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So next time you hear a libertarian talking head lay it on thick about the "entrepreneurial spirit", how "investors take risks and these need to be rewarded", "the market regulates itself", "taxes are an undue government intervention" — remember this.

Because the moment shit goes south for *them* it becomes "saving the economy" or some other bullshit excuse for an undue government intervention that benefits *them*.

Tax the rich!
Regulate tech!
Support public tech infrastructure!

#SVB

/end

Oh, and one more thing: should some kind of government intervention happen here? Maybe!

But it needs to be designed in a way such that it prioritizes protection of the *employees* of the companies affected, not the investors.

Investors knew or should have known the inherent risks well enough. Every investment brochure warns about them.

The plot thickens!

Silicon Valley Bank chief pressed Congress to weaken risk regulations
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/11/silicon-valley-bank-weaken-risk-regulations-svb

> CEO Greg Becker personally led the bank’s half-million-dollar push to reduce scrutiny of his institution – and lawmakers obliged

> [T]he bank was lobbying lawmakers on “financial regulatory reform” and the Systemic Risk Designation Improvement Act of 2015 – a bill that was the precursor to legislation ultimately signed by President Donald Trump

Thanks Obama!

> “Without such changes, SVB likely will need to divert significant resources from providing financing to job-creating companies in the innovation economy to complying with enhanced prudential standards and other requirements,” said Becker, who reportedly sold $3.6m of his own stock two weeks ago, in the lead-up to the bank’s collapse.

So… Silicon Valley tech startups got screwed by a bank that pushed Trump to deregulate it.

Doesn't get more Schadenfreude than that!

@rysiek

This also applies to other things:

"The only good and just abortion is my (or my daughter's) abortion"

"Free speech for those with a printing press (or 90% of the shares of a major newspaper)"

"We are a serious news outlet, except when we are sued, and then everything was nothing but entertainment and hyperbole"

"Gun bans are evil, except when we could get hurt, and then they are mandatory"

And don't get me started on the whole vaccine thing.

Hypocrisy, pure & simple.

@ParadeGrotesque "do as we say, not as we do".

@oblomov @rysiek Workers only get bailed out if they agree to a lifetime moratorium on splaining or editing Wikipedia.

@skepticsbookoflists @rysiek what if the bank loses your money...?

@ryanjyoder @skepticsbookoflists well, I am all for regulation and taxing the rich and making sure banks operate with safe margins — all of which generates costs that libertarians hate — so I am at least not a hypocrite when I expect some government intervention on behalf of the private persons whose money is on the line.

That's why we have things like FDIC in the USA and deposit insurance schemes in EU and a lot of places. These only insure accounts up to a certain amount, and that's fine.

@ryanjyoder @skepticsbookoflists I am want to be very clear that I am not against government intervention. I am against hypercapitalist techbro and libertarian hypocrisy that cries bloody murder when any kind of intervention that happens to not benefit them happens, but then comes crying to the Big Gummint the moment their stock options are threatened.

I am also against interventions that effectively funnel public tax money into the pockets of the super-rich. It should go the other way around.

@sofia @rysiek What part of taxing the rich, regulation of tech, and/or creating public tech infrastructure is incompatible with freedom or egalitarianism?

@SallyStrange taxation is robbery, and it goes straight to the richest, most powerful cartel around. i don't think "that rich" have actually earned that much of their wealth, and instead is extracted and protected with the help of that cartel.

there is no such thing as unregulated social systems. but there is the authoritarian dogwhistle of "regulation" for state control. i want to decentralize control, but for them, all control that isn't government is just "chaos".

@rysiek

@SallyStrange "public infrastructure" would be great if it meant commonly owned or unownable infrastructure (like p2p). but again, the name of the public has been dragged though the toxic sludge of government. the whole language of political discourse is poisoned by demagogues trying to sell state violence for votes.

and of course government is in it's anti-egalitarian in it's very core. it divides people into rulers and subjects. and state-socialists would like us to forget that.

@rysiek

@sofia @rysiek OK, I'm good with that. Sorry, I'm not used to encountering left libertarians in the wild. My apologies, please carry on!

