If you can use mountainous capital to sell at a loss in order to distort the market, yes, that's not a "Free Market", as in, the vaguely understood competitive marketplace armchair economists idealize.
True freedom in the market means the freedom to capitulate your wealth to snake oil salesman and schemers who operate on generational timeframes until economic power consolidates and renders your society into de-facto tyranny. Before any sort of regulations existed, we were all trading shiny rocks with ultimate freedom, and that somehow has produced a bunch of economic situations in the modern day that a ton of people don't like.
What's more interesting to me is freedom from the need to have investigative journalists doing deep dives into potentially fraudulent, thieving, or scheming companies behind every purchase, and to know that what I'm granting market success to is exactly what my money or time is going towards - I'm not buying something at a loss that funds some other deliberately obfuscated project that's made opaque from my perspective of the market transaction.
The proverbial "market wisdom" doesn't emerge out of markets with extreme information asymmetry.
>> I wouldn't call it brilliant. It's like cancer cells celebrating how fast they're growing.
> Isn’t that the entire point of a capitalist economy?
> What is the alternative?
If the point is to be cancer, then the alternative is to kill it.
Things are getting so out of hand, this former-libertarian is getting to the point were he'd support any market regulation that makes libertarians cry.
And even fewer would vote for him today vs Nov 2024. He's at ~39% approval at this point. So, I disagree with the comment above which said that most americans voted for / support this.
This is true in the absolute, not just in this special case but in almost all national level elections of any democratic country. I am going out on a limb here, but I think this is mostly true.
"Most Americans voted", really has now come to mean most of the voting citizens voted for him. Now I wonder if that qualified statement is true or not.
Just paying the fine without arguing on time gets you a 50% discount in state voting. And it's a token fine - $20 or so from memory for federal ballots. Besides you don't have to vote. The requirement is you turn up, or give them a piece of paper if you post it. This is deemed so important when we designed our own voting machines (which were never deployed), they had an explicit "I decline to vote" option.
The paper can be blank, but people are often more imaginative. I can't find the reference to it now, but one paper had penises of different lengths drawn beside each option. The Australian Electoral Commission is required by law to "save" votes, which means that even if it wasn't marked strictly according to the rules if a reasonable person could infer the intention, it counted. This particular vote worked its way through the courts, where it was eventually struck down. Reason: it was impossible to know if a longer penis meant it was more or less favourable to the candidate.
About 8% of ballots can't be saved. Of those around about 2% are deliberately spoilt - the rest are mistakes. If Vanessa Teague's voting machines (with the decline button) had been deployed, the remaining 6% would have gone away.
Trump 2024 won 49.8% of the vote versus Harris' 48.3%, out of the 65.3% of eligible voters who voted (about 154 million of 174 million people.)
Trump's exact vote tally was 77,284,118. That many people voted for him, versus 74,999,166 for Harris (with Trump's margin of victory being 2,284,952 votes.)
There are approximately 300 million Americans. So even though Trump "won the popular vote" it it still correct that most Americans didn't vote for Trump. Not even more than half of voters voted for Trump. Trump having "won the popular vote" does not in any way mean that a majority of Americans or even voters supported him, that just isn't the way the system works.
Wonder how the founders/board/investors of the bad incentives factory would manage their site after a massive crowdfunding campaign bet that they'd all still be alive in 2027.
When ambitious competitors who can't accept loss or normalcy enter into a field that's saturated with skilled rule-abiding players, they'll cheat.
Hypercompetitive fields will always surface cheaters given enough time. Then regulations pile on to fight the cheating, which makes it harder for honest people to do the good work.
We do not punish cheaters like these as much as we should.
Access to corruption is never widely understood and accessible to every person, otherwise it would be written into law and stated plainly for everyone to see. Corruption is a form of economic eugenics that breeds fraudsters and cheaters who can buy into the in-group via know-how, money or aesthetics while slowing the growth of a law abiding populace that competes honestly on merit but doesn't fit the unwritten rules of admission. Any participation in that system is a spiraling force that makes the world worse, and it's always a choice.
In the US we're being led by a career fraudster who was a Wharton grad only because he had a family friend who was an admissions officer, and according to his sister, he paid someone to take his SATs for him. We have not been serious about the massive consequences of white collar fraud and corruption and we are now beginning to understand the butterfly effects.
> Access to corruption is never widely understood and accessible to every person, otherwise it would be written into law and stated plainly for everyone to see.
