Put Down the Ayn Rand

Put Down the Ayn Rand

Wherein author Alex Hellene speaks authoritatively on a subject that weighs heavily on my mind, as well: busting the Big Tech trusts.

Get over your knee-jerk “Muh private businesses!” conditioning and realize these tech giants do not care about the Constitution, fair play, freedom of speech, competition, or any classical definitions of what we call “capitalism.” The Masters of the Universe are unelected individuals with gigantic organizations that have as much power and influence as governments.

“Build your own platform!” “Vote with your wallet!” “Use something else!”

Loser talk! These attitudes are why we are where we are. You can’t just “build your own Google.” The way things are structured are anti-competitive.

And Google, Facebook, et al. have more information about you than even the government. Why do you trust big tech with that?

Oh, right: “Because all businessmen are heroes!”

Put down the Ayn Rand for a second and realize no they are not. They may start as heroes, and small business owners and entrepreneurs–who represent the majority of Americans–are amazing people. But there comes a point in the cycle where corporations do amass too much power and influence and get to throw their near-limitless money around to bend the rules to favor them. Bye-bye competition!

Some call this “crony capitalism.” Others “corporatism.” I call it “inevitable.” Whether the system is a democratically representative republic or a socialist autocracy, the end result is the same.

You may not like to hear it. The prospect may offend your deeply ingrained free market sensibilities, but Alex is absolutely right. Big Tech delenda est.

To those who object, “But we shouldn’t give the government any more power than they already have!” I answer as follows:

  1. The government already has the power to break up Big Tech.
  2. Big Tech kommissars are already acting as de facto bag men for the government. Why go to the trouble of burning books when you can have Amazon ban them?
  3. “Business good. Government bad,” is a simplistic false binary made wholly irrelevant by Big Tech’s ongoing rampage against dissenters.
It really does seem as if their capitalist conditioning is overriding the self-preservation drives of most Republicans–even Republicans widely considered to be outsiders. Consider President Trump’s response to social media’s anti-Conservative bias.

Just Be Good

Contrast that answer with two Democrat candidates’ positions.

Warren FAG

Yang Agree on this

On a positive note, it is encouraging to see both wings of the uniparty pushing back against Big Tech censorship. Hopefully something will come of it.

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9 Comments

  1. MegaBusterShepard

    Absolutely agreed. We need a Teddy Roosevelt.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Hear, hear.

  2. xavier

    Brian,

    This love affair with unbridled capitalism and Ayn Rand seems to be an Anglopshere phenomenon.
    Ayn Rand is frankly unknown in the Romance language countries and noneof her books have been translated to my knowledge
    Capitalism works best when its fractually localized and tethered to rights and obligations. Time to re read the Church fathers and the Salamanca school

    xavier

  3. Heian-kyo Dreams

    It's a black pill day, because my first thought when reading Warren's words were, "I'm going to build a Big, Beautiful Wall, and Mexico is gonna pay for it!"

    But yes, I agree with her and do hope something comes out of it that's not even more censorship and illegal data selling.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Warren has given no indication that she's not serious. Then again, she's unlikely to be in a position to implement her plan.

  4. Chris Lopes

    Big tech is like The Machine in Person Of Interest. Instead of being controlled by a kind hearted and extremely moral guy named Finch, it's controlled by a bunch of amoral technocratic assholes. Yeah, it's well past time to break up the game.

    As to Rand, I wonder how many of her worshippers have actually read Atlas Shrugged all the way through. I mean I liked some of the ideas in the book, but it was a painful read. The lady was very much in love with her philosophy.

  5. Jeremy Beckett

    Companies are made up of people. They produce goods and services.
    Governments are made up of people. They produce control, i.e. laws.

    The best situation for an individual company is to BE the government, or failing that, to have a government-guaranteed monopoly. See the East India Company and others for examples.

    Governments are less moral than the individuals who compose them. It's easier to do wrong things than right things, and morally strong people aren't usually attracted to government service.
    Corporations are the same, except they can attract VERY strong people because the weeding-out process of building a company can produce strong leaders. However, routineers will come to dominate, and then the morals of the company will drift downward just as with government.

    It says something about Libertarians and similar riff-raff that they don't seem to understand this.

    • Brian Niemeier

      Indeed. They also somehow miss the fact that corporations are creatures of governments.

    • Anonymous

      Jeremy,

      Correct but eventually the East India company was liquidated after the debacle of the Indian Munity and the Brits created the Raj. It was far more stable and contributed much to contemporary India.

      Even Marx praised the Raj

      TL;DR
      Corporation should be born with an expiration date. Once they're irrelevant liquidate them (cf Taleb's Principle 14 in his Political compexity and localism paper)

      xavier

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