Are you under the impression that corporations and governments of capitalist countries are somehow independent? The ultimate goal of both of them is to have the greatest amount of power over the greatest number of people. They're an extension of one another more than they are independent entities.
You my friend must live in an alternate reality where political leadership isn't obviously enmeshed with corporations to a pathological degree - without a revolving door of people circling between them, without lobbying, without corruption, without special deals to the benefit of the biggest corporations, where private corporations aren't abused to bypass restrictions on government powers, and vice versa.
Lobbying is a tiny industry in the United States and corruption is basically a nonissue. With the exception of the current president I haven’t seen any evidence for widespread corruption in the United States - at most it’s a collection of isolated low impact and rare incidents.
I can only speak for the U.S., but I know a lot of large instances where lobbying was a direct result or sibling of corruption. BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Bosch all combined their efforts to kill grey market imports into the U.S. starting in 1994 after a campaign they initiated in 1988. This effectively killed imports from Britain, France, Spain, Russia, and Italy and severely shrunk the market for luxury sedans and coupes in the U.S., which backfired as the Japanese were faster to manufacture and took up the slack. Oshkosh created a system to undercut AM General in order to push the L-ATV design over competing JLTV designs. They repeated this tactic in 2021 to ensure they got the contract for the mail delivery vehicle despite not matching the statement of objectives paper as well as Mahindra or Workhorse. Verizon and Comcast combined forces to kill net neutrality, each whittling away at it with targeted campaigns since 2011 until it was finally ended in 2017 and barred from reimplementation this year. Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, Doordash, and other "disruptor" companies collectively spent hundreds of millions of dollars to bypass classifying their workers as employees and to excuse themselves from taxation. Even now they're still trying to reverse the legal landmark that those workers are employees and can form unions. Blue Cross Blue Shield spent tens of millions of dollars cutting off parts of the Affordable Care Act they didn't like. Currently license plate reader manufacturers are lobbying to get contracts with local governments at the city and county level to install facial recognition cameras everywhere they can, and they're lobbying the federal government to allow this breach of privacy in exchange for access to the databases.
Lobbying is only tiny if you look at the individual amounts. Most lobbyists only put forth $5-10,000 at a time because they're not doing it at a national level. But it's the fact that so many do it in so many different places that makes it a threat. Somebody running to be on the city board can have their entire campaign financed by a single donor. A mayor can have their entire income for the year matched by two lobbyists laying the groundwork for a national campaign. One Senator or House member having seven to eight lobby sponsors can almost match their guaranteed salary for that year. There are entire divisions of the finance departments of companies that are dedicated to budgeting for lobbying over the fiscal year. It's a massive force, composed of nearly $4,000,000,000 in "contributions" in 2024 alone.
Merely being a counter-narrative to some other narrative is not valuable in itself, otherwise all sorts of nonsense would be valuable. Proof that counter-narratives are not automatically valuable: "the moon is made of blue cheese" and "the moon is made of green cheese" provide worthless counter-narratives to each other.
I think the comment you replied to explains it well enough and I don’t feel the need to repeat myself.
I will edit my comment as well since you edited yours instead of responding. I don’t think the GP’s comment is the equivalent of saying that the moon is made of cheese.
The original parent comment (now flagged) essentially said: only people who reproduce have any right to have any say in how society operates. Especially when it comes to mass surveillance.
Which is patently absurd on its face. Much like saying the moon is made of cheese.
Edit: I’m done pretending like regressive ideas like removing voting rights from entire segments of the population are points for valid discussion.
What makes it patently absurd? I don’t agree with this perspective but I don’t agree that it’s the equivalent of saying that the moon is made of cheese. I found their perspective much more interesting than the typical HN opinions, shame it was flagged.
You may be done with that idea but the idea is not done. We can choose to limit the franchise or we can have it imposed on us when a strongman takes advantage of the chaos.
The people you are replying to are trying to have a meaningful discussion by providing references and some basic argumentation. Can you add some link or arguments that explain more strongly your point of view instead of using strong affirmations ('misinformation', 'debunked', 'nonsensical') without any trace of argumentation and no reference at all ?
You might be safe as long as the ad is on a website but stupid laws that shouldn't exist like the DMCA can make it illegal to block ads when you have to circumvent a technological measure in order to block those ads. Blocking ads and the steps needed to block them might also violate some product's EULA which could result in civil judgements against you.
> DMCA can make it illegal to block ads when you have to circumvent a technological measure in order to block those ads. Blocking ads and the steps needed to block them might also violate some product's EULA which could result in civil judgements against you.
Your issue there is with the government. No disagreement from me in this regard :)
The problem of course isn't the fact that government and laws exist. Most of us are happy that we have government and laws. The alternative is very ugly and doesn't lend itself to progress or prosperity.
The problem is that our government was allowed to be bribed/corrupted by corporate interests to pass bad laws designed to protect their profits and enforce control by taking freedom from consumers. The true villain here isn't government, government was just the tool they leveraged against us.
It's supposed to be our job to insist that our government work for the interests of "we the people" and we failed. The solution now is to get rid of corrupt politicians and the bad laws they passed and replace them with good ones that preserve our freedoms and don't put corporate interest ahead of the people's.
