In the US the rhetoric is "free market". But in political practice this means responding to large corporations who often want laws that make if difficult for others to compete with them. Telecoms want to be able to coalesce into an anti-competitive oligopoly. IP holders want to control their rights for longer and longer. Commodity producers like farmers want state subsidies.
Americans love capitalism because it is the best system known to distribute resources. But we need to separate the idea of being pro-capitalism from the idea of being pro-corporate lobbying. They are not always the same.
Capitalism is great because it divides decision-making authority in resource distribution to many people who can't distort the market on their own.
The disturbing trend I see is more and more decision-making power collecting to relatively few people, whose power is enough to change the market environment rather than reacting to it.
Our democratized political environment is far from perfect, but I'll certainly choose that over Communist despotism, and I fear if we don't do something we'll continue our slide to privatized oligarchy/despotism.
The problem is that American culture has a permanent belief that any form of socialism is guaranteed to come alongside totalitarianism, and an end to liberty. Which isn't necessarily unfair to believe- the two have a history of correlation.
But the result of that fear it's a form of corporate totalitarianism. You're free to choose your fate, but the options were dictated ahead of time by those in power, those with wealth. And all of the options will give them more power, more wealth.
The system exists today, sadly, in a form where those with wealth and power are also able to strongly influence culture, beliefs, society. And once you control those, you can control a democracy.
There's no such thing as a permanent belief. The strong association between socialism and totalitarianism only started in the late 1940s as a reaction to the horrors of the USSR. Before that, socialism had been expanding in America with widespread public support.
I'd say a major turning point was the Bolshevik Revolution, which was instantly demonised in the US, and led to Wilson's "red scare" - which effectively destroyed organised labour. It rose again in the 30's only to be crushed again after WW2
I'm not an American, but I don't despise socialism because I think it will bring totalitarianism. I think it's an unnatural and unfair system. And I think this mismatch with natural order always results in failure and collapse, which has many forms. One of those is totalitarianism.
There is a natural order to this world, and those who try to upend it do not fare well.
The natural order is the law of the jungle. The strong eats/exploits the weak. Would you agree that this is the most natural order? I think the whole point of civilization is that we can do better than that.
Let's define socialism as the collective control and ownership of the means of production and their profits, and capitalism as the private ownership of these things. In this case I'm not sure which is intrinsically more "fair". I care deeply about individual freedom and not having some collective telling me how I should live my life. But at the same time I care a lot about social justice and not having the rich and powerful grind the poor for personal profit.
It seems obvious that a good system would be one that strikes the right balance between these conflicting interests. It certainly isn't whatever is most "natural". Nature serves no purpose.
Also, a force we have to contend with is the development of technology. I think it has the consequence that the "right balance" is shifting more towards intervention from the state: due to increasing automation, the capital is getting an ever greater share of profits. At some point the state has to intervene to enable some redistribution of wealth.
> Let's define socialism as the collective control and ownership of the means of production and their profits
> I care deeply about individual freedom and not having some collective telling me how I should live my life
Indeed, you're critiquing an inherent characteristic of socialism, that you even mentioned in your own definition in the first quote. Good so far.
> capitalism as the private ownership of these things
> I care a lot about social justice and not having the rich and powerful grind the poor for personal profit.
... Wait what? Capitalism doesn't prevent social justice and doesn't mean that the rich and powerful grind the poor for personal profit.
This is a textbook false equivalency.
> At some point the state has to intervene to enable some redistribution of wealth.
Not really, in a true capitalist society the producers would know that they need consumers or else they'll lose their income, it's self-correcting. A state is tangential to that.
The reason the USA might or might not be going into a totalitarian oligarchy is because of the state, not in spite of it.
See for us the difference between socialism vs Capitalism is like the difference between eating unhealthy (but tasty) food vs eating healthy food.
Not everyone who eats unhealthy food dies, nor does not everyone who eats healthy food lives to see 100. But fundamentally looking at other people who have managed to live despite of eating unhealthy food or some combination of these isn't the way to go.
The people who have lived to see 80 despite of eating McDonalds burger everyday, have done that due to a combination of good genetics + some other redeeming qualities. This does not mean that everybody should eat McDonalds or anyone talking about harmful effects of unhealthy food should shut up because clearly there are people enjoying their lives while eating unhealthy food.
Take for instance, an African country trying same socialist policies will not see the same effect as a European country trying them. Same thing goes with Capitalist policies.
Socialism in Russia was very 'Russian', and when they got Capitalism, it's again very 'Russian' in nature. In fact when you go back to Tsar's times, you'd find the same 'Russian' entity about their culture.
You make an important point. Those with the most power in this country are perhaps the decision-makers of media companies (NYTimes, WaPo, CNN, FOX) and online platforms (Google, Facebook, Twitter). Funny that their political leanings are mostly homogeneous.
And, unfortunately, you've just demonstrated a common problem in economic and political discourse: that issues quickly descend into one dimensional, black & white, us vs. them absolutionism.
Not surprisingly this seems to occur most commonly where public education is underfunded or nonexistent: you end up with an undereducated electorate putting undereducated people into positions of leadership who then make underinformed decisions.
Sociological, economic, and political issues are multidimensional and must be treated as such.
TL;DR Education is important. Stop electing dumb people.
However, I would surmise that a better educated society, having learned how to apply rational thought, would reduce the likelihood of that occurring and/or would minimize the damage when it does (and it would.)
Their own benefit is 1) getting re-elected, and 2) being remembered through history as one of the great leaders.
Politics are a horrifically inefficient and error prone way of enriching yourself. To the extent that politicians value money, it's usually about getting elected again, possibly to pursue higher offices where they think they can have more impact.
Our corruption problem is not so much about money for politicians to spend personally, but to spend on further campaigning.
> Capitalism is great because it divides decision-making authority in resource distribution to many people who can't distort the market on their own.
There are plenty of cases where it's rational for participants with the necessary resources to participate in some portion of the market to work together to "distort the market." This is why antitrust law is designed not just to target monopolists, but also cartels.
