[LegendHasIt]

Indeed.

And these guys are more inherently evil than the old ones.

[Behind the Blue Wall]

Surprised the Mercury News printed this.

[BostonNeocon]

There are ways for conservatives to avoid using these technologies. Start by downloading the Brave browser- it blocks all ads and prevents surveillance and data mining by Google. It was started by Brendan Eich, the former CEO of Mozilla who got fired for fighting the gay agenda.
https://brave.com/download/

Then, start using other search engines. I’ve started using Qwant.com, but others exist like duckduckgo. These don’t keep a record of your search history, so it can’t be used against you if Google decides that Christianity and low taxes are now tenets of Nazism.

Social media is harder, but I’ve opened up a Protonmail account to start making more subscriptions with. Protonmail is based in Switzerland and fully encrypted, meaning it too is not tracked. You can use Telegram or WhatsApp, which are both encrypted, to avoid Facebook or Google monitoring your chat histories. Take the case of the Harvard teens who were denied admission for their meme chats as a sign of what could come for Christian conservatives.

[dadfly]

the merc news printed VDH? i’m in shock.

although i’ve known this for years (having worked in sv for years), it’s nice to see VDH bringing it to the fore.

[Billthedrill]

Oh, my, now isn't this interesting? VDH appears to break a little new ground in this one and it's a good thing he has tenure because the Silicon Valley Mafia will be coming for him.

A brief demurral - Carnegie was never a robber baron in this sense. The rest, oh my yes. Rockefeller, Morgan, oh, yes.

The key to this dubious title is the employment of insane wealth to effect power outside the field of mere capitalistic competition. And such creatures as Mark "A Wall For Me, None For Thee" Zuckerberg are symptomatic of a very dark drive for power that money can buy. So many of these men and women begin with the object of empowering the individual and end up determined to control that individual that one has to wonder if there isn't some nasty compulsion at work here. Lord Acton was right: absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It was, in the end, "progressives" (in the original meaning) such as Teddy "The Trust-Buster" Roosevelt that dealt with this form of abuse. What is different today is that our academic and industry progressives are largely as much a part of the Uniparty as the political end of things. All one big, happy, self-funding, self-perpetuating family. This explains why Trump, who is quite outside this cozy mutual arrangement, is such a mortal threat. He can't be bought. And that's a problem.

But in the Obama era, the nation received all sorts of progressive lectures on the downsides of being super-rich. Yet such sermonizing never seemed to include Facebook, Starbucks or Amazon.

Naturally not. Today's proggies have been bought and paid for - that's what is different about this. And the currency isn't money, it's power, employed with a criminal and murderous ruthlessness that makes the old robber barons look like altar boys. If such a creature as 0bama could become comfortable with directing killing - about which he boasted - what are we to expect from the likes of Zuckerberg, Cook, and the rest of this bunch?

Kudos to VDH for broaching it. I hope he has somebody watching his back.

[Swordmaker]

Few seem to care that West Coast conglomerates such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Starbucks filtered hundreds of billions in global profits through tax havens such as Bermuda, shorting the United States billions of dollars in income taxes.

Poorly researched and false to fact article. Apple, for example, has zero presence in Bermuda or other "tax havens," and in fact pays its income taxes in the United States, with an average ~27.5% effective tax rate on its world wide profits. In some years, Apple has been the single largest payer of US Income Taxes. . . In 2012, for example, Apple paid $1 out of every $40 of business income taxes paid that year!

Why post an article from an anti capitalist viewpoint on Freerepublic, especially one that distorts facts?

[Swordmaker]

Usually Hanson gets his facts straight, and I as an economist applaud him for it. . . This time he shot from the hip, accepting the talking points of the know nothing liberal critics. Some of the tech firms do indeed use the off-shore tax-haven approach, but in 2014, Apple, accused by Senate committee staff investigators of paying zero US income taxes and moving Apple profits off shore to Ireland, went before a Senate Investigative Committe and under oath bared their accounting and audited corporate US TAX RETURNS, showing that Apple does not play games with US Income Taxes. Apple demonstrated the money held off-shore was money earned off-shore on which Apple had already paid both foreign AND, most importantly, US Income Taxes. ,p> The same can and could not be said for Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or Facebook, all of which used tax shelter schemes to lower their US effective tax rates to as low as 11%, or in the case of Amazon to less than 0.

I don't know what the individual officers of Apple have set up to shelter their earnings. That's private, but the above on Apple's accounting, audits, and taxes is all in public records.

[ransomnote]

I’ve always admired Victor David Hanson. Thanks for posting.

[llevrok]

I wish he’d added Elon Musk and the billions in subsidies he received for Tesla cars. The new Edison, some call him?

Laughing all the way to the bank.