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Scale Ruins Everything

(coldwaters.substack.com)
175 points drc500free | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | 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. feoren ◴[] No.41851217[source]
A single human is a non-fungible entity, but a corporation is a wibbly-wobbly entity whose boundaries can shift at will. Any progressive tax scheme on a corporation will be immediately met with 100,000 smart accountants figuring out how to optimize against it. Expect lots of crafty maneuvering to turn one giant corporation into a thousand tiny corporations, yet somehow all under the same umbrella, all anti-competitive, and all benefitting the same original owners.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't try, but these are very difficult issues to address.