Posted on 08/04/2024 4:23:09 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Despite the sharp polarization of American politics, there is surprising agreement on what went wrong with capitalism. Whether the writer or politician is coming at this question from the left or right, the blame often falls on four decades of “small government” ideology and free market orthodoxy since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Whether the flaw in question is slowing productivity growth, the rise of oligopolies, the export of jobs, or income and wealth inequality, its source is traced to excessive faith in the “magic of the market.” Capitalism’s flaws are “market failures.”
The problem: this narrative is wrong on the facts. Today, as Biden pushes forward plans to restore “big government,” and many Republicans embrace new barriers to trade, capital and immigration, the reality is that government has been expanding in an almost unbroken line, and most every measurable respect, for nearly a century. The flaws of capitalism, in its modern, distorted form, are government failures.
How could standard histories fall so far off the mark? After the anti-government revolution spawned by Reagan, and Margaret Thatcher in Britain, their agenda of cuts in spending, deficits, taxes and regulation often did shape the political conversation in the capitalist world, but it did not downsize any aspect of the state. Consider as one striking example the regulatory state, which dates to the nineteenth century and began to expand in earnest during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
As America prospered after World War Two, economic regulation designed to protect the struggling masses against price or supply disruptions gave way to social regulation, aimed at improving the quality of life for the growing middle classes. Under Richard Nixon in the 1970s, his economic advisor Herb Stein would later recall, “probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy than in any other presidency since the New Deal” — including new rules to protect job safety, clean air and water, marine mammals and more.
By the late Seventies, the tangle of red tape was provoking a backlash from an unexpected alliance: conservatives who hated regulation for distorting market efficiency, and liberals who hated regulation for raising prices and thus hurting the average consumer. Still, rhetoric didn’t produce much action.
The pattern was already set: the regulatory state expands, rarely if ever contracts. A few of the relief agencies created by Franklin Delano Roosevelt during the Depression no longer exist, but often because they were renamed or folded into other agencies. Every new agency develops a circle of supporters — its own staff, clients in the public, backers in Congress — who defend its turf.
Nixon had a plan to streamline twelve government departments into nine, but Congress approved only those parts of the plan that created new agencies: the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Reagan would try to eliminate those two agencies as well as the Department of Energy, created by Carter — and Congress turned him down too.
It’s been said that the government safety net is like plastic wrap — once stretched, it never shrinks back to size. The same can be said of red tape.
The growing bureaucracy spawned a boom in the lawyer population, which was growing by about 30,000 per decade before 1970, and 100,000 per decade since. Dense regulation helps explain why America has more lawyers per capita than any other country — and why the bureaucracy is so expensive.
Spending by US regulators has more than tripled to $70 billion in constant dollars since 1980, and staffing has nearly doubled to 280,000. Reagan did slow this expansion in his early years, but by the end of his second term staffing and funding had regained their old levels.
Though Bill Clinton has often been cast as an anti-government “neoliberal” in the Reagan mold, he did not downsize the regulatory state either. Since the end of Clinton’s first term in 1996, the bureaucracy has issued more than 3,000 new rules virtually every year but one (2019); a chart on the cumulative growth in red tape looks like a set of stairs, climbing upward. Over the same period, the United States has eliminated a total of just twenty rules, according to Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Even Donald Trump, who promised “the deconstruction of the administrative state,” and ordered regulators to eliminate two rules for every new one, did not deliver. A flurry of regulations during his final year put his output of new rules on par with his predecessors’. The reality is that “deregulation” has always meant rewriting rules at greater length and complexity, often with more loopholes, not “cutting” red tape.
Meanwhile, the same process of illusory deregulation was underway in Europe. In his 1996 book Freer Markets, More Rules, UC Berkeley political scientist Steven Vogel wrote that the deregulatory revolt was largely a myth, having had little effect in the United States, Japan, Europe, or the United Kingdom. Of the fifteen key British regulatory agencies, he pointed out, twelve were established after 1980, in the midst of the alleged anti-government revolution. In most cases, he wrote, “governments have combined liberalization with re-regulation, the reformulation of old rules and the creation of new ones.” The “big bang” reforms of London finance during the 1980s were, for example, accompanied by the Financial Services Act, which created a web of red tape “more complex and burdensome than what it replaced.”