Communism and socialism are very different systems.
Communism includes centralized government control over markets, and pseudo-religions. It falls apart because sane people come to power and realize just how stupid it is.
Socialism, as practiced in some European countries, has free markets. That's a critical difference lost on people who bring up communism in these kind of discussions.
> Communism includes centralized government control over markets, and pseudo-religions. It falls apart because sane people come to power and realize just how stupid it is.
You mean state-capitalism. Communism is where the people, not the government, own the results of production. An example on a much smaller scale, existing inside a different system, would be workers being given shares in the company that they work.
The funny thing is that your "disturbing trend" has been the status quo for a long time and not far from a more efficient version of the Communist despotism you fear.
Also, your statement that the "democratized political environment is far from perfect" was the understatement of the century.
I used to believe in "free markets" until the financial crisis of 2008 . Then it became clear that the people who shouted "free market" the loudest didn't like it when market forces hit themselves. And they changed the market rules to their benefit. It's a rigged game.
We should replace "free market" with " functioning market". It's pretty clear that a lot of markets are dysfunctional and benefit only a few.
There were no free markets before 2008 and none after, either. So what is your point? Had we real free markets, a one major thing would have happened--all those banks that broke the law and did so many hugely unethical things would all be gone right now and we could recover. Instead, they all got bailed out--with our money (see: gas prices during that time, as well as direct transfers via TARP, low interest rates, etc.).
If we had real free markets, we would have sound money, we would not have a huge federal government with multi-trillion dollar budgets, the change in your pocket would still be worth something, not that anyone even BOTHERS with change anymore. I can go on and on, but the point is we aren't free and THAT is the problem!!!!
None of us have ever experienced anything remotely free market in our entire lives in the macro sense. Hell, people are even afraid to simply haggle on the price of a new car and we're even fearful of cash money nowadays.
I don't understand what this comment is trying to say, but despite that, I'm pretty confident there must be better ways to say whatever it's trying to say.
If we had real free markets, we would have sound money, we would not have a huge federal government with multi-trillion dollar budgets, the change in your pocket would still be worth something, not that anyone even BOTHERS with change anymore. I can go on and on, but the point is we aren't free and THAT is the problem!!!!
Free markets don't experience inflation? A free market-having nuclear global superpower with 300M people wouldn't have huge budgets?
A free market with free money (and not a govt controlled money like today), would experience a natural inflation or deflation. Most likely it would experience a natural deflation (considering it would have gold or silver as the basis of its currency).
"Free market" does not mean "unregulated market". Free markets are those in which there is healthy competition. Regulations that oil the gears of competition are pro-free-market.
But it may be worth switching language to something like your "functioning market" because at this point it will be hard to convince most people that this is what "free market" means.
Or actually mean free market when we talk about "free markets". That is, we should make it very clear that the market rules shouldn't change to benefit specific corporations.
That's all well and fine until one market segment (finance) can grind capital for unrelated industries into the ground by crunching credit. It's a classic ecosystem problem, some of the critters in the pond are going to rise above others in the chain, and that can cause ill effects everywhere if not properly controlled.
Given that one of the defining characteristics of humanity is that we've been cultivating ecosystems for millenia, it's not that much of a stretch to say we're going to cultivate our own invented ecosystems for the betterment of the system. It's actually a stretch to say -- we're just going to throw all these actors into a system of shared responsibility, and they'll just work it out.
In my view there is no free market. It's all man made rules. The only free market I can think of is total anarchy with no state enforcing any rules. The (probably physically) strongest wins.
Yes. I had a similar realization as GP during the financial crisis. I realized how small a minority of people actually want free markets, themselves included.
What about all the market rules that were originally created to protect specific (groups of) corporations from competition?
I'd argue they should change in response to challenges by new entrants, unless actually necessary to deliver some actually valuable benefit to the public.
Stopping corporate-driven regulatory change now just locks in the position of whoever got their regulatory capture done early.
The fact that there were those too big to fail who got bailed out with people's money tells you that this freedom is fake. Free my ass. But you have to sell the dream to dumb masses.
The problem is that people like to skip over the gritty details about what makes a free market work well, and in so doing lose a lot of foresight into how to appropriately respond to some problems. Markets work better when information is freely available and easily understood, and when people act rationally. Humans aren't always all that rational, and information is routinely obfuscated and distorted. What's worse, sometimes we pass laws to make this worse instead of better because it's not well understood by some lawmakers.
I think most people believe in free markets for people who sell things for them, but prefer protection for their own goods and services. It is human nature. I would like to unpack our policy choices from an ideological wrapper like "free markets", which in theory everyone is in favor of and always relative. The label lets people get away with the lazy thinking that if business lobbies for X, it must be good for the economy, and if government wants to regulate Y it must be bad for the economy. Neither statement is always true. What we tend to believe is based on our prejudices rather than thinking about each choice on a case by case basis.
Exactly. Rent-seekers love to appeal to 'free market' capitalism while actually doing the exact opposite—using government power to create competitive moats.
I would love to be able to point to several specific examples of rent-seekers using government power to create competitive moats, but I like almost everyone , am not nearly well enough informed.
How about law schools forcing everyone to do massively expensive degrees to be allowed to take the bar?
Keep in mind, you can support some kind of exam and educational requirement while asserting that the scope and scale of ABA requirements represents regulatory capture.
The median salary for a lawyer in SF is about 200k a year. Try finding a lawyer who will work for cheap. Plenty of people are denied essential legal services because they can't afford a lawyer.
Sure, the regulatory capture of the legal market does extend to areas beyond the standard law school market.
The employment rate in the legal profession as lawyers for law school graduates appears to be about 70% historically for new graduates. Those who went to a top 10-20 school are doing very well and probably those to whom you are referring to in your sample. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/19/business/dealbook/an-expe...
Your general point is well taken, but do you think the fact that there is notable unemployment among law grads demonstrates that the ABA requirement (in most states) that people complete a very expensive three year degree is not an example of regulatory capture? Or that the existence of a non trivial number of law grads proves that the requirement does not affect the availability and price of legal services?
