Comment by epistasis

Comment by epistasis a day ago

8 replies

This was Lina Khan's big thing, and I'd argue that our current administration is largely a result of Silicon Valkey no longer being able to get exits in the form or mergers and IPOs.

Perhaps a better approach to anti-monopoly and anti-trust is possible, but I'm not sure anybody knows what that is. Khan was very well regarded and I don't know anybody who's better at it.

Another approach would be a wealth and income taxation strategy to ensure sigmoid income for the population. You can always make more, but with diminishing returns to self, and greater returns to the rest of society.

vlovich123 a day ago

Sorry, how did she stand in the way of IPOs? She was against the larger players providing easy off-ramps to smaller players but I don’t recall anything about IPOs. Indeed, Figma’s IPO is precisely because she undid the pending Adobe / Figma merger if I recall correctly.

  • epistasis 21 hours ago

    You're right, IPOs were not blocked by this. I wish I could still edit to add a correction!

sharts a day ago

a better approach might be to farming out shares to stakeholders. that seems a lot more dynamic and self-correcting than periodic taxation battles after the fact

CamperBob2 a day ago

Khan was largely ineffectual. The current administration, if it can be blamed on SV at all, is more likely to be the result of Harris's insanely ill-timed proposal to tax unrealized capital gains just as election season was kicking into high gear.

  • adgjlsfhk1 a day ago

    IMO Khan was by far the best we've had in at least 2 decades. Her FCC even got a judge to rule to break up Google! The biggest downside Khan had was being attached to a 1 term president. There's just not that many court cases against trillion dollar companies you can take from investigation to winning the appeal on in 4 years

    • CamperBob2 a day ago

      All true, and I'm not making a value statement about whether her influence was good or bad. However, Khan only threatened the oligarchs' companies, while Harris point-blank threatened their fortunes.

      Don't pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel and bandwidth by the exabyte-second. Or at least, don't do it a month before an election.

      • jordanb a day ago

        The oligarchs hated Kahn with the intensity of a thousand burning suns. If you listened to All In all they were doing is ranting about her and Gary Gensler.

        That being said, Kamala's refusal to run on Kahn's record definitely helped cost her the election. She thought she could play footsie with Wall Street and SV by backchanneling that she would fire Kahn, so she felt like she couldn't say anything good about Kahn without upsetting the oligarchs, but what she was doing was really popular.

  • aerhardt 9 hours ago

    She was largely ineffectual because she was cock-blocked by the ruling classes. I lean libertarian-capitalist and still I think this. Although it's not a settled debate in the classic liberal or libertarian traditions, there are plenty of arguments in them against the excessive concentration of power.