The subsequent advance of the regulatory state in Europe was clouded by the fact that most Europeans came to live under two governments — one national, one continental. By the late Eighties Europe was moving to create a single market for goods and services, and a new administrative state with what Columbia Law School professor Anu Bradford calls “vast power” to regulate those markets. Since then, this Brussels-based bureaucracy has expanded steadily, adding staff at a pace of 5 percent a year, hiring mainly multilingual technocrats who are true believers in the project of unifying Europe. In a federation of societies that “have structured their economies so as to allocate more rights to the state as opposed to the individual,” the Eurocrats would extend this trust in the state to the creation of a regional government. And in part because the European Union lacks the power to tax and spend directly, its energies have been channeled into the construction of what one scholar called “an almost pure regulatory state.”
This two-headed government creates a lot of confusion. Scholar Thomas Philippon has argued that Europe “of all places” is replacing the United States as “the land of free markets,” based in good part on evidence from an index of regulations kept by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development. It tracks nineteen EU member states, and shows that while seventeen of them were more densely regulated than the United States fifteen years ago, now only two of them are. The limitation, as Philippon points out, is that this index tracks only certain national regulations, leaving out other parts of the code that cover everything from taxes to labor rules.
There is plenty of evidence that these national tax and labor rules are getting more onerous in the large European economies. By 2023, more than a quarter of Germany’s medium-sized businesses were considering shutting down or moving abroad, citing “too much red tape and higher taxes.” France had suffered an exodus of millionaires fed up with high taxes, and it had developed a strange bulge in the number of companies with just under fifty employees — the point at which its tough labor regulations kick in.
On other parts of the code, national regulators aren’t streamlining the rules so much as ceding the authority to write them to Brussels. Europe has thus become “the global regulatory hegemon,” writes Bradford.
Though many liberal critics suggest multinational corporations are engaged in “race to the bottom” — meaning havens of thin regulation in shady microstates — Bradford says the race is in the opposite direction. Any multinational that wants to do business in Europe, which is all of them, needs to meet standards set in Brussels, which are determined largely by its strictest, most powerful members — Germany and France. In Euro-jargon, regulations “are harmonizing up” to the strictest national standards, not “harmonizing down” to the loosest.
And the world has little choice but to comply. European rules now shape industry and business the world over, from how honey is made in Brazil to how milk is produced in China and the degree of internet privacy worldwide. Bradford calls this “the Brussels Effect” and applauds it, as proof that Europe remains far more geopolitically “relevant” than its critics suggest. On whether the Eurocracy helps or hurts the economy, however, she says that question “may not even matter” because like it or not, individuals, corporations, and governments “can do little” about it.
That’s part of the problem, however. Polls from Europe to the United States, Britain, Canada and Australia show growing frustration with capitalism, for many reasons, one being that overconfident governments are turning daily life into death by a thousand bureaucratic annoyances. The fact that many of these annoyances now originate in Brussels would likely make non-Europeans even more frustrated, if they were more aware of what’s going on.
Though this creeping bureaucratization has been underway for decades, Joe Biden has stepped up the pace. Early on he scrapped Trump’s controversial one in-two out order as well as a linchpin of efforts to control costs first established by Carter — the requirement that regulators conduct cost-best analysis before issuing new rules. Instead, Biden directed administrators to avoid “harmful deregulation” and search for opportunities to write regulations “that are likely to yield significant benefits,” even if those benefits “are difficult or impossible to quantify.”
Not surprisingly, the costs of red tape are exploding. In the first two years under Biden, new regulations added an annual average of around $160 billion in costs for impacted businesses as well as state and local governments. That compares to $67 billion a year under George W. Bush, $108 billion under Barack Obama and $16 billion under Trump. In short, while the regulatory state has expanded steadily for decades, its costs have grown dramatically under Joe Biden.
Biden is thus thickening a web of regulation that only the richest corporations and individuals have the resources to navigate successfully. The result is slower, more lopsided growth, benefiting mainly oligopolies and billionaires. The rest experience the unspooling of red tape as frustration, not an opportunity for “regulatory arbitrage,” fueling popular disgust with the capitalist system and undermining trust in the governments that run it. The real story of the last four decades is one of constant state expansion, so the sensible fix for capitalism has to start with less government, not more.