As you can probably tell, I do think the ABA does still function effectively as a cartel. In fact, the seemingly paradoxical co-existence of brutally indebted and underemployed law grads and the lack of available and affordable legal services may in fact be a consequence of cartel-like behavior in the legal industry.
If very smart people were allowed to self-study and take the bar, they might be able to offer lower cost legal services, free of the severe debt that accompanies a 3 year JD at UC Irvine, for example.
Honestly, I'm not even sure the quality of lawyers would go down if we eliminated the requirement. Why? Because really smart people who can learn rapidly may be turned off by a program that forces them to go through 3 years at 50k a year, when there are other fields that allow them to learn at a more rapid pace. If the bar exam remained rigorous, allowing smart people to learn at their own pace might actually draw more talented people in, yet in a way that would allow them to keep prices lower. It might also be possible to require some apprenticeship and coursework, but less onerous and with less debt. Keep in mind, regulatory capture can involve expanding reasonable requirements for licensure into unreasonable and onerous ones. Arguing that regulatory capture exists does not commit you to arguing agains any regulation.
I want to be clear this is just a thesis - I'm intrigued by the possibility, and as you can tell, it think there's a good chance it's true, but no, I'm not totally convinced, and it's hard to test - to really know, it would have to happen at scale, with enough time to ramp up, something that could take a generation or more.
Yeah, there are a lot of edge cases. And of course, it's reasonable to point them out.
But again, do you think that, generally speaking, these edge cases (and notable underemployment among law grads) indicate that the ABA is largely ineffective in restricting supply and increasing costs?
Read up on Lawrence Lessig for an unpopular(sadly) view and many pervasive instances of corporate socialism and legitimized corruption, aka: lobbying. Mega corporates bleeding red until the competition can no longer afford to compete, closes shop and we are left with oligops in most categories. Sometimes it seems like we have nothing but moats all the way down.
> Read up on Lawrence Lessig for an unpopular(sadly) view and many pervasive instances of corporate socialism and legitimized corruption, aka: lobbying.
I read his book about lobbying and campaign finance. I don't recall that it did much to point out specific cases where a person or corporation lobbied for the government to create anticompetitive conditions. It might have been a more persuasive book if it had.
> Mega corporates bleeding red until the competition can no longer afford to compete, closes shop and we are left with oligops in most categories.
This is indeed a thing that happens a lot. But it does not mean the government has been used as a tool to suppress competition.
I don't recall the title ATM, but he laid out a pretty thorough description on how ADM & Monsanto have gamed the system. So when people talk about farmers+subsidies is good to know a large % goes to those two companies. If memory serves was in excess of 80 or 90%. Quick search resukts didn't jump out at me.
Their citizenry doesn't have large swaths living like third world workers / peasants at the mercy of their corporate overlords and sudden illness and such, and that's enough for me.
Companies don't start because of a low tax environment, but because of market demand. If low taxes mattered, Kansas would lead the way in business creation and economic growth
Why the smugness? In particular, Norway's GDP per capita is notably higher than that of the US in both PPP and nominal measures. And both countries outrank the US in terms of the so-called "quality of life" or "where-to-be-born" index.
You want to be born there because they are relatively small groups born on top of huge reserves of oil. Not really applicable or relevant to the economy in the US.
Norway is not freely spending the oil wealth, instead it's going into a sovereign wealth fund with protections on spending. So I really don't think you can dismiss their success with their oil reserves.
Norway's approach seems to be a very smart way to handle the oil wealth and atypical of most outcomes. See the phrase "resource curse," natural resource riches like oil typically hurt the economic growth of the nations that should be benefiting from it.
So that you get innovations like the iPod, Facebook and various gadgets -- while working 60 hours/week to make ends meet and you're still a sudden illness away from debt.
Corporations of a certain size start looking and acting awfully Soviet. An economy dominated by mega-corps is almost indistinguishable from the Soviet economy. Over time due to regulatory capture and revolving doors it becomes a fully socialized planned economy, but one whose socialism only benefits the rich and the connected.
My personal life experiences tell my that, nowadays in the US at least, most people couldn't care less about the idea of "freedom" and on a daily basis happily trade it for faux-security and financial gain.
In fact, most are scared by the idea of it and actively try to limit the meme. This explains why the US has basically become a prison state and has roughly 4% of the world's population and 33% of the incarcerated inmates, with no serious efforts at reform seeing the light of day.
I suppose given our evolutionary biology, these attitudes aren't surprising, and really represents just another form of tribalism where the ingroup works safe "corporate-drone" jobs and the outgroup don't.
That incarceration rate is there to keep the blacks off of streets and away in prisons. It's the modern form of slavery and one in three black males will be put in prison once in their lifetime. Not sure that it has anything to do with evolutionary biology and all with a fear of a black person.
I think its a positive feedback loop. We criminalize blacks, which makes life "harder", which makes crime more attractive, which leads to more crime, which criminalizes blacks...
But there could be a chicken or the egg argument as to which step occurred first in the loop (crime vs criminalization), because blacks didn't make up such a large percentage of prisons until the last few decades.
I think that's lazy thinking. Blacks didn't make up such a large percentage just a few decades ago, so its a recent problem. Fatherless homes, for example, are much more common than before.
Slavery transitioned to Jim Crow which transitioned to Redlining which transitioned to systemic poverty by the 60s-70s. Every thing was nicely set up for the arrival of the Anti Drug Abuse Act of 1986.
Look at what Nixon's Aid (Ehrlichman) said about Nixon's drug policy. (Excerpt NY Daily News):
The “War on Drugs” was actually a political tool to crush leftist protesters and black people, a former Nixon White House adviser admitted in a decades-old interview published Tuesday.
John Ehrlichman, who served as President Richard Nixon’s domestic policy chief, laid bare the sinister use of his boss’ controversial policy in a 1994 interview with journalist Dan Baum that the writer revisited in a
I don't think so. There's a whole waterfall of cause effect starting from there.
