Posted on 07/28/2024 6:40:44 AM PDT by Twotone
The new VP candidate has made enemies and allies in Silicon Valley, while on a quest to regulate the tech cartel.
Last night, Sen. JD Vance officially accepted the Republican nomination for vice president at the 2024 Republican Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sending optimism to Silicon Valley and the tech community.
A right-wing populist, Vance has been critical of the old right’s market fundamentalism in favor of the new right’s pro-worker economic nationalism — one that calls for antitrust crackdowns on Big Tech. A New York Times article described Vance as “pro-labor, a fan of crypto and the F.T.C.'s Lina Khan, and says Big Tech is too powerful.”
Last February, Vance called for government action against Google, tweeting, “It’s time to break Google up,” since Google is “an explicitly progressive technology company“ and “a threat to democracy.”
“In October and November, as millions of undecided voters consider their choice for president, they will go to Google and ask 'Did Donald Trump say X?' 'Is Biden too old to be president?' The results they see will be explicitly biased towards Democrats,” Vance tweeted. A conservative trustbuster?
Vance has drawn criticism from the libertarian right for bucking the GOP’s free-market orthodoxy and praising Biden-appointed Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan’s aggressive trust-busting revolution against Silicon Valley and private equity. As FTC chair, Khan has battled various big multinational businesses by cracking down on corporations who make bogus “Made in America” claims, going after a private equity firm’s plan to “drive up the price of anesthesia services provided to Texas patients,” and suing Kochava for selling geolocation data and violating Americans’ privacy.
At RemedyFest, an antitrust conference organized by Y Combinator and Bloomberg, Vance told conference attendees that he “look[s] at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration who ... is doing a pretty good job.”
Following Vance’s VP announcement, Reason, a libertarian publication, put out a story attacking Vance’s “love” for Khan’s “anti-free markets” and “anti-innovation, anti-tech, anti-big business, and anti-consumer agenda.”
“A second Trump administration may mirror some of the tactics of Khan and the Biden administration but turn them against policies and companies that left-leaning types support. No matter who wins the election this November, we're looking at four more years of aggressively anti-free market policies coming from the FTC,” Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote.
Some, like libertarian journalist Brad Polumbo, have also likened him to Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), claiming Vance “has more in common with [her] on economic policy than Ronald Reagan” due to his open willingness to go after large corporations, raise their taxes, and “do whatever else is necessary to fight these goons.”
Others, however, are pleased with the GOP’s populist trajectory. Oren Cass, chief economist at American Compass, tweeted, “Exceptional VP pick. @jdvance1's conservative economics and dedication to American workers captures perfectly the Republican Party’s transformation over the past eight years.”
Little Tech vs. Big Tech’s agenda
Vance’s support for aggressive trust-busting and regulations creates an interesting dynamic within the GOP. With the exception of being pro-crypto, Vance holds many ostensibly anti-tech stances, putting him at odds with some of his biggest supporters — tech billionaires and venture capitalists.
It was reported that Elon Musk and tech investor David Sacks helped push Vance over the line for Trump’s VP selection. Furthermore, Vance first got into politics through his exploration into venture capital. He initially worked at Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital after briefly working in corporate law. And a couple of years later, he started his own venture capital firm, Narya Capital, where he raised $93 million from several tech billionaires, including Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen.
After his spell in venture capital, Vance shifted his eyes to holding public office. Vance went on to win an Ohio Senate seat even after a hotly contested GOP primary in large part due to Peter Thiel’s record-breaking $15 million donation. Thiel also helped garner large donations from wealthy individuals, including David Sacks.
Considering the tech sector’s increasing support for Trump and Vance’s ties to tech billionaires and venture capitalists, some are starting to think the 47th administration might go soft on Big Tech and “switch on Lina Khan now.”
Fortunately, Vance is not likely to. After all, Big Tech’s agenda isn’t always in the interest of America’s tech sector because “their interests are often at odds with a positive technological future as they are more interested in regulatory capture and preserving their monopolies. As a result, technology startups need a voice,” venture capitalist Ben Horowitz wrote in a blog post.
Startups, also referred to as “Little Tech,” are at the heart of the American tech sector and could turn the 21st century into the American century. In Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz’s Little Tech Agenda, they highlight Little Tech’s role as "the vanguard of American technology supremacy." They say, “From Edison and Ford to Hughes and Lockheed to SpaceX and Tesla, the path to greatness starts in a garage.”
Vance’s endorsement of Khan’s antitrust revolution serves as a net positive for America’s tech industry since Little Tech faces huge disadvantages by having to “go up against incumbent companies that have overwhelmingly superior brands, market positions, customer bases, and financial strength — incumbents that are out to strangle startup competition in the cradle.”
The Little Tech agenda could be the catalyst that recaptures American supremacy. The Trump/Vance ticket must not back down from Big Tech. Andreessen and Horowitz don’t explicitly endorse Khan’s trust-busting, but without tough antitrust legislation against Big Tech monopolies and pro-innovation regulatory reform, Big Tech will continue to enjoy its “wall of laws and regulations that protect and entrench their positions and that new startups cannot possibly scale.” Breaking up Big Tech, on the other hand, will empower startups and foster an innovative environment.
