I can think of plenty of American startups that are hindered (or simply don't exist) as a result of regulation.
Betfair should be a Silicon Valley (or NY) company with billions in revenue. Instead, it's a UK company with $350M in revenue, available only to the UK market. See also Intrade, Hollywood Stock Exchange, etc. All due to regulatory issues.
How about automated medical diagnostics? Many prototypes have been built which outperform human doctors, but the entire industry is dead due to fear of litigation/FDA.
Leverage the internet to disruptively innovate in education? Good luck, with the massive subsidies given to the traditional system.
See also the regulatory issues that Ubercab, AirBnB and others are running into.
This isn't taxes, but it sure doesn't count as "stay out of our way".
You listed three things that I'm really glad the government does:
- Attempts to keep all investment activity well-regulated and conformant to some definition of legitimate. Thus minimizing the risk that my money manager is going to lose my money on an illegitimate, thinly disguised gambling platform like the Hollywood Stock Exchange.
There's no reason why something like that shouldn't be tightly regulated -- HSX is not the same thing as the NYSE and shouldn't be allowed to take real money in exchange for fake value. The NYSE returns my investment when companies I've selected do well: actual value. The HSX returns my money when random celebrities have an on camera nipple slip: no value.
- Make sure that there are tight restrictions on what counts as a medical device, or as medicine. If there's something approved to go into my body for medical reasons, I want associated risks to be minimized. This is not where I want the boomtown to be -- I don't want to undergo the therapeutic equivalent of WebVan or Twitter.
- I also don't want just any jackass to be able to print a textbook off of Blurb and start selling it to my kid's teachers. Qualified jackasses only, thank you :) No seriously, the way education is decided in this country is currently suboptimal, but the goal is to have all children on the same page. I don't want to find out that my kid has been on some experimental curriculum that turned out to be a pointless waste of time.
But you're also wrong about this. It is possible to start an alternate education system, so long as you conform to guidelines about what you teach. I've never heard anyone complain that they couldn't get their education startup going because of "massive subsidies given to the traditional system." There are a number of folks trying to crack this one from different angles, from textbooks to actual brick-and-mortar institutions.
If you tell your money manager not to limit his gambling in your behalf to NYSE listed equities, he is legally obligated to do so. He will go to jail if he does not. However, even if your wallet stays closed, you can reap the positive external benefits - if HSX says some movie will suck, you can avoid shelling out $12 to your local movieplex (guess why Hollywood's bought and paid for politicians killed it?).
Or perhaps your goal is not to protect your money, but to prevent me from harmlessly entertaining myself in activities you dislike?
The same thing applies to manual medical diagnostics - you are free to pay extra for a human to give you a less accurate diagnosis if you want. Although I'm not sure why you think human doctors do such a great job - diagnostic procedures and surgery are not regulated by the FDA at all. Only devices are. So an automated medical diagnostic tool would actually be more regulated than the system we have now.
I don't want to find out that my kid has been on some experimental curriculum that turned out to be a pointless waste of time.
This already happens under the current system. Ever hear of "whole language"?
Both you and your sibling poster are claiming that individual instances of failure within the existing regime are reasons why the current regime should be abolished, which is a completely absurd reduction. I don't care how you entertain yourself. I do care if your method of entertainment, if scaled to billions of dollars, has the potential to destroy volumes of wealth for no particular reason of consequence. And I do want an agency to try to keep completely unviable quackery off the medical market.
> Attempts to keep all investment activity well-regulated and conformant to some definition of legitimate. Thus minimizing the risk that my money manager is going to lose my money on an illegitimate, thinly disguised gambling platform like the Hollywood Stock Exchange.
As opposed to losing it on a regulated, totally-not-gambling company like Enron, or in a regulated, totally-not-gambling market like sub-prime mortgage derivatives? Similar arguments could be made against the other two items as well, under the general framework of "regulatory capture". Your arguments presume that government regulation agencies always act in the best interest of the general public.
> I've seen several people who think taxes are too low,
Oh really - how much extra do they pay?
What - they mean that other people's taxes are too low?
Do they actually mean "taxes are too low" or is that a proxy for "not enough govt services"?