When you deprive a group of people equal opportunities over the span of 200 years, you're bound to develop a culture and community which has grown around the notion that one cannot succeed using standard methods.
Arguably the "egg" is the heroin epidemic that was caused by the Vietnam War. Blacks sought out and eventually won the right to fight for our country alongside white Americans, only to find that coincidentally(?) the nation no longer felt the same pride and sense of responsibility it once had for those who served as members of the armed forces.
Regarding fatherless homes, I don't think one can take for granted which way the arrow goes. Is it fatherlessness --> problems or Problems --> fatherlessness? In other words chicken/egg redux.
Aren't a lot of these people in jail for stupid shit like drug position and there are rules such as 3 strikes and out specifically designed for them? Maybe this fiscal freedom Americans love to talk about and the gun carrying freedom could extend to some other parts of life...
As tempting as it is, you can't immediately ascribe the situation to racism per se, which is why I believe tribalism actually much better fits the data plot.
> This explains why the US has basically become a prison state and has roughly 4% of the world's population and 33%
That could also be attributed to strict drug laws. If we decriminalize drugs, that number will fall dramatically. It may not be as philosophical as "people are scared of [freedom]".
> If we decriminalize drugs, that number will fall dramatically.
Not so much. Drug charges are common, but sentences are often short. Releasing everyone in state or federal prison solely or chiefly for drug crimes might manage a 14% drop. That's important, definitely, but we would still be #1 globally in incarceration rate.
And worse, that's everyone in on drug charges, up to and including smugglers and major dealers. Some of those people are fine to release, but remember that drug charges are very easy to get convictions with. So some people doing long sentences for dealing are also known murderers, but got convicted of possession/intent conviction because it's easier to prove in court. If we let them out, they'll probably reoffend violently. If we hadn't pressed drug charges initially, they'd have gone to prison for one of their other offenses. (The difficulty of identifying these people is one reason politicians are more opposed to decriminalizing than other people - they don't want to enable Willie Horton ads.)
None of which makes drug decriminalization bad! Our drug laws are ineffective and immoral. But something like cut50 is totally unattainable via drug law.
I'm sure there is some relationship between drug prohibition and violence, but the big difference in US incarceration rates is from the severity of sentencing for violent crime. There aren't all that many people imprisoned for straight up drug crimes.
How did non-competes suddenly become big news? Has there been some recent change to laws surrounding the non-compete?
I'm seeing articles everywhere about it. Some of them are politically slanted against the current administration, but I can't recall any party doing anything about it for some time.
If I look at California and Texas (blue & red), in one it is legally unenforceable and the other it is practically unenforceable.
None of articles about non competes seem to have any details either. It all seems to be a hypothetical. They seem forced and driven by something else (or are they just copying each other).
When combined with stories about the average american having roughly zero savings and negative net worth, the strategy is very SLAPP in that very few americans can financially afford to respond to a letter from a lawyer or a lawsuit even if a win is guaranteed.
There is also synergy where even a miracle free lawyer none the less requires time off from work. "I need time off on Monday for court, previous employer problem" "Oh OK you're fired take all the time you want".
Finally like many legal agreements they're primarily CYA.
Answering my own question (and yours), I guess I've seen a number attached to it recently, and the press does love numbers. Thirty million is the number being repeated, so maybe it's a case of copying and an unlikeable president to attach it to.
The articles seem to be split into two flavors of "sympathy for the worker" or "let's associate this with Trump".
Pushing the question about 'why is it suddenly popular' can appear to be a veiled attempt undermine a clearly anti-competitive abuse, or be trying to appear contrarian and savvy. But, the sooner this issue reaches a critical mass of attention, the better.
This is a problem that is likely having a detrimental affect on economic growth and innovation, and that could get worse.
Giving the benefit of the doubt as to why this could be more popular:
1. Confirmation bias. You're assuming your observation is correct that it suddenly has blown up relative to past coverage. Maybe you just haven't noticed it. If you search for stories on HN, it's a common topic over the years.
I am more of the view that it has actually increased in popularity over time because of #2.
2. The abuse is becoming more commonplace.
What started getting abused due to hot tech talent markets is now being applied to more job sectors.
If some companies try and successfully abuse noncompetes to reduce turnover or wages, then other companies will follow. It's a tactic destined to snowball until a court case strongly rules against the broad application of NCs, or law is passed prohibiting this abuse.
3. Political issue "consciousness raising" could have some exponential shape. Your inquiry is more of a general interest in political science. There is likely some literature on how this process happens that would provide insight.
- The use of noncompetes in low- and even un-specialized roles has risen a lot. We're hearing about landscapers getting threatened over noncompetes as a way to keep wages low. This is a real change, but over the last ~decade so it doesn't explain the recent spike of articles.
- "Low unemployment, stagnant wages" articles are catching on, and noncompetes are a plausible factor in that.
- A few states have discussed banning noncompetes recently. Chicken and egg, but that would make it timely for news stories. Possibly a few politicians have emphasized this and offered to do interviews?
- Everyone is just borrowing the same story from everyone else.
So -- insurance-based healthcare with barriers of entry for newcomers, revolving doors, overcharging for everything and regulated to hell is now free market?
Noncompete agreements, preventing free competition of labour -- those are free market?
And the answer to these problems is somehow _more_ regulation, and more lock-in arrangements with fixed payments to benefit the usual suspects? Whoa.
Free market _does_ solve many problems. Healthy competition and low barriers of entry is the only way to make things more affordable. However, free market is not a natural state of affairs -- ironically, we need government help to promote it, to create competitive playing field. Unfortunately, this is also not natural, and corruption prevails.
Socialism equals inefficiency. Revolving door crony "capitalism" is indistinguishable from oligarchic socialism. Only competition brings efficiency to complex systems.
Lobbying is fine, when it is open, transparent and competitive (there are always stale laws that need to be corrected). The alternative (lobbying is officially prohibited and everything happens behind closed doors) is worse.
Direct democracy (like we have in Switzerland), where most of laws are initiated by the public and voted in (or rejected) on referendums also helps. But it only works with fast enough iterations, where poorly thought laws can be easily repented. However, representative democracy is worse in any way.