This is an uninformed non-sequitur. In China or Mexico for example, it's well known that to get certain things done you have to bribe local officials. The central government is against corruption by policy, but nevertheless corruption is endemic. It's only "inaccessible" to some because some people are poor and can't afford the bribes.
Yes, exactly. I went on holiday to Cairo a few years ago. Small bribes (bashish) is 100% normal there.
My tour guide was this bright 22 year old who dreamed of going to the UK to be an uber driver, so he could make enough money to get married. I told him if he went to the UK, he needed to know to never bribe officials, ever. He made the most adorably confused face - like his brain was blue screening. He had no conception of how a society could function without bribes. “But … how does anything get done?”
Greece is kind of the worst-of-both-worlds for this. Nothing works properly, but you also can't pay someone to make it work. In a country with good honest corruption you pay someone else to wait in line for you at the post office while the folks behind the counter smoke, chat to each other, and ignore you. In Greece you can't do that, you have to wait while they smoke, chat to each other, and ignore you. The friend of mine I was visiting also did the brain blue-screen when I asked who you paid to wait in line for you.
On the upside, a country that undergoes the transition from highly corrupt to well functioning inevitably goes through the stage you describe. My native country was going through that as I was growing up, starting with the Soviet "corruption is just how everything works" to being a fairly well functioning European society now.
Somewhere in between, there was definitely what you described. I've heard people with the remarkable complaint "there isn't even anyone to bribe". Of course if a society gets stuck too long at this stage, it turns into a different problem altogether.
I can't speak to China, but having spent most of the past decade in India and Sri Lanka I can say the problem there is that nobody is willing to unilaterally disarm. Everybody agrees that bakshish is deadweight loss and inefficient, but if Person A stops doing it and Person B doesn't, Person B gets more of whatever the finite resource in question is (slots in a school, permits, gasoline, whatever).
Xi Jinping has disciplined millions of officials as part of his anti-corruption campaign. That cannot be some corrupt way to silence dissidents while being popular with an allegedly corruption-omniscient citizenry.
This is just the citizenry paying double tariffs. First, we bought the higher priced goods. Now, the companies are trying to take our tariff payments again, this time from the government, to "make up" for the tariff money that we had already paid them in the first place.
What should happen is that $X of the budget should be put into escrow for the next administration to use after these criminals make their way out.
Maybe triple. (1) paid higher prices, (2) the government will issue debt to refund the tariffs to importers who we already reimbursed through higher prices, and then (3) Congress will use the extra debt from the refunds as justification for higher individual taxes to pay for the 2025 tax cuts for businesses.
And the supreme court is to blame for all of this because they decided to invalidate lower court injunctions, reasoning that there was no chance for "irreparable harm"... Yeah, right.
Both the people who voted for the criminal to be president. And the people who supported such a horrible Democratic candidate that she couldn't even win against Trump.
Yes, because that's several million people, and the elected democrat officials count in the hundreds.
It's actually tens of millions, if you count eligible voters that didn't vote. Not to mention the tens of millions of voters for the other Party.
People don't lose elections, campaigns do. And when they do, out of a refusal to accept responsibility, they cast blame outwards. They try to get people to blame each other, rather than the frankly quite obvious people at fault.
People who voted for Trump were pretty clear about what their issues were. They wanted to bully trans and they wanted to stick it to the libs. They were looking forward to liberals suffering. Some of them would never vote for a woman or black person. They liked masculinity Trump projects - aggressive insulting fraudster.
That's exactly the kind of simplistic thinking that I was talking about.
People had legitimate concerns about cost of living, food inflation (look at the charts of food prices 2020-2024), ballooning national debt, military adventures, crime, fraud, expensive housing and rent. I could go on.
Trump's government is unlikely to offer any solutions to the above, but that's a different story. Voting because they wanted libs to suffer... sheesh. Most people are not that dumb and have objective reasons to vote a certain way. Any party that wants to stay in power longer will have to address these issues.
Do you really think an average family is more concerned about trans issues than their inability to afford a house?
Unfortunately you are pretty much out of touch with reality. What parent wrote is true for large swaths of voters (sticking it to libs - any regular US forum I ever opened was full of 'libtards' and other worse insults even on completely unrelated topics... or just go to bible south, even completely ignoring racism and bigotry topic).
Sure, thats not all, then there are folks believing that a criminal, notorious liar, populist and suspected pedophile is going to do magic unheard of in reality. Very smart, what could go wrong...
Solution of the issues you write would move US to highly regulated country maybe like France, which is unpassable in US and would cause massive issues down the line. Also, the issues you list are valid for basically whole world, has many reasons and US republicans are the very last group of people in a long line of people who would tackle specifically those effectively, they usually go into opposite direction.