I ask because the US govt collects about as much per person as Western European govts (and more than Canada). Yet, those countries do provide more services, but it's not because they collect more money. (The US has lower rates but has a higher gdp.)
That's a silly argument. There's nothing inconsistent about believing that it would be better off for the country as a whole if tax rates are higher, but not volunteering to personally pay higher than the current actual rate.
You play the game by the current rules, not the rules you are advocating the game change to.
> There's nothing inconsistent about believing that it would be better off for the country as a whole if tax rates are higher, but not volunteering to personally pay higher than the current actual rate.
If the country would be better off with $100B additional tax revenue, it would be better off with $5B additional tax revenue.
They mean taxes are too low. 2 ways to make up a deficit: Raise taxes or cut services. They want the deficit fixed, and they want it done through taxes.
> They mean taxes are too low. 2 ways to make up a deficit: Raise taxes or cut services.
Interesting that you equate spending with services.
The deficit is spending - revenues. The latter are only slightly connected to rates, especially the top marginal rate.[1]
Are they looking to get more revenues from the 50% of the population that isn't paying much of anything or the 1-2% which is paying 40% of revenues?
Which reminds me - while the top marginal rate has jumped around a lot, the "tax revenue as a fraction of GDP" hasn't managed to top 21% for very long and tends to stick around 18%.
We're currently spending around 25% of gdp. Why will we be able to hit that with tax revenue?
[1] The estate tax has never been, and never will be, a significant revenue source. The very rich don't die often enough and they engage in significant estate planning. The estates of the rich folks who died in 2010 weren't going to pay much in taxes because they did estate planning in previous years.
I'm not particularly interested in talking tax policy on HN as I view a great majority of it offtopic. If you'd like to hit reddit.com/r/politics, I'll talk till the cows come home.
If I understand correctly, he was there with Jobs and Zuckerberg, among others. Two generations of hard core startup OGs, I think that's pretty tough to beat.
edit: I mean, isn't the best startup guy to talk to the kind who made himself a billionaire?
In retrospect, I probably should have used a term like "typical" or "statistically representative".
The point is that there are a lot of people who are currently running startups, most of whom are not much like Jobs or Zuckerberg (these are the "average" people). There are also many people who have not started a company, but who might decide to do so if circumstances changed slightly (the marginal people) [1].
In aggregate, both of these groups have just as big an impact on the economy as the few outlier successes.
[1] One might also consider startups which failed, but only barely, as marginal.
You've done a great job presenting a compelling case against talking to successful people about how to breed more success with your comment. I am now convinced!
I had a roommate in college who slept all the time, let's make a point of getting him into the Oval asap. He's going to know way more about job creation than these ass clowns who have created billion dollar companies. </zealoftheconverted>
Straw man argument about the lazy people who sleep all day. Your smug sarcasm and attitude is also not appreciated. You sound like a child.
Facebook employs less than 3000 people. Apple less than 50k. The underemployment rate in the US is over 15%. That's millions and millions of people without work. Is John Doerr single handedly going to put all these people to work?
How about Obama talk to a group of executives from mid-cap or small-cap private and publicly traded companies run by not-any-less real business people who employ MILLIONS of people on a daily basis?
This billionaire hero worship is just so over the top and short sighted. The real economy of everyday goods and services is SO much bigger and just as important than consumer devices and social networking.
Sorry, mom. I will be super, duper serious from now on. As we all know, the internet is serious business and there is never to be any humor, ever.
> This billionaire hero worship is just so over the top and short sighted. The real economy of everyday goods and services is SO much bigger and just as important than consumer devices and social networking.
I think you're kind of missing the point about what you're going to learn from someone like Zuckerberg or Jobs.
Why do you think they have billion dollar businesses? What got them there? What chain of events transpired leading to the creation of that wealth?
In both of those cases, you have guys who figured out concrete ways where new technology could benefit people every day. They saw a future just over the horizon that could be better for everyone, then built companies to create that future. And in each case, their companies gave birth to lucrative cottage industries that let individuals and businesses make some great money.
In a country clearly destined to transition to a very different day-to-day existence than we knew in the 90's, Obama is absolutely better served to go and talk to people with visions of the future than he is talking to the guys who run the Octopus carwash chain or Panera Bread.
But don't listen to me – I'm not serious enough to be taken seriously.