As Andreessen and Ben Horowitz write, “The glory of a second American Century is within our reach. Let’s grasp it.”
If Donald and JD win this November, JD will make one interesting VP.
The NFL. I don’t like it.
Buy a season ticket after paying for license fees. Too many games to pay for so if you sell a few and use the NFL system they charge up the ass. They got ya by the short hairs.
In other words, just because you have a Yale law degree it doesn’t make you knowledgeable about the Constitution.
Assuming the story is true, Vance is engaging in rabid leftism, and using the Commerce Clause in ways the Founders never intended.
Bottom line, there is no enumerated power in the Constitution granting leftists or alleged conservative bureaucrats the ability to break-up companies. “Anti-Trust” law is the bastard child of a progressive/“living Constitution” approach to the Commerce Clause.
If you don’t like that reality, try the empirical reality: do you REALLY trust the Justice Department to break up firms? They’ll do it in a way to make them stronger.
Here a better idea. Big Tech is imploding on its own. Leave business alone. Do something worthwhile, like lowering taxes and shedding regulation.
Populism doesn’t need to be stupid. It is here. And this guy is starting to come across more and more as bright as a dim bulb. Trump should have picked Elise Stefanik.
Populist = democracy?😯
Let’s see. You go to a doctor who’s office paid millions for an MRI machine. Don’t you think they’ll order MRI’s up the king yang?
Dentists and mechanics tell you what you need done and thereby create more work for themselves on a subject you know nothing about. How about separate testing services with no stake in your treatment? Mechanics less so.
Vance and others clearly hold that many Big Tech entities are not free market constructs at all, but government-favored monopolies which would not exist in their current form without the protection and endorsement of the state.
Interesting
He can start with Google; but some regulation might do the job with less effort in certain cases, i.e., by eliminating political discrimination by banking and other large entities.
How many government contracts do these big tech companies get ? They get plenty of cheap labor that we have to import.
There is some logic to breaking them up for security reasons since if one place fails the entire system falls apart
His known role will be to attend international funerals.
No complaints here. Google/Youtube have been banning people not on the left and Section 230 needs to enforced. They also conspired to keep other companies from having access to their app stores. Free market my arse.
Excellent. Bust up Alphabet (ie Google/Youtube). They are the worst of the worst.
After them Facebook, Amazon and Apple and need to be busted up or severely pruned back also.
Vance is on the money here. These tech oligarchs colluded to silence anyone on the right in the last several elections. It was all part of Hillary’s 2016 campaign to silence free speech. If that demon had won, we’d have ‘hate crime’ laws making it illegal to say something they don’t like. And every tech oligarch was fully supportive of it.
When has there ever been an interesting VP?
DoodleBob, you are always on the wrong side. I remember when they broke up Ma Bell and innovation skyrocketed and prices fell. In 1981 a friend of mine had a girlfriend that lived 30 miles away in another town and the little idiot racked up a$250 dollar bill calling her. That would be like $1000 in today’s money.
Make sure you keep up with your clot shot boosters.
People don’t buy a car based on the quality of the spare tire. Vance is ballast for the ticket.
However…see this story
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4252781/posts
Uh oh. Since he’s worked on regulatory legislation with Warren, Brown, and Durbin - who are enemies of capitalism - then he is a leftist on such matters until proven otherwise.
And this story, while trying to put lipstick on a pig, doesn’t inspire confidence in Vance’s ability to pass Econ 101. Anti-Trust=living Constitution, ie leftism. Again.
If Trump makes it back to the WH this guy should be walled off from that wing of the Administration. The populist anti-“Wall Street” rhetoric coming from a former VC guy with a Yale degree is comical.
Populist….Opportunist is more like it. Blah blah blah. What next, will he join an Occupy encampment to show how down he is with the working man?
Again, Trump could have done better but he also could have done worse. Vance is an ok battery backup. Just keep him away from anything related to economic policy until he reads “Free to Choose” by Milton Friedman.
So, you like Elena Kagan, Sotomayor, and KJB’s living Constitutional theories. Got it. Good to know.
Have a blessed day.
lol…. By bringing in skilled and college aged migrants. Their plan to increase the government big business partnership should wake up every American worker or someone whose sons daughters are making a decent living.
The continual meetings with labor unions and woke corporations aren’t fooling anyone… same tactic as the covid tyranny. “Trust the Experts”
Their plans will make the 90s tech worker replacement look like kindergarten games.
When a corporation becomes too big it becomes a government unto itself. It kills its competition and strives to extract as much wealth from the nation as it can without adding any value. Breaking up monopolies doesn’t steal money from shareholders ,it just forces the newer, smaller entities into competition between one another fostering innovation, value and more freedom of choice. I remember when there were only a few types of phones in a few colors and they were expensive.
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