None of that favored Trump. National debt, military adventures, crime, fraud - all of those are consistently better under democratic administrations. They are consistently worst under republican administrations. Trump himself committed crimes and it was very clear he will be more corrupt then anyone before him. Trump himself talked like someone who will be aggressive ... and here we are with Venezuela, Iran clusterfuck.
> expensive housing and rent
People who genuinely cared about those did not voted for Trump. However, some used these as excuse.
> Voting because they wanted libs to suffer... sheesh.
Yes. I say so because I was actually listening to what conservatives said and did. Yes, if you do not read what they actually say, there was a lot of sane-washing going on. But, you have to ignore what Trump voters were actually saying in conservative places.
> Most people are not that dumb and have objective reasons to vote a certain way.
Their priorities are not what you say they are. It is simple as that.
> Any party that wants to stay in power longer will have to address these issues. Do you really think an average family is more concerned about trans issues than their inability to afford a house?
Frankly, yes, MANY conservative people were radicalized by that prospect. That is why Trump team made created culture war about it prior election and why they do it now too.
It does not matter what favors which administration (btw like I said, food inflation stats look awful during Biden's admin, although covid is probably more to blame). The grass is always greener on the other side, and people that cannot afford rent are just not going to vote for more of the same. It is always a swinging pendulum.
The more I think about these things, the more I am convinced that Marx was right, and we only have a semblance of democracy. There is no fundamental difference between the parties.
Like I said, I am more worried about paying real estate taxes, keeping the house, getting my kids through the college, paying car insurance and being able to afford food, and not having to leave the city downtown before dark. Trans issues... not my concern at all. Immigrant rights - I frankly do not care. The plumber who was unclogging my kitchen pipe today is a Trump voter who is not a fan of this war, and he was mostly complaining about skyrocketting cost of doing business and cost of labor that started shooting up about 5 years ago, and THAT likely was the main reason for his vote. Many people keep hanging out on the forums where niche party darling issues get discussed nonstop, and that creates an impression that most of the population cares about them, but I don't believe that's the case at all.
Anyone who manages to decrease the cost of healthcare, food, gas, improves an economy, etc.etc. will get my vote. That was not Biden, and it is clear by now that will not be Vance. Anyone who talks about immigrant rights ahead of my own, defunding the police and so on will not get my vote.
Unfortunately I always seem to have a choice between a bad candidate and a worse candidate. This time I had to choose between a word salad producer who was a VP of a senile president, and a baffoon. The democratic candidate was as unlikeable as the republican. I stayed home. You guys can attack my position as much as you want, but I am not going to put my financial well-being and that of my kids behind the issues that do not matter much for me, and that is not going to change. I believe the same goes for most of american families.
I'll give you a small example. I live in heavily democratic district. A local government had a referendum a few years ago on permits to build low income housing units, subsidized by local taxes. Housing immigrant families was mentioned. The referendum was a complete fiasco. You would have barely found any Trump voters in the room. People's concern about taxation took precedence.
Last years took us from Obama to Trump to Biden back to Trump who will likely lose midterms because of many things including the Iran adventure. Neither party offered any tangible advantage.
> It does not matter what favors which administration
It does matter. Republicans are supporting the Iran war right now. Americans in general are not, republicans are in. Conservatives and MAGA even more. So, no, they were not actually worrying about military adventures, they like them.
> The grass is always greener on the other side, and people that cannot afford rent are just not going to vote for more of the same
Oh yeh, actually, data shows they do.
> I am more worried about paying real estate taxes, keeping the house, getting my kids through the college, paying car insurance and being able to afford food, and not having to leave the city downtown before dark.
Funny crime was going down for years. Funny, actual crime rates do not even enter discussion about crime. It was republicans who wanted business like expensive college. Who are against students ability to discharge that debt in bankruptcy.
> Trump voter who is not a fan of this war, and he was mostly complaining about skyrocketting cost of doing business and cost of labor that started shooting up about 5 years ago
Well, maybe he should not have voted for Trump.
> Anyone who manages to decrease the cost of healthcare, food, gas, improves an economy, etc.etc. will get my vote.
It would be a mystery why would someone who want cheaper healthcare and better economy would vote for party that consistently pushes for healthcare to be more expensive and worsens economy voted republican. But republican voters do so while people like you talk about these as if matter for republicans
> This time I had to choose between a word salad producer who was a VP of a senile president, and a baffoon. The democratic candidate was as unlikeable as the republican. I stayed home.