Sadly, our entire political system has been carefully refined over centuries to make it harder and harder to keep our government accountable to the people but hopefully it's not too late to change that situation within the democratic framework we've created.
The founding fathers knew that the system wasn't perfect and would need to be modified as things changed and flaws were discovered. Making it work by "doing it right this time" was the point. That's not a sign of a bad system, it's a good thing!
Of course, nothing about government itself prevents adults from engaging in consensual transactions, and only a tiny percentage of laws do. Sometimes those laws are stupid and sometimes they are good to have. The original plan (and I still think it was a good one) was that we would have the ability to remove the bad laws and add good ones as needed. That process mostly even works, but with corruption and bribery in our government going unchecked it usually just works for a small few and the rest of us get shafted as a result.
That is a very weak argument. I don't have any way to decline seeing the ads before I do. I can't disable tracking by disabling js because, like a parasite, tracking software has uses what is necessary technology for websites to function.
Otherwise this is a very weak argument. Using the Internet is approximately mandatory in our current society. "Don't use the Internet" is not useful advice.
This doesn’t add much to the discussion and is closer to something I’d expect to see on Reddit than here. Dang can we take a look at this one please? Thank you!
Perhaps at that point she realized that her ideas were shit, and a system where you contribute to a public safety net is not a bad idea, it's what society is for.
Or perhaps she was still a dense prick to the end of her days. Who knows?
1. I’m not an objectivist.
2. Looks like the comment I replied to is heavily downvoted and soon to be flagged. Seems like I’m not the only one that agrees that it doesn’t contribute. I expect a similar thing to happen to yours shortly as well.
> She paid into the system. Why shouldn’t she get as much value out of it as possible?
That's not how “the system” works though. She paid so other people could benefit from it, then when she benefited it, she became part of a scheme that took money from working people to give it to her: she become one of the parasites she hated in good years.
I don't blame her for preferring hypocrisy to suicide, but it's still fair to call her hypocrisy for what it is.
Except she isn't stealing the state in any way, the state is more than willing to give her back.
If she's stealing someone, it's someone akin to her younger self whose work is taken away by the state to give her.
Had she become a burglar, stealing directly from the senior public servants[1] houses, then it would have been somehow consistent. But I'm pretty sure she would still have agreed that this was theft and immoral.
The reality is simple, at the end of her life, she simply couldn't afford to live in a way that matched her individualist ideology.
[1]: because even though Rand claims she hates the State, it's pretty clear from the writing that her main personal issues are the civil servants themselves.
I never claimed she was stealing the state, I claimed that she was stealing from the state.
> If she's stealing someone, it's someone akin to her younger self whose work is taken away by the state to give her.
I didn’t claim she was stealing anyone.
The state took her money, and she reclaimed some of it. This is perfectly consistent with her moral philosophy and doesn’t constitute hypocrisy in any way.
> I never claimed she was stealing the state, I claimed that she was stealing from the state.
Not a native speaker, what's the difference between those two?
> I didn’t claim she was stealing anyone.
Wait you did, right above “I claimed that she was stealing from the state”.
> The state took her money, and she reclaimed some of it.
No, in reality the state redistributed her money, then the state handed other people's money to her.
> This is perfectly consistent with her moral philosophy and doesn’t constitute hypocrisy in any way.
You keep saying that but you've failed to make a convincing argument.
How would accepting stolen money handed over by your nemesis be consistent with anything?
If we consider the state stole her money earlier, then the state is again stealing someone's money by the time it gives it to her. If taxes are theft, then late Ayn Rand was in “Possession of property obtained by crime”, which isn't morally more defensible than the theft itself.
This comment doesn’t make any point that I haven’t already addressed in my reply to the parent comment. I’d recommend reading it a little more carefully before downvoting.
The hypocrisy lies in the fact that the philosophy of Ayn Rand - that an elite few held up society and the rest were pretty much just parasites - has been used at great length to justify the gutting of social programs.
Please read my comment in good faith.
There is no contradiction with Rand’s philosophy here.
According to her framework, the state stole from her throughout her life. Using public assistance is merely retrieving a small piece of that stolen money.
I agree that it was in her philosophical framework to accept social security - apologies if my comment seemed in bad faith due to that not being clearer. The irony does not lie with her, but rather those that use her philosophy to eliminate the safety net that she herself ended up using.
Sure, she could have used the money she had put into social security to invest, and maybe would have come out better off. But for those of us who see how public services can enrich an entire society, there is irony to how this all played out.
"The irony is with those who believe that thievery is wrong. She obviously didn't believe what she wrote because her actions reveal she believed in stealing your stolen property back from a thief, which is itself thievery."
"The irony is with those who believe that thievery is wrong. She obviously didn't believe what she wrote because her actions reveal she was OK accepting when the thieve gave her your property to make up for the theft she suffered earlier"
FTFY.
She didn't steal from the thieve, she became complicit with the thieve stealing other people's work to get their money back (gracefully handed by the thieve).
She believed that even wealthy kids that just live off their trust funds were parasites too. It was about consuming vs producing, not elite vs non-elite.
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