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mhurron | 2 months ago

Honestly how? What law could be written that would ban PE firms and lookalike businesses that would hold up to scrutiny.

No one with a brain likes what PE does, but really, what do they do that's illegal as opposed to people finally realizing that capitalism is essentially evil?

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acdha|2 months ago

PE depends on favorable tax loopholes and a lot of acquisitions depend on them being able to do things like buying a company with a ton of loans which they then saddle the acquired company with or stripping assets before going bankrupt. All of that depends on arbitrary legal structures and protections which could be rebalanced to favor more productive business models.

underlipton|2 months ago

Right. Either you directly regulate activity, or you adjust incentives. If you suggest one, detractors say you can't do that, you have to do the other thing, and then work as hard as possible to block your efforts to do the very thing they suggested you do. That's because they don't want things to change at all. But that's obviously not an option, so I tend to suggest trying both and seeing what sticks.

master_crab|2 months ago

This isn’t really true. A lot of the laws that exist now are written to encourage private equity.

For example, you could start with fixing the privileged tax status from carry.

jennyholzer2|2 months ago

> capitalism is essentially evil

even though nearly every post on this website makes this point, the commenters here really do not like it when you state this explicitly.

marky1991|2 months ago

This argument seems to be a) intentionally provocative and intending only really to ruffle feathers, not actually put a coherent argument forward

And b) about on par with saying "water is evil" because if you drink too much of it you'll die.

itsanaccount|2 months ago

they do not.

what gets me is trying to make the argument that market economies are not necessarily capitalist economies. it seems plain over time that capitalism works to destroy markets. As an American I'm pretty pro market, but that means at this point I'm an enemy of capitalism.

Which seems wild to what I was taught growing up.

Nasrudith|2 months ago

It doesn't help that the people who say that prove an understanding of capitalism is about as thin as a single layer of varnish and their collective ideas for workable alterations would fit on a single index card after it was already ripped up by hand.

immibis|2 months ago

This is the website of a bunch of rich capitalists who got rich by doing capitalism. Of course you can't call the owners of the website evil on that website.