Also, if you guys are still talking about "the Koch brothers" that pretty much indicates you have no argument at all. At this point there is only one Koch brother and he is 87. At least conservative conspiracy theorists talking about the WEF and Bilderberg group are arguing people that are still alive are secretly running the show. You guys cant even come up with any plausible names, so you have to invoke dead people.

I'm not sure I agree. Of all the criticisms one might level at capitalism, "it results in higher effective pricing to consumers" is one of the weakest imo. I am much more persuaded by arguments that capitalism (at least in its most unregulated form) promotes exploitation and deeply suboptimal wealth inequality.

Except Trump still has nothing but populist anger supporting him. He may have tried to some extent, but he never took control of the govt so he could stay in power even when most of the people turned on him the way someone like Erdogan was able to. Trump's path to power is and always has been nothing but populist support.

Truthfully, the leftist dictator in Brazil is a much more cogent example of what you guys are describing than Trump. He is actually effectively dismantling their Democratic system to bolster his power. But because he is leftist he mostly gets a free pass.

I'm a Marxist. Marx's ideas do not depend on blood flowing or not through his body. The network that the Koch brothers created does not depend on both of them being alive to this day. We can call it anything you like, but again, we have receipts, we have proof, this is co-ordinated and it's been going on in its current form more or less for ~70 years. This is the Chicago School, this is Law & Economics degrees, this is the Federalist Society, this is Public Choice, it's all connected and designed by wealthy industrialists who want to shape public policy to suit them, and it's been happening in front of our eyes. If you choose to stay ignorant of that truth, that's up to you, but the argument 'a guy that started this is now dead' is lolhilariously dumb and you must know that, right?

Again, I don't have to choose between "there is no coordination" and your position.

There is fair bit of coordination, and I believe that some of that coordination is planned and not just an artifact of overlapping personal interest. I just don't think it as extensive as you believe it is.

Sure, there are plenty of valid criticisms of capitalism, this particular critique is simply aiming at the idea that at least capitalism results in good choice and pricing for the consumer. It plainly doesn't, it doesn't in practice and it doesn't in theory either.

Our politics are in better than shape than Brazil's politics isn't much of an argument. One of the main reasons Lula won is because he was running against one of the few world leaders who was a bigger embarrassment than Trump.

Forget beliefs. There are facts. https://bostonreview.net/articles/ma...arlottesville/

The existence of infighting or complete and utter boobery should not distract you from the nature of this particular beast. They have tried and succeeded in stealing the political centre. They did it by, in part, studying the history of figures like Lenin and Goebbels. They did it by getting organised and wising up to the power they can wield, between lobbying and outright bribery and buying up as much of the media landscape that they can and controlling the information and telling people what they want and what's good for them.

LOL. Face it, collectivism sucks and is completely uncompetitive with capitalism. It always has been and always will be. Collectivism can keep trying to reinvent and reiterate itself, and the results will always be the same. Complete failure.

Most of stuff you mentioned above was started by academics--or in the case of the Federalist Society, conservative law students--not wealthy industrialists.

Well, my argument there is no shadowy cabal of industrialists controlling the Republican Party, and the fact Trump has held the entire party hostage for 6+ years against the wishes of anyone you could come up with as a potential member of this cabal, refutes this argument pretty thoroughly IMO.

I have never argued that Trump was the preferred choice of GOP captains of industry. He clearly was not. As a general rule, billionaires don't want the tail risk that comes with erratic and unpredictable candidates like Trump.

With what funding or direction?

My overall point about implicit collusion means it doesn't even need to be directed and specific - though we know it is - but power likes more power and bipolar power structures tend to be more stable and distributed power structures and so power accrues to power by whatever way it can, and it can collude implicitly, very easily, in a number of ways.

Capitalism is entirely founded on collectivism. The markets would not work unless we all agreed together to have them work in specific ways. The greatest asset of capitalism is itself the greatest example of collaboration and collectivism. All our needs are best served by going down market on weekends and selling our excess produce at a reasonable rate to busy people. You meet at the same place and time, you work out differences, you use identical methods of exchange, this is all collaboration. Without collaboration, if you want humans to live the way mountain lions live, we don't have *any of this*.