"Lobbying is fine, when it is open, transparent and competitive (there are always stale laws that need to be corrected). The alternative (lobbying is officially prohibited and everything happens behind closed doors) is worse."
It seems that what happens now is the combination of those two. Politicians take money (and campaign donations etc.) more or less in secrecy from private organizations/corporations.
I don't think there's any way for them to represent the people anymore in an unbiased fashion. They just represent the companies where they get their money from.
But is the goverment for the people or for the businesses? In the US for the latter.
Lawrence Lessig suddenly changed his focus from copyright law to corruption after many years. He had an epiphany of sorts - he's been right for decades, but it doesn't matter. Why? Because corporations can openly hand out cash to congress.
So, he focused on corruption, but exactly as you've defined it to be ok. He explicitly said he isn't talking about lobbying behind closed doors. He's talking about the fact that Disney can walk into congress with a pile of cash, completely open about what it wants to do: we're giving you cash so for the first time ever, nothing new will enter the public domain for the next 20 years (or perhaps more, in 20 years, there will be a knock on your door, and we'll be there, with a pile of cash, to make that 40 years instead of 20).[1]
Is it really not corruption if it's in the open? This seems like almost total capitulation to corruption and corporate rule.
[1] probably clear, but I should emphasize, this is what I interpreted Lessig's argument to be. Read his words for his opinion.
"Her employment contract might very well include a clause preventing her from leaving a few months later for a job with a rival pest-control firm, since she could be taking crucial in-house information with her. And that’s perfectly reasonable."
What.. How can that be completely reasonable? It might be reasonable if the company isn't allowed to fire her, but as far as I understand it is quite easy to get fired in the US to..
How easy or not it is to be fired varies by state. Right to Work states are the easiest to be dismissed in (fired or laid off, not all dismissals are firings). More union friendly states (NY, CA, WA), it's harder to be dismissed.
In almost all states, government jobs are hard to be dismissed from after your initial probationary period (typically 1-3 years). Though sometimes getting to an extreme in cities like NYC where it can be so hard to dismiss a teacher, they just box them up in a teacher version of in-school suspension.
> How easy or not it is to be fired varies by state. Right to Work states are the easiest to be dismissed in (fired or laid off, not all dismissals are firings). More union friendly states (NY, CA, WA), it's harder to be dismissed.
All US states have at-will employment, which means that if you don't have a union contract, you can be fired for any reason or no reason.
All of them. "Right to work" is a completely different policy question.
Nobody except for union workers and some executives in the United States has what other First World countries consider a binding employment contract. All employment in the USA is by the mercy of the employer.
"Easily" is relative. If you work in a union friendly state and are in a union, cause usually has to be documented and there is often an appeals process. You may also be required to provide an opportunity for the employee to correct their behavior (which they have to document). If they fail to do that, you can dismiss them, if they succeed, you have to start over again when they start screwing up again in a year or two. Pros and cons. I'd rather have the protections of a union than not, but it also allows people to abuse it.
In a Right to Work state, you can generally be dismissed very quickly for very little cause, with little recourse.
Non-compete agreements are bad, but can be avoided or nullified in court. A lot of companies who have realized this are instead starting to use really nasty and broad copyright assignment agreements in their place.
My current place of employ has you sign a copyright assignment that lasts one year post-termination, and it's not the first place I've seen these in place. I wasn't in a position to turn down the offer at the time, so now I have to figure out a way around it (which probably just consists of "keep my head low and don't be a target").
It bothers me, but with the at-will employment laws, the employers effectively have all the power in the relationship. Working for myself as a contractor has its own set of problems (and doesn't exempt you from problematic copyright assignment clauses). What's an employee to do?
I'm sure it's enforceable in the same way that non-compete agreements are: the bigger lawyer fund wins. It's not unconscionable until you take it to court.
Yeah, but, on the face of it, it seems so restrictive that you could just show up and have your lawyer ask the judge to throw it out, and they would. I suppose the company could drag you through appeals, but how do you work for the year following leaving the company? I guess this is making my head explode too much to think sanely about it. :/
Enforceable non-competes are just part of the whole trend towards keeping things the same. We have "Intellectual Property" laws so that someone owns ideas, we have regulations to keep oligopolies and regional monopolies in place (and favor incumbents) and we have treaties like ACTA, TPP, TIPP which in effect lock down labor, and to and extents criminalise activism. To back it all up, we've got dragnet surveillance. It seems like the US and western Europe as a whole just wants to keep things as they are.
America could do with some more socialism, yes it costs money, but payed holiday, proper maternity leave, pension contribution and such help employees feel like a human being, instead of an exploitable company asset.
You know, I don't think this is necessarily about socialism. It may just be about capitalism, with rules. I personally do believe that some measure of antitrust regulation is necessary to preserve a market economy. Similarly, other measures may be necessary to insure that a competitive marketplace prevails.
Non-competes, for instance, are largely unenforceable in California, and it would be hard to argue that it has hurt the tech economy out here. In fact, the absence of non-competes may be so important that California can make a muck of almost everything else and still beat out other states that enforce non-competes.
Beyond that, I do agree that factors that limit the mobility of the workforce probably do harm the economy. Interestingly, the issues can move from the political left to the political right - mortgages that are underwater, health care, occupational licensing that makes it difficult to move from state to state, visa restrictions that make it difficult to change employers (or, perhaps more importantly, change fields), no-hire collusions like the one between Jobs and Brin, it runs the gamut.
I think that because large corporations and wealthy individuals are often such beneficiaries of capitalism and market economies, people sometimes think of them as being innately "pro-market". The truth is a lot more murky. Wealthy people and corporations will absolutely undermine free markets if it suits their interests, and because they are powerful, they often succeed. Keep in mind, skilled immigration may be something we should expand in the US, but the approach pushed by US tech companies essentially puts their HR departments in charge of who gets to live in the US, and the conditions under which they are allowed to remain. The no-hire collusion between apple, google, and so forth was an unusually brazen and galling abuse of free labor markets.
