October 9, 2017

The inconsistency in demands for socialism

This particular inconsistency must be constantly pointed out.  Socialists, communists, progressives and liberal Democrats consistently demonize big business while often pay lip service to the little business owner or in some cases free market capitalism. This all as they overtly or covertly work to dismantle the free market.  They rail against corporate welfare and insufficient taxation and they proclaim interminably that business cannot be trusted to do the right thing - particularly big business. Yet there is a fundamental inconsistency in their proclamations.

Sometimes it's true, big business, particularly progressive liberal businesses do not play fair;
In an explosive new allegation, a renowned architect has accused Google of racketeering, saying in a lawsuit the company has a pattern of stealing trade secrets from people it first invites to collaborate.

Architect Eli Attia spent 50 years developing what his lawsuit calls “game-changing new technology” for building construction. Google in 2010 struck a deal to work with him on commercializing it as software, and Attia moved with his family from New York to Palo Alto to focus on the initiative, code-named “Project Genie.”

The project was undertaken in Google’s secretive “Google X” unit for experimental “moonshots.”

But then Google and its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin “plotted to squeeze Attia out of the project” and pretended to kill it but used Attia’s technology to “surreptitiously” spin off Project Genie into a new company, according to the lawsuit.

“The real adding-insult-to-injury was Google telling him the project had been canceled and they weren’t going forward with it when in fact they were going full blast on it,” Attia’s lawyer Eric Buether said in an interview Friday.
That seems quite predatory if it's proven to be true.   It's anti-free market because it's the type of behavior that discourages innovation because there's no benefit in innovation for the innovator.  Every financial benefit flows into the hands of a shrinking cabal of monopolies.

It's enough to make one thing that maybe socialism isn't such a bad idea.  Almost.  The problem, the inconsistency with that type of thinking is that the solution socialism or communism provides is to take that centralized power over the market from those monopolies and hand it over to the government, which is in itself a super-monopoly.  Think about it - if the government is in a business like health care, as is the case in Canada, they not only can dictate the terms of the marketplace as there are no competitors, they can actually write the rules to dictate the marketplace.  They can enforce the rules of the marketplace through the police and courts. 

The solution socialism suggest actually worsens the problem.  The real solution is actually the exact opposite of socialism - more competition, which provides more choice and therefore more opportunity for innovation.  Both of those things advance social welfare.  Government should only exist in that spectrum as an adjudicator between competing companies or between companies and consumers where products and services have caused issues for consumers.  Even then it should be an adjudicator of last resort, as the marketplace that recognizes poor performance for a business will resolve that by flowing business to competitors that provide better service, better quality and/or better prices.

That this inconsistency needs to be constantly reminded or shown to people is sad, nevertheless it's a job we should all share tirelessly and with enthusiasm and no expectation of personal reward (because that's the socialist thing to do).

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