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33 points almost-exactly | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.267s | source
1. cowpig ◴[] No.44405075[source]
There's this belief system in San Francisco that I find borders on religion, which idolizes the corporation. It claims to be "libertarian" but when you think about it, it's the farthest thing.

The "invisible hand" effect is a powerful and just result of a free market. And so we should all fight to make markets more free, right?

A free market means perfect competition. No natural monopoly, minimal barriers to entry, etc.

The more a market is concentrated, the *worse it performs*. When you have a monopolist, they are effectively the same as a zero-representation government which sets fixed prices. The only difference is that instead of trying to accomplish whatever government objective, the price-fixing is optimized for extracting maximum surplus out of the system to benefit the singular corporate entity.

In aggregate, this minimizes economic activity.

The rhetoric coming out of SF around AI magically solving all of our problems (don't worry about climate change, the rising cost of housing, our crumbling government systems, our extractive healthcare system!) is like the stripped-down version of this perverse ideology: ignore all of the properties of the market system and say "because technology".