I'm ok with a fairly activist government where it comes to making sure large corporations can't use their power, especially where it comes to collusion, to undermining labor markets. This is a moral issue to me, but it's an economic one as well - a more free and open labor market will absolutely generate more economic growth.
The thing to me is, it's not a left vs right issue - some of the issues that free workers up appeal tremendously to the left (job protections, health care), others tremendously to the right (at will employment). The problem is that you get strange contradictions (someone who argues that employment should be at-will where it comes to firing people without notice or severance, but that the employee should not be free to change employers to get a higher salary).
> I don't think this is necessarily about socialism. It may just be about capitalism, with rules.
Socialism is when the state controls production and _capital_. Setting rules on labor is, in effect, a control on human capital.
I hate the way socialism and capitalism are pitted as a binary choice. That binary choice is a false dichotomy. In reality, they are only binary if every single action of every single person in an entire economy follows the rules (and assuming those rules are perfectly designed to support the official system).
China's foray into capitalism was a group of farmers who quietly made a contract to distribute earnings from their harvest proportionally by yield (which was illegal at the time) -- this was covered by Planet Money, an NPR show. Even deep in the midst of the most socialist time in China's history, they had a streak of capitalism which was later encouraged by the local government.
I find Socialism quite a broad name and depending on which shade we look at it through, it can mean collectivism, absence of a free market, centralized decision making, bureaucracy, and the potential for an authoritarian administration.
A Welfare State on the other hand covers the things you mentioned, and has fewer negative connotations. I'm saying this here because the state providing a minimum welfare guarantee to its citizens should be an unquestionably accepted idea, but the confusion with socialism often undermines it.
In the US, the terms socialism, welfare, and welfare state have been tarred with a brush for quite some time now... I only feel like the last election has started a fresh re-evaluation of all of them, but socialism in particular.
I would rather a larger portion of the value I create go to social programs than to shareholders. If I am going to be an exploitable asset, I would prefer to be exploited for reasons that do some good in the world.
You are a shareholder. You are a tax paying citizen of a organization nominally called a 'state' or a 'country'. You invest into this organization by your labor. You benefit by the services it provides.
Should you prefer, you may go and invest elsewhere, assuming the other collective would have you. If non of this suits you, you can move to a truly free place, like Somalia, and build your own medical, justice and defense systems, where you can compete with the other warlords that have done the same.
"If you don't like it, leave" has been used as a reply to accusations of rights violations since time immemorial.
Perhaps the black Americans sick of Police brutality should leave for Africa? Jews targeted by anti-semitism could always leave for Israel. I don't know what they stick around and complain for. /s
Leaving that part of your argument aside: the rest is a false dichotomy. You present two examples of rights violating societies - mixed-market socialism, and barbarism (feuding warlords) - while ignoring a solution that respects human rights:
No mention of any of the state laws that make noncompetes unenforceable (e.g. California, Florida) or place massive restrictions on them (Texas, Colorado, etc). Would be interesting to see how Krugman's "one in five" stat would hold up if state law were taken into account.
Non compete clauses are unenforceable (especially if the state has a right to work) and I simply do not sign them. For me, it's a deal breaker. If you have a right to fire me for any reason, I have a right to leave and go work for someone else, including a competitor in a the same industry in which my skill set lies for any reason (especially if that reason is higher pay).
So the article's premise is that ~30 million Americans are tied to their current employer with a legal agreement that prohibits them from seeking employment at another firm that may offer them a better position.
I agree that in principle this is a problem that should be addressed, however in practice in my personal experience it's never actually a problem. I've not been CEO/CTO of any company, but I have been team lead and/or considered a 'senior' member of the engineering team. I also have friends who've held those types of positions. Both myself and the aforementioned friends have never had one problem transitioning to a better deal elsewhere despite having signed these non-compete agreement, even in the same industry.
Do others have different (bad) experiences with non-competes in practice? My assertion is that while these agreements might be sometimes enforced/pursued when talent flees, it seems exceedingly unlikely unless the person fleeing under agreement is at the very top of the ladder (meaning that way less than 30M are actually affected/limited, in practice).
edit: Clarified that I DO AGREE that it's a problem in principal.
He seems to have missed the health care portability act signed during the Clinton administration. That fixed the "health insurance ties you to a single job" problem. As I understand it, even the current crowd isn't trying to mess with that particular protection.
Manipulation, as in intentional leading of someone's behavior.
"The usual poor decision making" is more erratic. Mix up poor education, poor info, weird ideas about causality, etc., and you'll get all sorts of different behavior.
Well planned disinformation, strong persuasive ads, policy that leads to desperation + overly obvious option to get out... These sorts of things would create a lot more focused of a result.
That definition encompasses almost any human interaction. When I politely ask you to pass the salt, I sure hope to lead your behavior. Is this manipulation?
Requiring employers to shop for and provide health insurance is only going to complicate the already complex system and lead to crappier less competitive outcomes.
> American conservatives love to talk about freedom [but here's why they are hypocrites]
> ... if the Freedom Caucus gets its way, [bad thing]
> ... few expect the Trump administration to [good thing]
> the Trump administration is [bad thing]
Even in an article about non-competes Krugman can't help but slather on the bias. It amazes me that people still take this man seriously and that his books are so widely used in economics classrooms. Krugman has long since abandoned any hint of objectivity, and thus his conclusions should be considered with a heaping scoop of skepticism.
It's an opinion piece on the opinion pages of the NYTimes. It's not a paper in a scientific journal. It's not required or expected to be "unbiased" or "objective".
The whole article starts off with bs: First, non-competes are rarely so airtight that a person can't work in their field for another employer. Second, the whole FUD about healthcare is total bs as well--the ACA is screwed up and Americans badly need any replacement that might control costs better. The whole "pre-existing" condition FUD is crap, too, since the new healthcare bill doesn't do away with that "protection". I should add that I don't think it is fair that un-insurable people push their problems onto the rest of us because all that does is bring everyone down! It's nice to think we can look out for our nation's most vulnerable people, but what if we can't do that and maintain viable economic growth? What then?
