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In Which I Unexpectedly Agree with AOC
She may think she’s blasting capitalism, but someone needs to explain her real complaint is against corporatism:
‘Instead of conservative politicians scaring people that socialism means the government is going to take over their business, “we should be scared right now because corporations have taken over our government,” she said.’
And almost all the large interest groups who benefit from Big Government are on her side of the political spectrum. Corporatism, or the use of government to capture market-share, is the consequence of a too powerful government.
Maybe we can convert her to a freedom lover.
I can dream, can’t I?
Published in General
By the same token, Elizabeth Warren seems to be the only one who talks about breaking up big tech. Where are the Republicans on this stuff?
Big Tech monopolizing speech platforms is a problem, but I don’t want to see power shifted from the right hand to the left. I want to see it restored to The People! If I were king, I would outlaw public sector unions and shutdown 80% of federal agencies. For a start.
About the same time Trump becomes a humble man?
I’m talking about eliminating their special immunity from the rules of being either a platform or a publisher. Make them choose one or the other, and then apply the same rules that everyone else gets. Either choice will tend to work in our favor.
That is the legitimate answer. I suspect they’d have never gotten out of hand without legal protections that simply don’t apply to them.
Concur, and that would be restoring power to The People — people could sue GooFY for pretending to be a platform while acting like a publisher. But, I somehow doubt that’s what Elizabeth Warren has in mind. She’s probably going to propose a new federal agency (run by Democrats and leftists, but I repeat) to “control” free speech. That’ll work out…
Strange times we live in. I thought she had a point with Amazon, though wrong on the particulars. She could be useful going after the tech oligarchs.
+10
Re Representative what’s-her-name: Isn’t there a saying about a blind pig and an acorn that applies here?
I really doubt that her vocabulary includes the difference between capitalism and corporatism.
It’s roughly the same thing as AOC’s jihad against Amazon’s Queens headquarters. You can make the argument that when New York’s tax and regulation policies have made 80 percent of the state’s land mass inhospitable to new business start-ups or expansion, giving a sweetheart deal to Jeff Bezos to benefit the 20 percent of the state’s area in and around NYC that doesn’t need help is wrong-headed (since the economic benefits the Amazon HQ was going to bring to the region would likely help Hoboken, N.J. with the spillover economic effects more than it would ever have benefited Buffalo). Better to lower taxes and reform regulations so all areas of NYS can become more economically competitive.
But that’s not what AOC was arguing — she and the people giving her the talking points really thought Andrew Cuomo had $3 billion in cash ready to hand to Bezos so he could jump around in it like Scrooge McDuck, when AOC’s people had oodles of things they could spend the $3 billion on.
In this case, Ocaso-Cortez is demonizing capitalism because she thinks all capitalism is Jeff Bezos getting sweetheart deals from Andrew Cuomo. There’s zero nuance at all, and certainly none when it comes to smaller businesses vs. the big crony-capitalist players, where the big companies work with government to keep competitors out of the marketplace. Once you get above the Ben-and-Jerry’s level of capitalism, it’s all bundled together and all evil to AOC, because she thinks they all do the same thing.
FIFY.
BTW, isn’t this what the PragerU lawsuit is about?
Honestly, it’s hard to take this poorly informed young gal seriously about anything she says.
I think she’s incredibly dangerous.
Not mutually exclusive.
Premature. There is some talk of reviewing platform safe-harbor for libel.
Its even more important to make it illegal for banks and payment processors to discriminate on the basis of political belief or ideology.
thank you everyone for sharing. I’m deep into the issues and cases, history, etc… on this, and the status quo is already being exploited in unimaginable ways on the left and right.
Um, how is the right exploiting the status quo when all the tech platforms are controlled by leftists. If you would argue that the right milks being a victim, I would note there have been several articles as to how deplatforming does effectively destroy someone’s influence.
The left’s feelings towards the current Big Five of Tech players — Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Twitter isn’t uniform. Facebook gets the same sort of demonization from the left that poor Mr. Gates and his Microsoft Corp. received 20 years ago, in part because they see Mark Zuckerberg as not controlling his platform enough to prevent things like the Cambridge Analytics data mining for Trump in 2016 (where they were cheering Facebook helping the Obama re-election team with the same sort of data mining in 2012).
Twitter and Apple get occasional grumbles — Twitter when they fail to ban the people the left thinks should be banned, and Apple got dinged in the final years of the Obama Administration for not repatriating their billions in overseas cash due to the high U.S. corporate tax rates (because the left saw all that cash and got aroused thinking of what they could do with it). Google is the fair-haired child of the quartet, where nothing they do in terms of privacy violations bothers the left, because they’re confident anything they’re doing there will be used to help benefit the left’s pet causes. So any privacy worries about Amazon Alexa never seem to bleed over to Google Assistant (and of course Amazon’s recent foray into Queens went over about as well with AOC and the rest of the far left as a Trump rally featuring Ted Cruz as speaker).
This is one of the reasons I prefer to speak of “free markets” rather than “capitalism.” Free markets emphasizes the fact that the enemies of the free exchange of goods and services may be — often are — nothing more than the regulatory burdens favored by big companies that can afford them, and that are crushing to small businesses and entrepreneurs.
I have no animus toward big companies until they invoke the regulatory apparatus of the state or the power of the courts to subvert free markets and quash competition.
She’s a moron.
She thinks she knows what she’s talking about but she’s just flying by the seat of her pant suit and relying on Dem talking points and hysteria.
Labor unions probably have more control over our government than do “corporations”.
And if she really doesn’t think that government will take over business she should take a gander at her GND.
And that’s just it.
She can write a “resolution” that has the government taking over the ENTIRE SOCIETY one day and then claim that she supports no such thing the next.
These people are fanatics who glom onto anything that they can wring their hands about and about which they concoct simplistic solutions that either would never work or would have serious negative consequences…
likely both.
My same thought while listening to the Ricochet podcast this morning.
Welcome to Ricochet!
The real problem isn’t that corporations are evil, etc. It’s the fact that there’s so much money being spent by the USG, and it’s reach is so broad (from a regulatory standpoint) that businesses will inevitably get all up in Congress at every turn, in order to preserve what they’ve got, or gain something against the next guy.
Because Congress is going to make laws that impact them. It’s why they’re there, in DC – to lobby for their own interests. Maybe if the gov’t were much smaller, you’d have less of it.
But these are just the normally-expected ma’amblings of a confused and self-righteous idiot. Expect a lot more until she’s out of office.
Thank you!
Happy to be here
Exactly. I would add that Fed policy anf the financial system contribute to it as well.
Another good post in this thread.
The GOP doesn’t control this conversation in a constructive way at all. They just want to get pastThe next election.
Corporations aren’t evil, but Google is. :P
I wish she was a drooling idiot who attracted no attention. Unfortunately, she is young and cute and passionate in her speech, which sounds articulate even if it’s a mashup of noxious left wing ideas.
She’s a demagogue, and could very well be a hugely successful one. We should not underestimate her potential for destruction.
She’s an idiot. Comes from upbringing.
Parents are probably idiots too.
Lorraine, you ever have a kid like that, I’ll disown you.