. They wanted the big corporations and banks to have their own virtual outlets within this tightly regulated and controlled online landscape.

The Tech Bros were always going to rebel against this vision for the future, and it was always going to foreshadow their attitudes towards government.

The other problem was innovation and the way it lends itself to monopoly seeking in certain sectors. Virtually every major Tech Bro has sought out some form of niche where competition is low or nonexistent.

This was always going to attract regulation and government flexing its muscles in a heavy-handed and coercive fashion, meaning they would rebel against government.

Not that I’m against regulation per se, but good regulations tend to be incredibly nuanced whilst also not defaulting to legal minutiae or processes.

This is as witnessed by the fact that the FDA succeeds at being simultaneously cumbersome, bad for small businesses, and terrible at preventing over a thousand poisons being commonplace in the America food system.

Plus there is another factor. Most people think that the reason why the private sector is more efficient is because it’s able to keep operating costs much lower for comparable parallel public vs. private entities competing. This is simply not the case.

In side by by side comparisons, the private sector really doesn’t outcompete the public sector by that much unless the private sector has a substantial bureaucracy attached and entrenched which has accumulated over decades.

When one factors in profits, there are specific areas where the public sector can even outperform the private.

No, by far the most important reason why the private sector outperforms the public is because it’s better at solving problems. In simple terms, it’s better at asking Who, What, When, Why and Where, and most importantly, Should we?

The private sector also has a whole problem with amorality and weird incentives as well as the natural desire to establish their own fiefdoms in the form of monopolies, but the private sector is also far, far better at solving problems than governments.

To give an example, if the private sector were willing to take a serious stab at making a major contribution to solving climate change, there is no way on Earth they would really consider building high speed rail with their own money.

This is because there are already some really viable options for ways to make air travel and air freight Net Zero or Net 20% by 2050.

That’s the real problem. When they do interact with government, it’s usually the state regulating them or getting a quote from them on government contracts where the specifications and requirements are hopelessly inefficient.

These latter would be much more effective compared to the types of solutions they could probably come up with after a weekend of brainstorming within a small team. Of course, this doesn’t mean they won’t take the government’s money and plan to run overbudget.

When they do suggest solutions more broadly, in terms of policy solutions it usually comes in the form of UBI or NIT. It’s because they have far greater faith in the iterative processes of the market than they do in government or bureaucracies.

They’ve even proposed ways to garner taxes like VAT taxes and automation taxes and are not at all opposed to Rawlsian Redistribution.

More generally, they tend to see government employment as a waste in most areas and government decision-making as absolutely terrible in almost every way, particularly with regard to commissioning NGOs for service provision, which to their minds seems like a combination of the worst of both worlds.

The counterculture thing is largely cynical. Their marketing/lobbying people told them they weren’t going to have a problem with free market conservatives or libertarians, but they would have huge problems with the Left.

They also wanted to appear cool to the kids, their employees, who at the time slanted heavily progressive, but who are now switching back, especially young men.

My response:

I agree with most of the commenter’s post about the motives and development of the Tech Bros liberatarianism. He nailed it well. However, I disagree with the promotion of the private sector to “fix problems.” But then he’s a bit of an economic liberal recently converted to some variety of socialism.

No, by far the most important reason why the private sector outperforms the public is because it’s better at solving problems.

Haven’t the Chinese and Russian governments done quite well? The Russian state kicks our ass on weapons development, and it is heavily involved at all levels of Russian society. Now that there’s no centralized planning, it seems to work quite well.

The Chinese government has done fantastic at all sorts of things. Many of the largest corporations in the world are Chinese state firms, and they even operate at a profit. I believe this was a Dengist reform to force public enterprises to compete with each other and even make a profit.

If you allow people to be fired for being complete screwups, and you force public enterprises to compete nationally and internationally, doesn’t that get rid of most of the problems associated with them right there?

The CPC in China does an excellent job of regulating the private sector. It is mandated to follow 5-year plans, and there is typically a CPC committee sitting on the board of directors.

The party has mandated that all foreign firms increase wages by 16% every year for some time now. You either do what the government tells you to or they shut down your business, take your stuff, and give it to the state or one of their private sector friends.

In some extremely internationally competitive firms, people are readily fired, and there is much demanded of employees nearly to the point of worker abuse. On the other hand, they are paid quite well.

Most of the major societal problems have been and are being fixed by the state. The private sector is good for making stuff (widgets) and not much else. Its involvement in politics and the media is a nightmare from which nothing good comes.

The CPC keeps the capitalists out of the state and especially the media. They know full well what letting the private sector into those areas will do.

As an example a billionaire sits on the central committee. He recently advocated huge cuts in social and state spending, reduction of income taxes, and dramatically lower regulation of business. Duh! What else would he ever propose?

I’d add in the Vietnamese, Venezuelan, and even the Cuban governments. And West European social democratic governments have done quite well with their state firms, airlines for one.

Major decisions of the Cuban state are made via an ultra-democratic process whereby proposed legislation goes before neighborhood committees all over the country where it is discussed by everyone who attends. The result takes into the account the peoples’ desires and demands.

The Cuban biotech industry competes with the entire private biotech industry of the world. In that case, it’s literally sink or swim.

