Say my friends and I own a business that will be affected by something Congress is considering. So we hire a lobbyist to go inform the politicians about that. How is that not people exercising their First Amendment rights? Our livelihood depends on what they do. It is a major part of my life. It seems like your view is that you are only “people” when you’re not engaged in economic production, that human beings only exist in leisure.
Because you are now exercising more power than one person is normally able to do so in democracy, you, your company and friends now have a distinct advantage in influencing policy that normal citizens cannot exercise. This is very relevant if your company is benefitting you and your friends at the expence of other citizens—which, unfortunately, is an all too common occurrence.
The bigger your company gets the more money you are able to put into lobbying and the more this distorts the democratic process. Big Business, especially Big Tech, is damaging our democracies beyond recognition.
This is why this barring of Amazon by the EC is to be welcomed.
But that's not the reason the EU gave for banning Amazon from lobbying; they said it's unreasonable for Amazon to lobby if they refuse to turn up to committee meetings.
I'm not keen on lobbyists drafting legislation. It saves the civil service effort and money, sure; but if the civil service don't have the competence to do the drafting themselves, who's going to review the draft?
Fwiw I think the bigger issue is that existing businesses are overrepresented relative to the businesses that don’t exist yet, or that would exist if rules were changed in a way contrary to the interests of some existing businesses.
I don't know any examples but someone explained some pulling up the ladder trick: An existing business you can implement nice things gradually over a long time and have them written into law. It seems very nice but the future business will have to implement everything before starting.
No, the idea is that existing businesses will lobby for the government to prop them up. Politicians are inclined to think it’s reasonable to protect jobs and such. But maybe if they let the business fail, what rises from the ashes would be even better.
The corporation is the legal embodiment of our joint interests. It is the only reasonable place to put the lobbying efforts. The silly thing you propose would in fact be workable for a small number of owners like this hypothetical, but how would a public corporation with diffuse ownership engage with the government under this proposal?
It’s really no different than a company defending itself in court. A legislative or regulatory proposal can be just as confiscatory or punitive, or have as many unexpected consequences, as a lawsuit. In both cases, the business needs to lawyer up and represent its interests.
"The corporation is the legal embodiment of our joint interests."
You've just admitted the reason why you shouldn't be allowed to lobby as such—as I said earlier, your joint effort represents an unfair power advantage over other individual citizens.
Proof is in the pudding, take a good look at our fucked democracies.
So should all joint influence efforts be banned or just ones that have economically productive elements? Forming groups and trying to influence politicians is the only way to get things done. They can’t listen to 300 million atomized individuals. Are you suggesting the NAACP should be illegal?
The solution isn’t limits on people’s rights to debate and to advocate for their interests, it’s limits on the power of the thousands of elected rats running around DC and state capitals and city councils. We need less politics which means more centralization in the federal government and more power for the President.
When there was a Congressional hearing on Youtube's Content ID stuff, one of the people present was some millionaire country singer complaining loudly about how much money he was losing because of Youtube. And my thought was "what this needs is a poor Youtuber scraping by on near-minimum wage to talk about how Content ID fucks them over." Except those people can't individually afford to show up to Congress to complain at a hearing.
There is a fundamental asymmetry between rich and poor people that is a real problem and that we don't really have a comprehensive solution for. But banning poor people from pooling resources together to get someone to talk on their behalf is not a step up; it's moving in the opposite direction.
Poor youtubers can support the EFF, they can call/write or even visit the local offices of their congress critters. Most congressional hearings are nothing more than dog and pony shows anyway.
That’s exactly the point, the corporation wouldn’t:
Those small, diffuse shareholders aren’t typically represented by the board or executives, who are substantially controlled by a minority cabal. Do you think people with DIS in their retirement funds are happy Iger burned half the value on his politicking? — no, only his weirdo financier friends are. So why should we allow them to confiscate more assets from those small, diffuse shareholders to advocate their private politics and interests to the government?
If small, diffuse shareholders want to lobby Congress, they can do so individually as well, eg with a letter writing campaign or at public events.
A company has no interest in swaying the government, which represents the interests of the public. If the public (not the corporation) has concerns, they can privately advocate for those.
> The corporation is the legal embodiment of our joint interests.
Would you stand by this statement when the corporation is caught doing some illegal evil thing, like denying employers their rights, or damaging the environment? Even if you would, most shareholders of large corporations don't. They suddenly discover being a shareholder is a very "at arms length" thing.
Might work nicely if corporations were "the embodiment" at all times, or at no times. But selectively, it is quite bad.
If you intentionally undercapitalize a business to avoid foreseeable liabilities, the courts can pierce the corporate veil. Otherwise, limited liability is thought to provide the necessary incentives for widespread equity ownership and investment and desirable economic risk taking. In any case, limited liability is not a constitutional right and could be modified or abolished. Free speech and freedom to petition the government are guaranteed rights though. The government can’t just circumvent the first amendment by making waiver of those rights so economically necessary that every business has to do it to be competitive. The courts don’t buy that logic nor should they.
it's different from a company defending itself in court if only because a court is a judiciry power affair whereas lobbying congress interacts not with the judiciary branch of government but with the legislative
Part of my point is they’re not that different in practice. A law that bans your way of making money is worse than a lawsuit. And in a difficult tort lawsuit, the judges are making a lot of the same kinds of value determinations that a legislator does, such as whether the risk of harm from a practice is justified by the utility of it.