I'm not going to say that capitalism doesn't work extremely well. It does. Just that its direction and goals, being as they are at the behest of those with the most money and power, who only got to the position of having as much money and power as they because they like more money and power, will continue the process of making more money and power, perhaps in some degree to innovation and hard work but undeniably also due to exploitation, and will exercise their control of the markets in order to do so to whatever extent they can get away with before the people get too testy and threaten taking it back. Capitalism works extremely well at, for example, raising GDP, and then economists go 'hooray' as if it's clear and obvious that total money in a system goes up always equals society better off.

Co-operation trumps competition in a number of ways, borne out by game theory. When you're on your own, you have to spend a greater proportion of your resources on defence, and you can't really think about attack until you feel solid. You have the knowledge of one person. You don't get any specialisation benefits, from say 1 person doing the foraging and hunting and one person doing domestic chores. The hunters can only hunt small game. When you get home, you're tired and can't enjoy yourself.

In a group, where say 10 people have all agreed to stop competing and start co-operating, now you can just put people on defensive rotas so they don't get exhausted and you get round the clock coverage, and maybe you can feel solid enough to expand. You have the collective knowledge of 10 people. Some will be able to specialise and get better at and more efficient at just hunting or just cooking or just foraging or just making weapons and maybe if you've got the manpower spare a lazy creative type to draw pictures of the animals we're hunting on the walls of the cave and sing and tell stories. It is the logic of 'being more than the sum of our parts'. Network effects is the modern term for it. And they're all around us. If you don't see them, you're either choosing not to see them, perhaps because they're the very air we breathe and co-operation is so clearly baked in to our nature.

We can't even resort to nature to justify competition over co-operation. Yes, it's true that nature is brutal, and lots of individuals within lots of different species compete in a number of ways and in a number of niches and the result is evolution. But that's not the entirety of the story. It took us hundreds of thousands, or maybe arguably millions of years both to evolve clubs for fists, bipedalism (which is itself indirectly and directly a precursor to lots of other evolutionary advances, such as decoupling the action of the internal organs against lungs when running, allowing us to control our breath, allowing us to run for longer duration, allowing for us to hunt bigger game down to exhaustion, allowing for more protein rewarded in relation to how much time spent hunting, which afforded us bigger brains, which afforded us....) and ultimately over the last couple of hundred thousand years, the ultimate technology in collaboration - language. It is language and the collaboration that allows that has got us to a place where we're living in every livable corner of the globe and we're responsible for whatever vast % of the biomass in it compared to where we were. Where we were competing, we were competing for the chance to collaborate, something we see all the time in the modern human world.

People like Richard Posner didn't need a lot of funding to write a zillion academic articles about law and economics. But that misses my point. There are billionaires and CEO types like the Koch brothers who are (or in the case of David Koch, were) deeply intertwined in politics. And there are other billionaires who have thrown relatively little money at politics.

If you interviewed America's billionaires and CEOs and asked them about the Chicago school of law and economics or the Federalist Society, I'm not convinced they would be particularly knowledgeable. Many would just have a vague belief that the former was pro-business and the latter promoted conservative judges.

The traveller's dilemma is fairly important in the realm of pricing and economics in general and I think it pays us to look closer. I misspoke earlier and it's a bonus of $2 for the honest player as well as a penalty of $2 for the dishonest. The Nash Equilibrium specifically is $2, resulting in an apparent paradox that naive play beats Nash. But it depends on the frame. It doesn't beat Nash if it's playing directly against Nash, but it does if it's a parallel competition. The paradox points at the underlying assumptions that are analogous to our relationship to money and power. In a one-off game, where I'm competing against you, the complete lowball @ $2 at least draws and sometimes wins, meaning you're never going to have less. You have either 2/4, or 3/4 against 2/4 or 1/4. If the goal of the game is to have a greater slice of this particular pie, then you lowball. But if we're not concerned with competing against each other, and thus we're not concerned about a power imbalance, we'll happily accept that sometimes when we bid $100 we will get undercut and therefore get a slightly lesser slice of the pie, but if the goal of the game is maximising absolute, not maximising relative, then choosing sometimes $100 and sometimes $99 just for the lols clearly dominates Nash which is shown to be wrong unless you're concerned with the power that comes with having more money.

This is the logic of greater buying power. Because we're isolated from the other guy, we don't know that they're going to follow the same strategy and maybe we're shooting ourselves in the foot by highballing. But the key logic here is that they're specified as perfectly rational and self-interested. That specification allows us to ignore our inability to communicate. If we presuppose that there is one correct solution, and we've found it, we can presuppose that our 'opponent' is also following the same correct logic. You could imagine we're each having identical discussions with the avatar of the other guy in our heads.