@bitbear yeah, you hear that from time to time. and as long as we no what me mean i can use your definition. i personally feel no attachment to the term, but under your definition socialism would be a subset of anarchism and i would be a socialist.

also all classical "socialist" ideologies marxism, fabianism, saint-simonism and social democracy would all fail to be socialist.

not a problem for me, it's just not how most people use the word…

@SallyStrange @rysiek

@sofia @SallyStrange @rysiek If you listen to or read modern socialists like Richard D. Wolff, I think it’s apparent that socialism starts with the democratisation of the workplace, where the workers own the company in which they work. All other company forms than coop should be illegal and the coop structures we have, should be strengthened and improved.

How it spreads from there is not that important, because if we accomplish that without angering the capital elite so much they corrupt the system, everything else will fall into place. Not having the capital elite corrupting everything is always the biggest problem.

Socialism, as in ubiquitous democracy and dissolution of power, should at least not end up in state capitalism as all other so-called “socialist” societies have done.

@bitbear Richard Wolff is an interesting case, indeed. i find him pretty obnoxious and i'm not a big fan of most of his policy prescriptions, but his focus on cooperatizing workplaces gives me a glimpse of hope. i never heard him talk about cooperatizing (and thus de-monopolizing) public security and law. so i don't think he fits the anarchist criterion. he also has that inexplicable soft spot for Marx, but so have some anarchists .

@SallyStrange @rysiek

@sofia @SallyStrange @rysiek I don't think Wolff identifies as an anarchist or describes socialism as anarchism either. But I don't think it matters that much. While both anarchism and socialism describe a society I definitely want to live in, I think they serve more as a guiding light than detailed implementation advice, at least for quite a while.

I believe well over 90% of the source of problems we see in the modern (Western) society can be explained by the distance between the people making decisions and people being affected by said decisions. If people feel in control of their own lives, their own money, their own worth, so much of the ails of modern society would go away.

And it all starts at the workplace, at least for over 90% of us.

@bitbear i think anarchism has quite a valuable implementation advice that is more actionable than what most ideologies can give you: "Live as if you were already free." as David Greaber perhaps put it best. reform and revolution (as commonly understood) both rely on that what those in power will do. i think we should focus much more on the things we do, and what we can do better. not just to realize our ideas, but to test them. (see also: prefiguration)

@SallyStrange @rysiek

@bitbear the thing you said about distance between the decision and the consequences very central to how i see the problem of government and bosses. it's also closely related to the problems of central planning that Mises and Hayek pointed out. and @KevinCarson1 explores very nicely how these also apply the the central planning of bosses in the corporate hierarchy:

https://archive.org/details/MarketsNotCapitalismAudiobook/04-03+Carson+-+Economic+Calculation+in+the+Corporate+Commonwealth.mp3
https://fee.org/articles/economic-calculation-in-the-corporate-commonwealth/ (text version)

@SallyStrange @rysiek

@bitbear though mere "feeling in control" is not enough for making rational decisions. control gives you the opportunity to experiment and to learn. it also helps when there is other people around you making different choices. i think state democracy largely lacks these sorts of feedback and instead gives some less nice incentives.

sorry for throwing that many links at you, but Caplan also has some good insights here, i think:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDfNiZ8KInE

@SallyStrange @rysiek

@sofia Mandating worker coops is absolutely essential for freedom and for protecting workers. People should be able to organize how they want as long as they aren't violating the rights of others.

Bryan Caplan's point ignores, like many economists, that there are 2 risk reduction strategies: diversification (i.e. exit) and commitment. In diversification, we spread our eggs across many baskets and can't watch over them as carefully.

@bitbear @rysiek

@sofia The dual strategy is keeping our eggs in a few baskets and watch over those baskets carefully. In biology, both of these strategies occur to reduce reproductive risk.

Worker coops can share risks with investors through non-voting preferred stock and other risk-sharing financial instruments. They can also use self-insurance. Workers can also themselves diversify their portfolio by purchasing non-voting preferred stock in other worker coops.