You’re not entitled to use Elon’s satellites. And in reality, the service is aggressively priced. It seems they only started breaking even a few months ago.
Also, costs are not geographically uniform. They need regulatory permission to operate in a country, and some countries make that easier than others. Sometimes market access means paying lots of tax too.
This is only correct in lawless land, such as right in the middle of Africa.
In most nations, in even some totalitarian dictatorships(dictatorships hate those opinionated and powerful), you are only allowed to deny services by conditions and to extents tolerated by law.
Some developed countries are moving towards Internet and smartphones as human rights, and handing out phones to homeless people. That implies it's rather phone network operators that don't have the entitlement to speak of such entitlements.
The nation owns everything. The nation can take and give anything anytime so long its owners agree(the monarch, the dictator, the party, the people collectively). It's always been that way.
Yea, it can take your life, your children, your freedom, and your dignity right along with the wealth. You harbor a view of "positive rights", that you are entitled to property that belongs to someone else; positive rights stand in direct conflict with negative rights, things that you are free from, like censorship, or search and seizure. Negative rights create economic cooperation and create robust societies with diverse opportunities, positive rights create bread lines and mass murder.
>The nation owns everything. The nation can take and give anything anytime so long its owners agree(the monarch, the dictator, the party, the people collectively). It's always been that way.
It cant take anything from an individual that they aren't willing to give up. They can make things very hard for them if they decide not to.
Huh? Starlink is in the US and his right to operate physical satellites is under US jurisdiction. So even acknowledging this middle-school observation of yours that governments can in fact confiscate property, the only leverage foreign governments have over Starlink is the right to deny him permission to transmit into their territory. (Even then, only because the US mostly respects international agreements on this. The US lets Elon transmit into some countries like Iran without their permission and there’s not much they can do about it).
Yes they are. So you can imagine how much is lost in Ukraine especially when Ukrainians travel to where it's even more discounted to buy in bulk. Use the dishes for 3 months to a year at $50 and proudly talk about how they paid in full.
Anyway the manufacturing costs are down from $3k to $750 ish. So things are looking up
You’re forgetting the part where they launch and operate thousands of satellites and many earth stations, as well as manufacture the user terminals. Oh and they have to write the software that makes the whole thing work.
"In May 2018, SpaceX estimated the total cost of designing, building and deploying the constellation would be at least US$10 billion. Revenues from Starlink in 2022 were reportedly $1.4 billion accompanied by a net loss, with a small profit being reported starting in 2023." [1].
Other estimates and other credible sources point out that SpaceX made adequate profits if you count the military and government subsidies[1].
Not only the Chinese government is deploying their own satellite internet, several other are too. Probably because its profitable.
Are you making an argument against supply and demand here? I’m trying to figure out what basic principles of economics I need to explain before I further engage.
I sincerely doubt economic principles where ever a concern [1].
I remember many rumours of Elon Musk in Moscow at the founding of SpaceX with former Pentagon people? Lots of other reports on military considerations of SpaceX. Hard to verify [2][3].
You're mixing up stories. Elon was in Moscow prior to founding SpaceX as he was attempting to purchase an ICBM to refurbish into a rocket to send a terrarium to Mars.
He settled on founding SpaceX on the flight back because after the oligarchs lead him around a bunch with no intention of actually negotiating a sale, they straight up spat at him.
>Large business wastes just as much money as govt, but when a business makes a mistake they just stop talking about it. In govt it ends up on CSPAN.
The other difference is that the business has to compete with other businesses and turn a profit (or convince investors it will eventually turn a profit) to survive. In any given year they might get away with waste. If you’re a mega corp in an oligopolistic business, maybe even a decade or two. But eventually, you live or die by the bottom line. By contrast, a government keeps existing no matter how poorly it manages its finances. Look at Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela, South Africa, Greece, etc.
No, businesses absolutely collude to get out of each others way, and it happens a lot more than you think. Even businesses that are "competitors" often have different aims and goals in the long run. And generally their are banks an wall street that are willing to pick up the tab for businesses that are big enough, even if they are failing. Look at a company like yahoo, or oracle, or IBM. How do they keep existing, when they are essentially zombies running on funding through the public market?
IBM is laughing stock to everyone. Whoever would want to work there, it’s not young ambitious people.
But it’s also a 100-year oligopoly, it will take more time to die.
It’s also a golf company - its main activity is channeling golf courses to government members and management teams. You wouldn’t classify ClearQuest or DrWatson are serious pieces of software. DrWatson can be reproduced with a small python script, that’s why it sells so well: You sell the idea of AI to the press since 1995 and it gives a good image.
The business of IBM is mainly funneling money from governments to government members; from corporations to higher managers. It makes corruption legal. This kind of businesses thrive well in general.
>But eventually, you live or die by the bottom line. By contrast, a government keeps existing no matter how poorly it manages its finances. Look at Zimbabwe, Argentina, Venezuela, South Africa, Greece, etc.
That's just survivorship bias. Some counterexamples:
This is an interesting counterpoint, but I'm not sure it's a counterexample: those governments kept existing, in the sense that the, say, Cuban government existed both before and after; they just had radical changes of direction and leadership. The same can and does happen to companies, and I think many casual observers would say that the business has survived.
