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Scale Ruins Everything

(coldwaters.substack.com)
175 points drc500free | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | source
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efitz ◴[] No.41848475[source]
It’s not that scale ruins everything, it’s the pursuit of scale that ruins everything.

I have thought a lot about antitrust recently and realized that it’s an overlapping problem with the VC unicorn problem. People get so hung up with being bigger/biggest, faster/fastest, that they minimize or ignore pathological side effects.

What if we have a progressive tax structure on business based on scale? Partly on size, partly on market power?

For example, what if corporate income tax were tied to the logarithm of the number of employees+contractors? What if the corporate income tax increased with the market share in markets served?

These kind of ideas have very low impact at small scales, but after a certain scale they start to have such a huge effect on bottom line that they disincentive growth for its own sake.

And they’re self-regulating and largely objective, unlike our current antitrust laws in the US.

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1. 6510 ◴[] No.41850221[source]
A funny alternative: If a company is deemed large (and stale) enough the government prints money against and purchases it. If you buy a 100 bl company you can write the 100 bl IOU no problem. Innovative departments should be split off into separate companies that start out with a good size government contract.

Government can then immediately start "mis"-managing the company to make it less profitable (while theoretical profit stays the same)

You would get for example a government google search and a government adsense department.