Shakespeare’s quote: “The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.”
The problem if that leftist judges and courts establish precedence on bad law, and the courts build on that bad precedence.
No one likes lawyers until they need one. Also lawyers are the last line of defense against government overreach.
Corporate monopoly capitalism is not capitalism. It’s totalitarianism.
“Why America has more lawyers per capita than any other country”
We lost the coin toss?
For people wondering how the Russians can fight us to a draw in Ukraine (some would argue we’re not even doing that well) when we’re told that we have an economy 10 times their size, just keep in mind that LAWYERS contribute to our GNP, along with women and men who major in Vaginal Studies.
That was my case. But when we needed one to handle an estate, I came to hate them much, much more.
Judges have become politicians in black robes.
Oh lord I am sorry. Most of my clients end up liking me, or at least they say so. But I don’t try to rip them off and I am easy to get in touch with.
Big companies decide their fate.
Chevron headquarters leaving California for Texas after 145 years
The move comes after years of fighting Golden State officials over strict environmental policies and costly regulations.
JUST interesting!
“No one likes lawyers until they need one”.
^
Am I seeing “immigration law” as a growth industry?
Maybe because we have more laws, federal, state and local on the books than most countries.
Federal laws alone amount to 30,000 and when federal agency regulations are considered its about 300,000.
Then you have to consider the states, and California alone has nearly 400,000 state regulations.
Eventually, we should fear, private enterprise could die from the weight of laws and regulations businesses alone have to navigate.
What are the easiest fixes at the federal level.
1. A blanket repeal of all federal laws for which a majority of states have a duplicate law. “Crime” and “public safety” should be primarily a state and local matter, not particularly a federal matter. Even so named “Conservative” politicians have gotten on the “tough on crime” bandwagens over the years at th federal law, helping to create many of the duplicate laws best left to the states.
2. Pass a sunset provision against 100% of the rest of federal laws, requiring their retirement unless Congress directly acts to renew them within a required deadline before they’d otherwise be retired.
3, Establish in Cogress Congressional federal regulatory review committees, to annually review and seek to repeal unworthy federal laws.
4. Require all new regulations to have to get direct, legislatively enacted formal comsent, through the normal legislative committee processes, with direct votes by the committees and by the House and the Senate, one regulation at a time, in order for any new regulation to become law. No more blanket approval of new regulations by the back door of Congress failing to formally oppose a regulation before its publication date in the federal register, turning a Congressional null condition into Congressional agreement.
When you have the highest standard of living in the history of mankind, you have reached a point where your citizens can no longer afford to pay the cost of buying what they produce.
You end up with a completely untenable and unsustainable environment where everyone wants to pay Walmart prices while working for $50/hour. The only way to keep this charade going is to have more and more people employed in jobs that don't actually involve producing things that people buy voluntarily. Instead, these people must work in jobs where they "sell" to "customers" who have no interest in buying what they sell: through government, regulation, suing each other, etc.
Narrowing this to torts/product safety law only - I always think that people who rant about our liability laws must be not well traveled. All you have to do is visit other parts of the world and observe how things function to see that some aspects of the law send very good signals to producers, manufacturers, designers, etc., etc., etc. as to what investments to make in safety. So many things in the US, albeit not perfect, are so much better than elsewhere the world, from a safety and efficiency standpoint, as a result.
I was in Jamaica on vacation a few years ago and I could not believe the inferior quality of the roads, the signage, and the pedestrian walkways. One store that I noticed was on the 2nd floor of a two-story concrete building. The staircase to the second floor, perhaps 16-18 feet off the ground, had no railing. When you get done laughing at that, you realize that their legal/insurance system does not send the right signals to the building owner to invest an optimal amount in the safety of that access avenue. Our legal system has many excesses, particularly in the regulatory realm, but it does accomplish things that tremendously benefit the way we live here.
There used to be three lines of work for bright young people to go. Lawyer, Doctor, Scientist.
But sometime in the mid-twenth century teaching hospitals, where young med students would become doctors and people who did medical research quit being opened. For almost 50 years there were no new teaching hospitals opened. If you were not the brightest of the bright or had something else to recommend you the chances of you getting a slot was pretty much nil. So young American med students went overseas for their residency. That was the one of the factors in Granada but I digress.