Frankly, if Harris is as unlikable as Trump for you, then I doubt the economic concerns here were drivers of yours stay home action. Because it was super clear where Trumps administration will go - including economically.
> Trans issues... not my concern at all. Immigrant rights - I frankly do not care. [...] Immigrant rights - I frankly do not care. [...] Housing immigrant families was mentioned
Fun fact, Biden deported more people then any president before him. Democratic party was never all that pro-imigrant as conservative propaganda makes them.
As for trans, it was republican party that made that issue and they did gained vote on that.
War - history won't agree with you. Trump started Iran. Biden got us into supporting Ukraine on the other side of the planet. I like neither.
Crime - I don't care about "going down for years". I look at Chicago where I work, and people in my office these days make sure they are out of the south part of downtown before the dark.
The guy's business started nosediving 5 years ago, and you mention Trump again?
Jeez.
Anyway, you really sound like a (not very convincing) TV commercial. I am telling you that neither party improved the life of an average american (or mine if you don't want to generalize), and you are telling me these are not the droids I am looking for. That's the reason I don't like talking to die hard republicans AND democrats. Neither makes any sense anymore, and neither looks beneath the surface. Maybe instead of voting for the side that I like more I should start voting for the party that pisses me off less.
But there are still reasonable folks to talk to from either party, and they are NOT found in this discussion.
Bye.
Not to me.
Both involve us in wars that have nothing to do with us, both are sucking away the money that could be spent on improving things domestically instead of spending it on MIC. Both use lame excuses for justification (WMD vs "fighting for democracy".) One is about protecting private equity access to Ukrainian agriculture, the other one is about denying China access to heavy crude. Both are likely to be losers.
I am sick of both.
> Preventing Ukraine from being taken over by Russia improves US security. Just sitting and doing nothing would be incredibly stupid and amoral.
The only thing it improves is the pockets of the US MIC. It will be taken over anyway, being in Russian backyard. Why didn't you take your broomstick and go fight over there if you are such a believer? Or would you rather leave the meat grinder for the Ukrainians to experience? What's amoral and stupid is that now I have to pay three times as much for heating because of LNG exports.
> But actively bombing Iran is so stupid the US never did it until Trump was elected.
LOL. Obama and Libya 2011 come to mind as a close contender. But I agree with you on this one.
Hehehe. Nice try. All I am saying this is not our fight. If you really think it is, don't be a coward and join in, instead of having Ukrainians die for you.
Thank you for proving what I said at the very beginning of this conversation. Say something that makes perfect sense, democrats like you would label a Putin shill. Say someting against Trump's policy, get labeled a libtard. Both get us into moronic wars.
No wonder I no longer bother going to the polls. Take care.
You keep repeating stupid Russian talking points about the war. Russia invaded Ukraine with the goal of taking it all over and Ukranians are defending their country because they don't want to be part of Russia. This isn't hard to understand.
You must be really dense. I don't repeat anything. I am saying that I am paying through the nose to heat my house as a result. I don't give a flying duck about your Ukraine and Iran. None. Got it? Saving the patch of dirt on the other side of the planet will not motivate me to vote for your party. Reducing cost of living will.
Hopefully more and more people feel the same way.
If you really want to get to the root cause, on the Democratic side it’s the people who promoted/supported/covered up for Biden when it would have been obvious to anyone close that he wasn’t fit for the purpose any more. And Biden himself, for his hubris.
That was why things were rushed and there wasn’t a proper primary. Yes, they could have held a very late/quick convention and would likely not have picked Kamala, but anyone getting the nomination at that late stage would still have been hugely in the back foot.
There is no single root cause in a complex system of checks and balances. Many parts need to fail for things to get as bad as they are now. Trying to reduce everything to a single fault is either stupid populism or blatant propaganda.
IMHO the highest court, which is tasked with delivering timely justice, ought to make their decisions in a reasonable amount of time, and not allow legally questionable executive actions to continue while the legal question is unanswered.
You may consider that populist, but my opinion is that SCOTUS has derelicted their constitutional duty in these trying times.
I agree, but derelicition of duty by SCOTUS during this regime does not explain why a 34-times convicted felon and insurrectionist was even allowed to run for office again. Nor does it explain why the entire Senate keeps rolling over for every wet fart coming from the office of the Pedophile Of The United States.
You can find many other valid issues with the US system listed in this thread. Most of them are valid criticisms, and many of them identify a different underlying cause. Pointing them out or even focusing on a single one is not necessarily populist -- but insisting that there is a singular root cause is.