Which, interestingly, mirrors the paperlessness of the trail between companies who agree to charge as much as they can get away with. It's also clearly why union-busting is popular, and points at the necessity for strong anti-trust. It clearly demonstrates a mindset of 'I'm not concerned with more, I'm concerned with more than my neighbours'. It mirrors arms races too. Solving it correctly requires us to do some subtle frame-shifting.

I think it also points perhaps a little more weakly at the paradox of trickle-down theory. The idea is that it's ok for those with the biggest slice of pie to keep increasing their share, because the pie itself is growing. Again, those with money and power get there because they like getting more money and power and they will continue that process because it's the very air they've always breathed, there's this cosmic scoreboard that's just reflecting their bank balance, and so they do whatever they can to increase their share of the pie as fast as they can to the point where their share is increasing faster than the pie is increasing. And since the pandemic, with productivity up, real term wages down, and the most incredible increase in money going to billionaires ever, it's clear that logic has long overtaken that where the worst off actually do get real terms benefits from the pie increasing in size.

By the way, in the traveller's dilemma, that bottom rung $2 can be set however you like. You could set it at 'unprofitable', 'unprofitable super fast', 'a little unprofitable that you could do for a bit if your goal was to put the other out of business by undercutting them', or you could avoid the whole business by going high to begin with.

Ah, right, I don't know this Richard Posner fella, is the point that he worked a bunch of jobs while he studied, or got rich enough in the world of business that he could devote all his working hours now to academia?

Okay, and most mountain lions have never killed a human, what of that? A billionaire probably has a money manager or 3000 and they direct money to causes they think are in the best interests of the billionaire.

TBH, my existence and that of a billionaire feel further apart (I know they're not, in reality) than my existence and that of a hunter-gatherer, so my general knowledge + watching Billions & Succession provide me the best clues as to what's going on in the mind of a billionaire, so who tf knows.

Richard Posner is a legal academic at the University of Chicago who spent the second half of his career as a judge on the Seventh Circuit. It would be fair to call him the godfather of law and economics. He is probably the first name that comes to mind for most lawyers if you mention law and economics.

Do you know who else went to the university of chicago? Marshall Steinbaum, the economist-historian who wrote the article I linked earlier reviewing the book about the specific, ongoing, co-ordinated attacks on democracy at the hands of wealthy industrialists for the last ~70 years. You don't need to read the book but you should read the review.

I wasn't invoking Posner's tenure at the University of Chicago Law School as some sort of appeal to the authority of the university. I mentioned it because you mentioned the Chicago school and you didn't know who Posner was.

Oh yeah, I know you weren't. I'll add that to my purple-striped filing cabinet of potentially useful facts. Is your neon with go-faster stripes hard drive of potential contradictions to fundamental assumptions about public life read-only, or is it writeable?

You're misrepresenting everything I posted. For one, the Kayne thing I just thought was funny. And it was ONE progressive group out of many GOP operative groups that donated to his campaign. The bigger problem was that the GOP connected think tank groups didn't file and disclose their funding sources. One of them sued as you stated for no payment.

Did you read this one?
https://www.npr.org/2014/02/13/27644...uence-congress

I'm honestly not sure what's confusing about any of this. Billionaires have objectives, that in a democracy, require them to have the people who write the laws, in their corner. They also need to control and shape public opinion as much as possible in favor of their goals. And in a capitalistic system, the goal is for these people to have as much money as possible. To the degree that these people make that the ONLY goal, is to the degree that they need networks of people helping them to achieve this goal.

So maybe just make it clear... do you not think this is happening? This has nothing to do w/ political parties, mind you.

I don't know what to tell you. It isn't personal. People disagree with me all the time on this forum. You probably should avoid politics forums in general if you don't like it when people question your views or assumptions.

I don't think anyone disagrees with the general proposition that the wealthy exert influence on politics. In my experience, uber-wealthy people (especially Republicans) care about exactly the political issues you would expect -- taxes, regulation, anything with potential for global upheaval (nuclear war, pandemics, global economic meltdowns, etc.). With some notable exceptions, they don't care much about the stuff that a lot of people on this forum have argued about over the years (transgender swimmers, M&Ms changing outfits, Hunter's laptop, Trump's tax returns, Obama's long form birth certificate, etc.).

I wasn't being snarky, I was trying to be colourful, I wasn't taking it personally, I was just being stoned and weird, sorry if I came across as that