Tech Companies and Deregulation
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has identified a problem but not the true culprit.
Two days ago, acting more investigative journalist than legislator (and in Hawley’s defense, someone has to do it), Hawley harangued Zuckerberg and Dorsey about the coordinated censorship that Facebook, Twitter, and Google obviously engage in regularly. He wants regulation. Stalinist/Nazi Senator Chris Coons of Delaware of course, doing his best impression of Joseph Goebbels, shortly thereafter launched into his own diatribe, redirecting Hawley’s energy by stating that Big Tech/social media conglomerates should be engaged in MORE censorship, especially of alternative science and opinion on climate change, to which Dorsey responded that their policies are “living documents” that will be amended to carry out Coons’s wishes.
Wow. Hawley compared the tech owners to the 19th century “robber barons” while Coons effectively sanctioned them to police free speech for the state.
_______________
How about a scholarly debate on the supposed “robber barons”?
_______________
They are both wrong–dangerously wrong.
Coons is an idiot. Not going to waste time on describing why–if you cannot figure out why, stop reading this and call a hotline geared to help those who sniffed glue and ate paint chips as children.
Hawley is wrong because he buys into the false historical narrative that served as the very justification for the progressivism he seeks to war against.
The supposed “robber barons” were–by and large–independent and incredibly successful entrepreneurs who provided goods and services at incredibly cheap prices and did more to elevate the American, actually global, standard of living than all politicians have or ever will. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil increased literacy rates and REALLY saved the whales. Carnegie’s steel housed millions of Americans in domiciles and made modern American architecture possible. Hill fed Asians, who were frequently on the brink of starvation, with cheap grain from Nebraska.
Hawley misses the entire lesson: the real criminal is the very organization for which he works–the federal government. There is a difference; in fact, an existential one that exists between what Burton Folsom has called market entrepreneurs and political entrepreneurs. The only time the American public is truly robbed is when corporate leaders and state apparatchiks collude to provide protection, advantage, and subsidy; thus throwing a criminal and destructive wrench in the otherwise efficient operation of the free market.
Hawley diagnoses the problem and misses the disease. We need government out of the social media and tech business so that genuine competitors to the FAANGs of the world can emerge, you know, start ups that rise not as a result of huge government contacts that cull public data for the state, for example.
Why prescribe more disease to cure the sickness? Hawley’s ahistorical remedy only opens the door for Deep State Senators from Delaware to kill the patient.
