Antitrust, Sonic and Star Fox.

So, I spent the majority of the day debating with people about everything from antitrust laws to net neutrality, and I came to the conclusion that I'm on the president's side. I realized that the kind of antitrust action he’s proposing is the only way to maintain a free market.

There really is no option (that I can think of) other than government to deal with large corporations that have monopolies, it’s just a question of whether you want them to regulate the big businesses and price control them to the point that they’re basically a government agency, or have the government fix the free market by breaking up monopolies from time to time. I guess in a way that’s true, which is why people embrace socialism, thinking they might as well let the government do everything if they’re going to let it regulate anything at all… but that’s ultimately throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Keeping government intervention as minimal and indirect as possible, and as uncoercive as possible towards small businesses and individuals could still give us a lot of freedom. That seems like the principle our founders were going for… a government that governs as little as possible, an anti-government that mostly springs into action to prevent concentration of power and slow things down. Checks and balances. Antitrust regulations are just the fourth check. A check by the courts and/or the executive branch on large corporations that are powerful enough to merit government attention. One thing government should never, ever do… though, is bail corporations out like Obama did before. Welfare is bad for both people and corporations, because it removes any kind of check on their fitness and ability to compete. Societies just don’t work well if a lack of productivity is encouraged and there’s no pressure on people to adapt, innovate, or work hard. 

The problem is that some big corporations (not all of them, some are smarter) don’t want this… they have lobbyists, and ironically want more regulation because they know it will increase the cost of doing business, and thereby kill small business and make sure no one can compete with them. It also doesn’t hurt that they hope the government will bail them out because they’re “too big to fail.” In other words, large companies are greedily trading economic freedom for a guaranteed monopoly. That is how the US is being run. Not capitalism, not socialism… basically a modern type of feudalism with more social mobility. In my opinion, a company that’s “too big to fail,” is a company that desperately needs to fail or be split up, otherwise everything stagnates. Like in certain kinds of forests, forest fires are needed to clear out the undergrowth and dead old trees. Preventing the fires from happening would ultimately bad for the forest, even if it seems to save plants and animals in the short term.

The whole first part of the day is a blur other than thinking about that. All I really remember about today is that I spent a large portion of it in a call with Cinderelliot. I remember we played through the final part of Sonic Adventure, and it took a long time because he died a lot and spent a while searching for power-ups he'd missed before in the stages. He commented that the game hadn't aged well due to glitches, and I didn't really disagree.

After that, we talked about getting a surge protector and his plans to go on a senior trip with his friends from High School. I'm a little jealous because I was never really offered anything like that, nor did I have any really close friends. We eventually decided to play Star Fox Zero as a follow up to Sonic Adventure 2. We had a really hard time killing this one boss that looked like a spider, he died to it a couple times. Weirdly, Infamous sent me a strange text talking about insects and how they have something like a brain in every part of their body, making them hard to completely kill and strange to study. I thought it seemed oddly related to the game, and seemed perhaps also symbolic of how liberals and advocates of centralized government see us. As being like insects that are hard to kill because we're so decentralized and hard to understand.