The Venezuelan cooperatives or communes work great. They are run by municipalities and operate at a profit. They sell whatever they produce to retailers. The profits are then distributed to the community by way of fixing up the town in various ways.

Everyone in town works for the commune, so it’s a company town in a sense. Also, if municipalities run businesses, people in that city do not want those enterprises to go bankrupt and will work very hard to keep them from doing so.

The problem with tasking the private sector to fix global warming is that they can’t make a buck off it. Same thing with all environmental, educational, medical, redistributive, and regulatory processes along with natural monopolies like utilities. Asking business to regulate itself is a joke because it never does.

I’ve read histories of very early businessmen in Italy in the 15th Century, and their demands could have been written yesterday. They had no use at all for the state and regarded it as a huge nuisance to be best done away with.

These essays showing the mindset of these businessmen could have been written yesterday. Capitalists don’t change. They literally cannot unless they are forced to.

I believe this was before there was even much in the way of capitalism. Instead there was mercantilism but apparently it had much the same mindset.

Few US non-tech corporations support out and out libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism. But boy do the Tech Bros sure love that stuff. They are even trying to set up tiny little statelets on islands where there would be few if any laws to constrain them.

Every rich capitalist who wants to go live in these anarcho-capitalist utopias is a Tech Bro. The other capitalists want nothing to do with an anarcap society. It also shows what the Tech Bros think of the state. They literally want to abolish it altogether.

As we have seen in corporations’ attitudes of too big to fail and privatize the profits and socialize the losses, most of the other capitalists find the state quite useful and even mandatory in certain cases.

I recall that Uber’s ultimate goal was to have basically zero employees. They wanted to lay off all of their drivers and have nothing but driverless vehicles. You don’t often see non-tech corporations acting that callous.

I recently tried to order one month of Abobe Acrobat. It seemed quite clear that I could do so based on the screen. So I did it. Somehow I ended up signed up for the monthly plan for a year, and worse than that, I didn’t even own the product!

I rented it from the scum at Adobe! Imagine if you didn’t own anything in your house. Most things you owned were just rented from jerkwad capitalists, and you had to pay monthly rental fees or they would come steal your stuff. This is the dreamworld the Tech Bros have in store for us.

I tried to cancel my order, but there was no way to do that! I was stuck paying for it monthly for a year. At some point my credit card maxxed out, and they kept hitting it trying to get a payment.

Then they sent threatening mails saying I owed them money. After a while they gave up and just shut off the application.

Ever been on a dating site? Another wonderful Tech Bro industry.

Those are easily some of the most evil businesses out there. Literally none of them are any good at all. Most seem to be run by companies that should be called Satan Incorporated or Devil Enterprises, and a lot of what they are doing is arguably criminal or at least ought to be.

There is zero regulation of those sites, and they are an object lesson in what happens when an industry is completely unregulated. It turns to a dystopian Hellhole for consumers real quick.

Ever noticed that these Tech Bros refuse to charge sales taxes?

Don’t tax the Internet!

The jerks scream. My response is why the Hell not? We tax all other sales of everything. It’s called a sales tax. You know, when you sell a product, you have to charge sales tax on it? You don’t even have to pay it. Your customers do.

Why do brick and mortar businesses have to charge sales taxes but Internet businesses end up being exempt? Are they special in some way? Not to mention it puts brick and mortar businesses at tremendous disadvantage compared to Internet businesses which can sell at lower prices.

Hence consumers try to get cheaper products by patronizing Internet business which then abuse them in all sorts of ways. Non-Tech Bro corporations are awful, but I’m not aware of any demanding that that they be exempted from charging sales taxes!

You will own nothing and you will be happy.

– Charles Schwab, head of the World Economic Forum

The Tech Bros literally destroyed customer service. That’s a Tech Bro “innovation.” Ever noticed that every Internet corporation has pretty much zero customer support?

Ever tried returning a software product because it doesn’t work? Good luck with that. I tried it. You literally cannot.

You often cannot speak to a human. The voicemail “support” typically doesn’t even work. My credit card companies’ voice mail systems often fails, and I get transferred over to a human who fixes the issue quickly and well.

Many of these Net companies have only these odd bots for support. Got a problem? Talk to a robot and it will fix it! Except it almost never does. Then instead of talking to a human, you talk to some email support person. It takes a lot longer and sometimes doesn’t even work.

Say what you want about brick and mortars, but almost to a one they all have superb customer support. No wonder the tech bros want to eliminate them!

Other wonderful things the Tech Bro pricks have gifted us are forced upgrades and natural monopolies as far as the eye can see. Microsoft literally forced you to buy their products. This made me so furious.

The forced upgrades are especially annoying. What if your TV or microwave oven stopped working every few years and you had to go out and buy a whole new one? This is the “utopia” the Tech Bros have planned for us.

It’s news to me that any Tech Bro corporation supports UBI or NIT. The VAT is a regressive tax, so of course they are for it. And I’d love to see one of them support Rawlsian redistribution.

I have thought for a long time now that these groovy Tech Bro capitalists are actually some of the worst capitalists of them all! We are literally going backwards.

Time itself and History (capital H in the Marxist sense) is going backwards. Clocks aren’t supposed to run backwards. They only do that when their broken, and you can say the same about societies. The old days were rarely better.