I love how the root cause is always the opposition, never the perpetrator.
Focusing on the Democrats (who are hot garbage) is such a wonderful way to keep attention focused anywhere but on the almost half the country still supporting a murderous cabal filled with people covering for a bunch of (other??) people who raped children to get pleasure from the sexual torture (yes, it's pretty clear from the Epstein files that they did everything they could to destroy those young children's minds and hearts for sport, and that was the real 'game' they were playing).
But by all means, carry on about bad tactics in the election, surely that is the 'root cause' here.
I don't disagree with you, but I also wonder what exactly the Biden justice department was doing with these files for four years. It seems to me like they were covering for the same people. Being "in the club" is more important to them than party.
1) You seem to think I'm some sort of GOP-pedo-billionaire sympathiser; nothing could be further from the truth. I'll help you slam the prison door and throw away the key.
2) No-one mentioned Epstein in this part of the discussion until you did - I thoughts we were discussing tariffs. I was responding to someone saying that, in the context of the tariff mess, they blame the people who voted for Trump, and "the people who supported such a horrible Democratic candidate that she couldn't even win against Trump". My point was simply on this specific issue, the root cause was the hubris and chain of events that led to Kamala being chosen, almost at the last minute, rather than that people "supported" her in that situation.
(And if you need someone to explicitly state that, yes, they also blame the people who voted for Trump or you get triggered, then consider it confirmed.)
You made a choice to focus on one (less important) half of the equation, and that choice comes with consequences - including obfuscation of the actual perpetrators, who commit crimes against humanity. We have had years of this which enabled our current situation. I don't think it is the right choice to make.
I was not going to pretend to understand your motives via text - not enough information. So I was responding to the concrete effects of your comment whether intended or not, and not to your personal opinions. I was pointing out the other (more important) half that you failed to acknowledge. It's so horrible that just stating it makes it seem like I am 'triggered', when I was just just stating facts.
The conversation is not strictly about tariffs, that was just the starting point. Once it was expanded to Trump and Kamala and the election, the context was far larger and naturally everybody reading would reasonably understand this. You contributed to expanding the conversation, it is normal that discourse would follow from that.
In brief, I think we need to be quite careful to explicitly mention specific evils at this time, particularly because a major tactic of those perpetrating them is making a lot of noise to drown out focus on their crimes.
I focused on the part of the comment that I was replying to that I disagreed with.
Without wanting to be overly reductive, this is the point of discussion: to focus on the points of disagreement, for the purposes of understanding, alignment, or persuasion.
I would have thought that this was obvious, and how people expected discussions to work. I would have said that needing to be thorough and explicitly state each point of agreement, alongside addressing the points of disagreement, was frustrating and unnecessary. But maybe I'm wrong on this, so thank you (genuinely) for giving me this to reflect on.
(RE: "triggered" - maybe re-read what you wrote. Responding to an ostensibly benign comment about the background cause of Kamala being chosen as the candidate, with "such a wonderful way to keep attention focused anywhere but on the almost half the country still supporting a murderous cabal filled with people covering for a bunch of (other??) people who raped children to get pleasure from the sexual torture" certainty comes over as disproportionately and inappropriately emotional and angry in word and tone, to this observer.)
Restricted representative size, gerrymandering, FPTP voting, businesses with resident/citizen rights, the restriction of 42 U.S.C. 1983 to not cover Federal actors...
Tons of goods companies paid tariffs for were inputs for those industries.
Instead of being mad at companies that were forced to pay illegal tariffs, who now want to recoup some of that, be mad at the cause of illegal tariffs. Letting the govt keep the money by fighting over who is a victim, hold the govt feet to the fire so they learn not to do this to begin with.
You really think Trump is capable of learning such a lesson? This isn't a 'they' situation, it's a 'him' situation. The cronies enabling him may well be cap[able of learning such a lesson, but their noses are too deep in the trough of self interest to care.
Ehh, they do a little better, but they are very much run by capital now. Most of their politicians are capitalist investors. And while individuals may get smacked down on occasion, as a whole they still follow the desires of capital holders above all else.
Because we don't want people whose profession is maximally exploiting perverse incentive structures to flourish. A society that grants outsized rewards to bad faith citizens is bad for everyone. The more influence those cheaters have over the economy the worse off we all are.
You should not be able to get rich to the tune of a 600% daily return just because you're insider trading. That doesn't incentivize sharing your information with the market. On the contrary that incentivizes delaying communicating your secret information until the last second to maximize the return on your unexpected information.
