[dabedee]

I think you're hitting the real divide here. Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. Also notable [0]: "[...] in any given year, we see up to 3,000 merger filings that get reported to us. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the most part, are going through. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the most part, are going through." The FTC wasn't blocking everything, just the deals that would entrench monopolies.

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2024/06/15/ftc-chair-lina-khan-on-sta...

[AnthonyMouse]

> Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face.

We have a problem where regulators are bad at their jobs most of the time, and then people develop the heuristic that all regulation is bad.

You need some rules to price major externalities. Not minor externalities, because regulatory overhead and enforcement are themselves externalities and it doesn't do any good to burn $1 in overhead to prevent $0.90 in some other cost. But you want a ban on leaded gasoline.

And you need antitrust rules, because "the market is more efficient" is fundamentally predicated on competitive markets. Real competition is the sine qua non of that actually working. Most government inefficiency is because the government is a monopoly, and private monopolies are just as bad.

The problem is politics breaks everyone's brains. One party says "regulation good" and the other side says "regulation bad" before either of them considers what the regulation actually does. And then you have one party promoting illiterate nonsense like price controls or justifying busybodies who want to micromanage things they don't even understand or trusting the government with mass surveillance data just because they're not a private company, and on the other side you have people with no objections to tying arrangements or companies with double-digit market share buying even more of their competitors.

"Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler." That last bit turns out to be kind of important.

[kaibee]

> We have a problem where regulators are bad at their jobs most of the time, and then people develop the heuristic that all regulation is bad.

No, we have a problem where 95% of regulations work so well that no one even remembers that they exist (child labor, etc). A media environment that reports on outliers for clicks and corporations that want to dump industrial waste in rivers.

[benreesman]

Your whole comment is good but I want to signal boost the most important point you made.

Private cartels are just bad governments with even less accountability or incentive to be efficient. Take the worst DMV office in the world and put it in charge of something way more important than license plates.

[benreesman]

Yeah I think you're right. It's a sad commentary on the times when a group of people so far above average in caring about outcomes and data just go completely lizard brain in a way that comes out of their own paychecks.

[akudha]

Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention

These are people who are ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention? How can such an extreme position even begin to make sense? This is like letting boxers (or MMA fighters) fight in the ring without a referee, isn't it? As it is, there are lax rules that are getting even more relaxed by the day and even those lax rules aren't enforced consistently, for big businesses and those with money.

[bobthepanda]

> big businesses and those with money

There are obviously the people in this cohort and there are also the people who think they will be in this cohort, who think they will be the victors in a cartel-like world.

Heck, before layoffs and the threat of AI started concentrating even more power into tech leadership there were plenty of tech folks along for the ride as the high paid, in demand workforce benefiting from the above.

[scarface_74]

So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.

[AnthonyMouse]

> So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.

If this was a viable strategy then they would have just done it regardless, right?

Meanwhile the solution to that is to break up the monopolies to begin with. You don't have trillion dollar companies monopolizing the labor pool if you don't have trillion dollar companies.

[triceratops]

If it keeps up, it's only a matter of time before startups stop being able to hire top talent.

[jbothma]

Any evidence of that?

[assword]

> So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self

I thought they were dumping everyone at the moment. Unless you’re an AI researcher.

[benreesman]

A very self-regulating little arbitrage, because the investors and the monopolies are in the process of merging themselves. This is the part most people seem unwilling to accept: these rich guys are dumb man. When you organize your whole society around rich kids having advantages it only takes a couple of decades before they're all just bad at their jobs.

This mafia capitalism isn't even good for the capitalists! They just can't get it together on a sustainable system!