I didn't even read the rest--the NY Times needs to go out of business if they can't do honest journalism without injecting their anti-Trump agenda into Every. Single. Article.
Assuming you sign a non-compete, whether or not you can work the field for another employer may require you to consult a lawyer which costs you $$$. Your previous employer may try to bully you, or your future employer into terminating your arrangement. While it's true several state have largely neutered non-competes for "Low-wage employees", higher paid professionals still have less freedom.
The ACA is missing a public option and is suffering from insurance markets being actively sabotaged by politicians who want to replace it with their own flavor.
The AHCA only protects you for your pre-existing conditions if you maintain continuous coverage (No gap greater than 63 days in the prior year), something that millions of people experience every year. This also means, during any significant recession, millions will lose insurance.
The ACA is great. Sure as a self employed person i can't afford the maszive premiums, ($22,000 a year for a $5,000 deductible) but I simply don't pay premiums. If I, or anyone in my family, gets seriously ill one year, we can sign up for ACA coverage at year end and they can't refuse us because it doesn't restrict pre-existing conditions.
And until that happens, I let the suckers pay premiums.
I believe you mean the ACA. With the AHCA your plan won't work out so well.
But here's the flaw in your premise, sure your new condition will be covered. But I had gall stones, needed surgery, it couldn't wait long. I had two weeks to get insurance using your strategy, feasible.
Then I had a toe torn off. Surgery that night. There's no opportunity to get insurance, and the cost was (without insurance) probably $10-15k (the hospital, the surgeon, the ambulance). Unless you're calling and getting insurance on the ride in, you're on the hook for a large portion of that, unless you don't value your credit score or lie to them about your name and social.
I actually have whats called "short term insurance". It's only allowed for 6 months, but because of that and because it can set pricing based on pre-existing conditions I get roughly the same benefits of the $1800 ACA package for only $200 a month.
The negative is I have to reapply every 6 months, so there if I get gallstones or my toe torn off, it's fine unless it falls right on the end of the 6 months.
Since all of these policies have $5K deductibles per person, and $10k per family, I"m paying for most of those situations out of pocket anyways. The benefit of the insurance is for really serous expensive problems, which will tend to last until I can get ACA. And that the insurance company will knock down the hospital bill to what they deem acceptable, saving me lots of money there.
> If I, or anyone in my family, gets seriously ill one year, we can sign up for AHCA coverage at year end and they can't refuse us because it doesn't restrict pre-existing conditions.
The continuous care incentive mandates a 30% premiun surcharge if you didn't have continuous coverage, and the AHCA also allows states to obtain waivers, for insurance within their state, of the rule prohibiting medical underwriting (price discrimination based on pre-existing condition.)
Fine, I''ll pay a premium surcharge then. Because I'm only going back on Obamacare if I have a life threatening illness that will cost far more than $2000 per month to treat for an extended period.
The AHCA is the proposed replacement for the ACA that has passed out of the House of Representatives (I would guess it won't survive unchanged in the Senate).
There haven't been any plans priced under it as law, so you can't be quoting a meaningful price there.
The likely scenario in the AHCA would be that an uninsured with a preexisting condition would apply for a high risk pool (with who knows what premium) or enjoy the only market plans available, plans regulated in a state convenient for the insurer.
The problem with AHCA is that there aren't enough suckers. Almost everyone would do what you plan on doing, so one person's insurance premiums would have to be enough to almost completely cover a very sick person's medical bills, so insurance effectively wouldn't exist anymore.
That's all great in theory, but if I were you, I would not rely on that plan to save you. When it comes to insurance companies, you are at their mercy. This is experience talking here, do with it as you will. Nothing will bankrupt you faster than not having insurance coverage when you most need it.
> I should add that I don't think it is fair that un-insurable people push their problems onto the rest of us because all that does is bring everyone down!
May you and your extended family continue to enjoy the perfect health with which you have all been blessed.
> It's nice to think we can look out for our nation's most vulnerable people, but what if we can't do that and maintain viable economic growth? What then?
When you talk about un-insured people pushing their problems onto the rest of us, well that would happen without the laws anyway. Those problems generally reverberate throughout a society, so why not just treat them with laws? Also, non-competes may not be airtight, but how many people do you expect to even attempt to legally challenge the non-compete clauses enforced by these multi-billion dollar corporations?
> First, non-competes are rarely so airtight that a person can't work in their field for another employer.
I assume you've based this conclusion on your extensive experience reading noncompetes from many different verticals in many different markets, and not just what the average tech worker sees.
> The whole "pre-existing" condition FUD is crap, too, since the new healthcare bill doesn't do away with that "protection".
No, it simply makes it impossible to take advantage of any protections by allowing insurance companies to charge any price they deem fit to the most vulnerable patients.
> Americans badly need any replacement that might control costs better.
I don't disagree with you here, but neither does the AHCA. And its glaringly obvious to anyone that knows healthcare policy well that the ACA has plenty of room to be adjusted to correct inadequacies. The "Repeal and Replace" mantra on the far right is just political gamesmanship. If Republicans really cared about free markets, they would have brought to the table measures that helped create an educated market, like pricing transparency and enforcing laws against anticompetitive behavior.
> I should add that I don't think it is fair that un-insurable people push their problems onto the rest of us because all that does is bring everyone down! It's nice to think we can look out for our nation's most vulnerable people, but what if we can't do that and maintain viable economic growth? What then?
Man, I gotta hand it to you, this is some Grade A supertrolling here. In the span of just a few sentences you've managed to combine fear, a begrudged sympathy, and a false dichotomy into what passes for an argument, flimsy though it is.
Maybe read up on the idea of the veil of ignorance[1] for that first point. Had you put it a different way I might agree with you in principle—we should stop talking about healthcare as insurance and start talking about how to provision healthcare for everyone. Its not insurance when everyone is guaranteed to need it at some point in their lives. There's nothing in doing so that demands we limit economic growth—the US is for all intents and purposes the only developed country in the world that fails achieve this.
