My favorite bit from Yglesias is when he brings up the negotiations around the US Constitution and compares this to the behavior of present-day political leaders, as if invoking the nationalist mythology of the Oh So Wise And Infallible Founding Fathers will bury his readers' worries under a heap of patriotism. It seems uncontroversial to assume that the single most haggled-over issue at the Constitutional convention would have been slavery, which is the issue around which we see a number of seemingly arbitrary planks including the notorious "three-fifths compromise" (which had nothing to do with individual slaves being worth three-fifths of a person but with Southern states receiving Congressional representation in proportion to their populations of slaves, each of whom were still legally treated as zero-fifths of a person... imagine I hid a bunch of murdered bodies in my car and tried to claim each of them as three-fifths of a living person when I want to drive in the carpool lane) along with the plank allowing the federal government to prohibit the international slave trade but only after 1808. It also seems uncontroversial to characterize the overall output of this Constitutional haggling over slavery as a massive case of kicking the can down the road, one that helped lead directly to the Civil War.
And in any case, apart from the role played in our jingoistic American creation myth by idea of the Constitution as some kind of miraculous super-document, the actual text of the Constitution is generally quite uninspiring and unremarkable, and if any part of the Constitution get treated as inspirational for what it actually says, it's generally one of post-facto amendments that were passed through public legislative sessions. So basically none of this should have the "...yes, Virginia, that's why government secrecy is good for you!" effect Yglesias seems to think it should.
Of course it is. If tomorrow at noon the government was abolished, and at 12:01 Hulk Hogan went up to Gawker and said "so about that $130 million..." Gawker would laugh at him. The problem is that a great enough socioeconomic disparity between two litigants allows the wealthier and more powerful litigant to assume effective control over the legal system, pushing verdicts that serve their interests and stalling those that don't, and any outcome is enforced by the government's monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. One could just as well blame the existence of a de facto police state in Ferguson, MO on citizens' not assuming responsibility for paying their parking tickets.
You're getting straight to the heart of what's both infuriating and hilarious about the predominant liberal capitalist approach to stories like this one. If for-profit companies can make more money by monopolizing the market and buying politicians and so on, what sacred principle of capitalism is supposed to grab them and tell them "no, you can't do that"? The supposedly real or true capitalism that people fetishize in contrast to "crony capitalism" is basically just capitalism at an earlier stage in its development, a stage that if left to its own devices will logically progress toward monopolistic "crony capitalism". And for the past 40-odd years in Western societies, the political trend has been toward revoking government's ability to put a check on this progression. So condemn broadband/cable CEOs if you must, but don't pretend they're doing anything the logic of capitalism isn't telling them to do.
This is silly. Of course the studios have an interest in preventing people from downloading their movies instead of buying tickets; the question is simply, do we consider this interest legitimate? Forcing them to adopt a "freemium"-type business model, where movies themselves are freely available but customers are charged for "upgrades" like an IMAX-quality viewing experience, would be wonderful for people who don't care about picture quality, but the companies themselves if given a choice would rather extract money from those people than not extract said money. Why is that so hard to understand?
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Constitutional Convention of 1787
My favorite bit from Yglesias is when he brings up the negotiations around the US Constitution and compares this to the behavior of present-day political leaders, as if invoking the nationalist mythology of the Oh So Wise And Infallible Founding Fathers will bury his readers' worries under a heap of patriotism. It seems uncontroversial to assume that the single most haggled-over issue at the Constitutional convention would have been slavery, which is the issue around which we see a number of seemingly arbitrary planks including the notorious "three-fifths compromise" (which had nothing to do with individual slaves being worth three-fifths of a person but with Southern states receiving Congressional representation in proportion to their populations of slaves, each of whom were still legally treated as zero-fifths of a person... imagine I hid a bunch of murdered bodies in my car and tried to claim each of them as three-fifths of a living person when I want to drive in the carpool lane) along with the plank allowing the federal government to prohibit the international slave trade but only after 1808. It also seems uncontroversial to characterize the overall output of this Constitutional haggling over slavery as a massive case of kicking the can down the road, one that helped lead directly to the Civil War.
And in any case, apart from the role played in our jingoistic American creation myth by idea of the Constitution as some kind of miraculous super-document, the actual text of the Constitution is generally quite uninspiring and unremarkable, and if any part of the Constitution get treated as inspirational for what it actually says, it's generally one of post-facto amendments that were passed through public legislative sessions. So basically none of this should have the "...yes, Virginia, that's why government secrecy is good for you!" effect Yglesias seems to think it should.
Re: Re: Sigh
Of course it is. If tomorrow at noon the government was abolished, and at 12:01 Hulk Hogan went up to Gawker and said "so about that $130 million..." Gawker would laugh at him. The problem is that a great enough socioeconomic disparity between two litigants allows the wealthier and more powerful litigant to assume effective control over the legal system, pushing verdicts that serve their interests and stalling those that don't, and any outcome is enforced by the government's monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. One could just as well blame the existence of a de facto police state in Ferguson, MO on citizens' not assuming responsibility for paying their parking tickets.
Re: Re: Re:
So-called "crony capitalism" is still capitalism.
You're getting straight to the heart of what's both infuriating and hilarious about the predominant liberal capitalist approach to stories like this one. If for-profit companies can make more money by monopolizing the market and buying politicians and so on, what sacred principle of capitalism is supposed to grab them and tell them "no, you can't do that"? The supposedly real or true capitalism that people fetishize in contrast to "crony capitalism" is basically just capitalism at an earlier stage in its development, a stage that if left to its own devices will logically progress toward monopolistic "crony capitalism". And for the past 40-odd years in Western societies, the political trend has been toward revoking government's ability to put a check on this progression. So condemn broadband/cable CEOs if you must, but don't pretend they're doing anything the logic of capitalism isn't telling them to do.
This is silly. Of course the studios have an interest in preventing people from downloading their movies instead of buying tickets; the question is simply, do we consider this interest legitimate? Forcing them to adopt a "freemium"-type business model, where movies themselves are freely available but customers are charged for "upgrades" like an IMAX-quality viewing experience, would be wonderful for people who don't care about picture quality, but the companies themselves if given a choice would rather extract money from those people than not extract said money. Why is that so hard to understand?