@bitbear @rysiek

@sofia In wage labor, workers' inalienable rights are violated such as the inalienable right to appropriate the fruits of their labor. It derives from the basic principle of justice that legal responsibility should be assigned according to de facto responsibility. In the employer-employee relationship, the workers are jointly de facto responsible for using up inputs to produce outputs,

@bitbear @rysiek

@sofia but the employer gets sole legal responsibility e.g. holds liabilities for the used-up inputs and owns the property rights to the produced outputs. This mismatch adds up to a violation of the basic principle of justice. The only way to satisfy the basic principle of justice is to structure all firms as worker coops. See: https://www.ellerman.org/inalienable-rights-part-i-the-basic-argument/

The reason alienating voting rights must be prevented including in voting shares in firms is that responsibility

@bitbear @rysiek

@sofia is de facto inalienable. Inalienable, here, means that it can't be given up even with consent. I can't make a contract to transfer responsibility for my actions to someone else as responsibility is something I possess due to my personhood, which doesn't change when I agree to be an employee.

@bitbear @rysiek

@jlou hm, something feels wrong about calling something that you can opto out of (by leaving) as inalienable.

i think Ellerman's point would be that your descisions in an organisation can't not be your own, and i think that makes sense. and i do like his point that workers should take responsibility.

but even if it is your responsibilty i don't think i can stop others from choosing to do what others tell them.

@bitbear @rysiek

@sofia More precisely, inalienable here just means that consent is not a sufficient condition to transfer or extinguish the right.

Ellerman's theory doesn't require stopping others from choosing to do what others tell them. In fact, it doesn't rule out any non-institutionally described action. This is an important point. The transfers expected in the employment contract don't occur. Such a system just assigns a different legal overlay to those situations.

@bitbear @rysiek

@sofia Basically, such a legal system has a different response to certain cases that end up resulting in all firms effectively being worker coops. It enforces the basic principle of justice that legal and de facto responsibility match.

@bitbear @rysiek

@sofia Worker coops are forced by the facts about workers' responsibility for their work. Would a just legal system allow people to be held responsible for another's actions? The property and contract norms of a free society shouldn't recognize the employment contract as valid. Without employment, everyone is individually or jointly self-employed (i.e. worker coops). Such recognition isn't so different from the invalidity of coverture marriage contracts and self-sale contracts

@bitbear @rysiek

@sofia Unless you think these contracts should be re-validated, free societies already force certain organizational structures on people namely freedom enhancing structures. The paradox of freedom is, to really be free, we must be "forced" to be free. If people can choose to alienate and give up their freedom, they aren't really free at all. Freedom isn't a property right that you own. It is something every person is entitled to simply by their status as a person.
@bitbear @rysiek

@jlou i get what you're saying, but you should also beware of a tendency of people to generalize their own preferences as the only good (or free) way to live.

in particular it's also quite a leap to go from "employment contracts (in so far as they imply renting people) are invalid" to "coops are the only legitimate way or organizing". the latter seems like it needs a whole lot more justification.

@bitbear @rysiek

@sofia I'm not generalizing my own preferences. I can sympathize with and understand why someone would want to be an employee and not want to be held responsible for their deliberate and intentional actions in the workplace. The problem is that they can't factually turn themselves into a talking instrument of the employer to match the legal status the contract assigns.

@bitbear @rysiek

@sofia Worker coops being the only legitimate way is a straightforward implication of the argument that employment contracts are invalid. The underlying property theory makes that clear. In a worker coop, workers are jointly legally responsible for the positive and negative product matching their de facto responsibility for the corresponding actions. This satisfies the basic principle of justice. See: https://www.ellerman.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/OnPropertyTheory-Reprint-singles.pdf

@bitbear @rysiek

@mpusto I'm so sorry you got caught up in this.

@rysiek Thanks. Our CEO says we should be fine, he met with the board and investors and we are okay. But a lot of people at other companies are going to lose their jobs through no fault of their own. And it’s not just crypto bros either.

@mpusto yeah. Have you seen the reporting on SVB CEO lobbying for less regulation and then running with the money 2w ago?

@rysiek Indeed. Disgusting

@mpusto it would be interesting to see SV tech startups themselves lobby for *more* regulation of the banking sector.

@Spiricom CW that face