But that artificial bottleneck was restricting the number of people who became doctors and medical researchers. Why bother spending years being a med student only to find there was no slot for you?
And so the bright young people decided to go into the only field that was still wide open. They became lawyers.
How can America become great again?
Shun the lawyers running for office. Block them in the primaries. Look instead for farmers, businesspeople, retired military, accountants, restauranteurs and hotel managers, etc., etc., and put your support behind them. The people who know what it’s like to work for a living, struggling often, and have paid both their taxes and their dues.
lawyers are in a unique position that allows them to create a need for more lawyers ...
That’s easy! $$$. You can sue somebody if they look at you cross eyed. Next story.
Quote by Tacitus: “The more corrupt the state ...
https://www.goodreads.com › quotes › 34827-the-more...
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. Tacitus:
Not surprisingly, the costs of red tape are exploding. In the first two years under Biden, new regulations added an annual average of around $160 billion in costs for impacted businesses as well as state and local governments. That compares to $67 billion a year under George W. Bush, $108 billion under Barack Obama and $16 billion under Trump. In short, while the regulatory state has expanded steadily for decades, its costs have grown dramatically under Joe Biden.
Biden is thus thickening a web of regulation that only the richest corporations and individuals have the resources to navigate successfully. The result is slower, more lopsided growth, benefiting mainly oligopolies and billionaires. The rest experience the unspooling of red tape as frustration, not an opportunity for “regulatory arbitrage,” fueling popular disgust with the capitalist system and undermining trust in the governments that run it. The real story of the last four decades is one of constant state expansion, so the sensible fix for capitalism has to start with less government, not more.
Surveillance Capitalism: You Are the Commodity!
BY Robert Malone, AUGUST 3, 2024 ECONOMICS, TECHNOLOGY !:
In the Surveillance Capitalism business model, you are enticed and cultivated to obsessively participate in the platform, and then your thoughts, emotions, feelings, and beliefs are harvested from all available sources, including platform-based interactions. The extracted value of these items is then algorithmically processed to yield predictive both individual and collective “futures.”
In contrast, Murray Rothbard considers capitalism to be a “network of free and voluntary exchanges” where producers work, produce, and exchange their products for the products of others (ergo: “Free-market capitalism is a network of free and voluntary exchanges…”). According to Rothbard, true sources of wealth are:
Individual Entrepreneurship: Innovation and risk-taking by individuals drive economic growth and wealth creation.
Voluntary Exchange: Free markets and voluntary trade allow for efficient allocation of resources and wealth creation.
Gold Standard: A monetary system tied to gold or a similar commodity-based standard restricts the money supply and prevents government manipulation.
In “The Anatomy of the State,” Rothbard argues that there are two means of producing wealth:
Economic Means refer to producing and exchanging goods and services through voluntary human effort, creativity, and entrepreneurship. Economic means are additive, generating wealth for all parties involved.
Political Means refers to using force or coercion to seize wealth from others. Political means are reductive, distorting incentives and undermining long-term prosperity. Taxation is a form of theft in which political means are used to seize wealth from others. Reasoning by analogy,
Surveillance Capitalism is a form of theft in which accumulated personal wealth in the form of fundamental, personal, and proprietary aspects of your soul is extracted and commodified without your permission.
Under Surveillance Capitalism, theft by commodification is practiced by machines acting on behalf of a small subset of humanity to involuntarily extract (or seize) value (wealth) from other human beings. Under Rothbard’s logical formulation, this is fundamentally a political rather than an economic transaction.
Once reformulated, repackaged, and marketed, this value generates wealth for the Surveillance Capitalist by removing and thereby diminishing the personal wealth of the individual, who is typically (and intentionally) uninformed of the loss.
In the case of the Facebook and Google versions of Surveillance Capitalism, behavioral and emotional futures are repeatedly auctioned off to third parties who use the information for various economic and political purposes. In most cases, the extracted value is repeatedly resold to multiple buyers. Amazon does the same but is more vertically integrated. Like Facebook and Google, Amazon extracts the information from you and processes it to yield predictive futures. However, rather than selling to third parties, Amazon uses this information internally to support the direct marketing of its products and those of third-party vendors.