Yes, it's not like the ACA isn't stunningly badly designed. I used to insure my family for $400 a month until it banned the use of pre-existing conditions for determining rates, and now the cheapest available insurance is $1800 a month, which my family can't afford.
Remember when Obama said we could keep our existing plans?
I see the "I don't disagree" bit a lot on here. You mean you agree, then, correct? Then why not just say "I agree!" Is that so hard for you?
I'm not "super trolling" I really want an answer as to why my insurance doubled in the past few years while all I got was a bunch of bs shoved up my ass, which is all I ever get!
"the US is for all intents and purposes the only developed country in the world that fails achieve this"
I disagree with that statement--I don't think you get how bad healthcare is even in Europe. Yes, you can get "free" treatment there, but your taxes run 60%, unemployment is ridiculously high, and the outcomes are no better! Where is the magical answer that socialized medicine provides?
Here's an idea--let's outlaw insurance completely. I look at my monthly budget and between car insurance, homeowner's insurance, health insurance, and two life insurance policies, I'm seeing a pretty good bit of my take home going up in smoke here. It's bullshit--my biggest takeaway in all of this is that insurance is simply bullshit.
100% of your takehome, the takehome of your children and the takehome of their children is going up in smoke in perpetuity if you ever get sick without insurance.
"Well then just dont get sick" is a bit of a stupid way of life. Getting sick is rarely optional.
Blue collar workers get injured. Thats just the nature of their jobs. If you work in a coal mine, your lung is fucked up, at some point. If you work in construction, it fucks up your back.
Wishing for medical care to be outlawed is not just a bit retarded.
Even if you're one of those wholly arrogant retards who think that people who "didnt manage to not be blue collar" - someone has to do it. Its conceptually impossible for the entire population to make it big. Even if every indivdual had the "chance" to be a millionaire, not all of them can be.
Insurance is just about the most basic necessity you can think of, to maintain society.
Or you can just solve it with outlawing insurance, forcing everyone who ran a streak of bad luck into crippling debt and then imprisoning them. Thats what they did in the middle ages. We progressed past that for the better.
Yes, you can get "free" treatment there, but your taxes run 60%, unemployment is ridiculously high, and the outcomes are no better! Where is the magical answer that socialized medicine provides?
I'm American, and I live in northern Europe. I no longer fear getting hurt and going broke nor the ills of old age. Know why? Taxes pay for health care.
Know where that magical answer is? In the diabetic kids. The elderly not choosing between medicine and food. In anyone that gets in an honest accident. Those that develop mental illness or MS.
And I'm not sure where you get this information about outcomes. Every system has its flaws, but at least this one isn't stealing hope from folks and at least tries to take care of their ills.
> I see the "I don't disagree" bit a lot on here. You mean you agree, then, correct? Then why not just say "I agree!" Is that so hard for you?
Ok then, I disagree: a replacement is not needed. What is needed is to amend the original law to address shortcomings.
> I really want an answer as to why my insurance doubled in the past few years while all I got was a bunch of bs shoved up my ass, which is all I ever get!
I won't speak to your particular case because there are too many variables at play between individual markets. One problem is that you don't know what would have happened had the market, such as it was, been left alone in 2008. I know I'd have been screwed several times over in that case—my provider tried to rescind coverage on my 2yo son just after the child provisions took effect, and the ACA prevented that.
Additionally, (and I'm assuming you lean right given your argument) its disingenuous for the GOP and GOP voters to pretend that the ACA is problematic on its merits, when they have been doing everything in their power to ensure it fails for the last 9 years. States that refused the medicaid expansion have only themselves to blame for the substantial number of problems in those states. You can't yell "because FREEDOM" and cut your nose off to spite your face, then complain because you got a nosebleed.
Can you name a country you would like the US to be more like that doesn't have socialized medicine?
It seems to work for the whole, entirety of the rest of the developed (and most of the developing) world, because the truth is socialized medicine is cheaper and more efficient.
Further, even if it wasn't cheaper, the value gained from a more efficient allocation of labor (due to the reduced friction from healthcare concerns) more than repays the costs of the healthcare.
I'm getting sick of people advocating inefficient capitalism as a good economic policy -- and that's all you're doing with your weird, social darwinist approach.
I'm not cool with it no matter how many countries do it and the reason why is that it takes your very freedom right out of your own hands and puts it into the hands of bureaucrats. The US isn't perfect, and we have allowed oligarchs to run free and do terrible things to us, but the answer is not "more government"--we can't deal with the huge government we have now! So the argument "well, everyone else is doing it" overlooks how bad healthcare is around the world and how nations whitewash their mortality rates to hide the truth.
You phrased it as an economic argument. I'm glad you're being honest that it's not one.
However, it's not taking your freedom away -- it's trading one kind of freedom for another: the freedom to not pay for collective welfare for the freedom from your (or your dependent's) health being used coercively during labor negotiations or to extract rents.
On balance, I think that the freedom to have less social responsibility is less useful than the freedom to be healthy regardless of employment status or job transitions, particularly since it saves me money.
I have more money to spend (because of less rent extraction from healthcare) and am freer to pursue my economic goals (because I am less dependent on an employer for my health).
To me, it simply sounds like I'm freer by having socialized medicine.
When you can no longer do (ii), you start to do (i).
But since no one wants either, the pressure usually ends up on doctors. If there is an exodus from the public sector, instead of a slow downgrade, then it will collapse.
edit: the original point is that the US should have a system like the UK - but is the NHS even sustainable?
The NHS is more sustainable than the current US system by virtually any conceivable measure. In fact, the one thing that every political party in the US agrees on is that the system cannot continue in its present form.
The problem of rising healthcare costs is a real one, not an artefact of a particular system, and there is no easy fix for it.
Imagine their agenda is to post the perfectly ideal set of articles. Success of that agenda would be the perfect outcome for their readers and your statement would still be true.
Americans love capitalism because it is the best system known to distribute resources. But we need to separate the idea of being pro-capitalism from the idea of being pro-corporate lobbying. They are not always the same.