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[sebastian_dangerfield]

You are confusing consumer benefit in the broad sense with monetary profits. You get a lot of the former. You only pay taxes on the latter. You don't pay any taxes for all of the value you get from your iPhone, for example.

The value of the iPhone in labor cost elimination is XXXXXXXXX. The value of the iPhone as a media device on which is listening to workout mixes and watch movies is XXX.

I don't know what you mean by high and low, but I am talking proportionately. Tech companies tend to have very high fixed costs relatively to marginal costs for additional customers. It costs Facebook nothing to onboard an additional user, but they had to build a big infrastructure to offer that person its services.

The delta between FB's fixed and marginal costs appears unusually large because the marginal cost is so exceptionally low. Its costs of operation versus, say, Citibank, or Johnson & Johnson, is actually quite low.

Uber's app doesn't cost nothing to produce. It has to spend a ton to be able to offer its services.

See my previous comment.

They absolutely do. If United has a flight from Philadelphia to Houston, what's the marginal cost to it of filling another seat on the plane.

Think flights, not seats.

I agree -- it's hard for me to tell what you're talking about sometimes.

This is an "eating the elephant" sort of discussion that should really be addressed on a company by company basis.

Great example. The prior barrier to entry was regulatory. The only reason taxi medallions were worth so much is that they block entry. And driving a taxi is a shitty job! If the government wanted to, it could require a similar license to drive for Uber, and set minimum fares. Uber didn't directly destroy anything -- it just created a much more efficient way to connect taxis and rides, and then people realized how shitty the regulated taxi industry was in most places. Many more people are driving for Uber now than were driving taxis before. Isn't that a good thing? I can get an Uber from my house. Getting a taxi was no sure bet. Isn't that a good thing?

It is. And I am actually in favor of removing "license leveraging schemes" of all kinds. (I think our own licenses, as well as those of CPAs, investment advisors, and many others, should be open to laymen [if you can pass the test, you get a license, regardless of whether you went to school or through training]).

But perhaps the taxi example is a poor one. Perhaps the better example are administrative staff. They're replaced by tech in droves.

So you're happy when government collects taxes on you indirectly through a private party, but not when it collects from you. OK. Doesn't make sense to me, but OK.

Yes. Because the creation of a new tax, like a new agency, means it never goes away. I'd rather that permanent fixture by applied to someone else.

Do you think technological innovation is, on balance, good for society? If so, why would you want less of it?

Most of it, yes. But is considering how disruption can be achieved more smoothly a bad idea?

A business that fails because it cannot compete is not an externality.

I agreed with that. I said a worker put out of a job because of new tech is an externality. If Buyer X stops buying from Seller X and instead starts buying tech from Seller Y, and as a result of this, Seller X's employees are terminated, those job losses are externalities.

I wouldn't have thought you'd be the person to have Old Left economic views about this, but OK. You want to go to the Google search bar and pay huge tax to run a search? Who thinks that's a good idea? Every using the service now would have to pay a tax to get what they get now for free?

I would rather trade dollars than privacy.

If you care, you can use a browser without the cookies. It's not rocket science. Most people accept the cookies because they enable a lot of value-creating stuff. Do you abstain from e-commerce?

I do. I run various blockers. If I have to allow cookies to buy something, I'll suspend them momentarily and then afterward immediately turn them on again.

Many people talk big about how much they care about privacy, but don't actually act accordingly when presented with real-world choices.

I have maybe four apps on my phone, and the settling are all blocked to thwart (as much as I can do so) all acquisition of information. Almost every social media account is set up with a one-off email which contains no contacts. And just to be safe, I refuse to allow access to email contacts.

Let's change the law so that richer people pay more taxes than less rich people.

This is where the rubber meets the road. No one will support punitive taxation (Eisenhower level rates) on tech-titan level wealthy people. And even if they did, it would be a pittance versus the cost of the safety net expansion needed. So what happens? The oncologist pulling down $350k gets a fat tax increase.

The cost is always carried by the affluent, but not crazy rich.

That farmer is almost certainly getting subsidized in a huge way by people who live in blue, urban states. Read Cadillac Desert about how we have paid huge amounts to supply Western agriculture with water. That farmer drives on a federally funded highway to his federally insured bank to cash his farm-subsidy checks for not using his federally-funded water. And the "subsidy" you care about is that he's not using a smart phone?

I wasn't discussing whether the farmer received a benefit from a blue state. I was discussing whether he benefited from tech.

So Wal-Mart is "tech" too, or are you inching closer to agreeing that the problems you are talking about aren't specific to today's tech industry?

To talk tech is wind up talking monopoly. I plead guilty to have broadened the discussion too far.