Under the Surveillance Capitalism business model, you are not the product, but rather, your thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and knowledge are the natural resources being mined to yield the raw materials that are then used to build predictive “futures” products. This goes far beyond the 20th and even 21st-century analysis concerning the psychological basis for totalitarianism described by Hannah Arendt and Mattias Desmet. The commodification of your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and needs via the Surveillance Capitalism business model is what enables and powers the expanding daily reality of globalized techno totalitarianism.
What is Commodification, and How Does It Differ from Commoditization?
Commodification transforms inalienable, free, or gifted things (objects, services, ideas, nature, personal information, people, or animals) into commodities or objects for sale.
It means losing an inherent quality or social relationship when something is integrated by a capitalist marketplace. Concepts that have been argued as being commodified include broad items such as the body, intimacy, public goods, animals, and holidays.
Intangible, non-produced items (love, water, air, Hawaii) are commodified, whereas produced items (wheat, salt, microchips) are commoditized. Karl Marx extensively criticized the social impact of commodification under the name commodity fetishism and alienation.
In Marxist economic theory, prior to being turned into a commodity, an object has a “specific individual use value.” After becoming a commodity, that same object has a different value: the amount for which it can be exchanged for another commodity. According to Marx, this new value of the commodity is derived from the time taken to produce the good, and other considerations are obsolete, including morality, environmental impact, and aesthetic appeal. In a sense, the value of a commodity reflects both the intrinsic value of an item or service and the value added by extrinsic factors (scarcity, marketing) that increase its perceived value.
Before the term was even created, Marx predicted that everything would eventually be commodified: “the things which until then had been communicated, but never exchanged, given, but never sold, acquired, but never bought – virtue, love, conscience – all at last enter into commerce.”
Where Does This Go from Here?
Once you have understood this, please go ahead and explore it further.
Many adjacencies, corollaries, and derivatives are associated with the fundamentals of Surveillance Capitalism. Take a moment to consider the interface between the Surveillance Capitalism business model and the Censorship-Industrial Complex business. Or Surveillance Capitalism and Politics – with Cambridge Analytica Ltd. being an early embodiment. Or Surveillance Capitalism and the Biodefense-Industrial Complex business. Or Surveillance Capitalism and Transhumanism. Or a thousand others.
All of these economic models and domains recognize no boundaries. All exist in a sort of Wild West, actively rejecting and deflecting all legal and ethical constraints on economic, political, and medical activities. These are treated as unacceptable boundary conditions to advancing “innovation,” market domination, and capital accumulation.
Ethical, moral, religious, and legal constraints must be disregarded or circumvented in the name of progress and profit.
Overriding all of this is what is essentially an emerging suite of marketing technologies consisting of military-grade psychological warfare tactics and strategies;
PsyWar. Surveillance Capitalism provides the economic model, logic, extracted data, and value that fuel and guide modern psychological warfare deployment.
I am deeply troubled by the many observable interactions between modern psychological warfare technologies, tactics, and strategies, the observations and predictions of Hannah Arendt and Mattias Desmet concerning the psychology of totalitarianism, and Surveillance Capitalism.
I fear the further development of feedback loops between these fundamental social, political, and economic forces. I sense that these feedback loops will enable and drive human society toward the dark collectivist and globalist transhuman future with which the World Economic Forum seems so enthralled.
By deploying PsyWar capabilities on top of these other business models, which are being expanded and enhanced by the predictive “futures” products of Surveillance Capitalism, humanity will be driven towards a new surrealist reality in which all feelings, beliefs, morality, and behavior will be a synthesized product in which wealth accumulation will become the exclusive right of a small controlling elite who no longer recognize the existence of their own souls, but rather exist at the interface of man and machine, and seek to birth a new species of man/machine fusion. Turning and turning in a widening gyre, disassociated from the falconer. Intentionally and unthinkingly giving rise to a slouching rough beast.
In the short term, I am also deeply troubled by the challenge posed by all of this to my faith in free market capitalism and my fascination with the logic of the Austrian School of Economics and its modern “Anarcho-capitalist” embodiment. I worry that when capitalist absolutism becomes decoupled from fundamental Judeo-Christian ethics.
Everything becomes commodified all the time, then all remaining human souls become at risk of being crushed into dust under a globalist techno totalitarian millstone.
Republished from the author’s Substack
https://brownstone.org/articles/surveillance-capitalism-you-are-the-commodity/
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.