(06-23-2016, 09:08 AM)Cynic Hero Wrote: The Current rise in entrepreneurship is only the beginning. Soon Millennials will recognizes the need for meritocratic entrepreneurs and build a shadow government to replace the current government in the beltway. Soon the meritocratic state, the civil-military education system, the combined civil and military meritocratic caste, these will come into existence. Like him or hate him martin Shkreli is the prototype of the future administrative entrepreneurs who would be the "advisors" to the governments of Latin America after the vassalization that continent. Far more so, Shkreli is the prototype of the military governors who would administer the Middle East and North Africa after the general pacification of the middle east. It would be done on a MUCH grander scale than what Shkreli is trying to do with his company.
Completely wrong. Small-scale entrepreneurs fill the interstices of an economy that Big Government and monopolistic behemoths ignore because such activity, however useful it may be to Humanity as a whole, is either 'inadequately profitable' or is impossible to micromanage on a large scale. But if such businesses create a family income for the owners that working to exhaustion for near-starvation pay does not offer, then economic freedom will manifest itself in a revival of small business. Some workers will see that their employers offer only 'jobs too small for their spirits', as an assembly-line worker reported to Studs Terkel in Working -- a reality now spreading elsewhere into the American economy. Think also of the low glass ceilings that bureaucratic organizations impose upon anyone who did not get hired for the fast track like the few people 'entitled' to become part of the elite.
Add to this that college education is becoming fiendishly expensive while no longer offering a reliable prospect of an above-average income. College graduates are job-takers and not job-creators. The typical college graduate would rather work as a letter carrier than start a house-cleaning service. But miss college, and one may want to set up a dry-goods store in a small town that fills a niche that chain retailers abandoned. Just because people largely abandoned impulse shopping (and retailers can't profit without people who buy on impulse) during the worst economic meltdown since 1929-1933 does not mean that they won't return as a phenomenon that Amazon can't well serve.
People do not like being abused, exploited, and humiliated; they will make great personal sacrifices to avoid such. Two weeks' paid vacation after ten years' employment isn't worth hating one's job. One is more likely to end up with several weeks of unemployment than 'earning' two weeks of vacation after ten years of devoted service to an employer who deserves no personal devotion.
The "meritocratic" scheme that you suggest well describes what we now have in Corporate America, with a self-serving Soviet-style nomenklatura controlling the internal opportunities while keeping wages down. I can easily imagine how that scenario works by 2100, when the next Crisis Era arrives. Your 'meritocratic' elite will be among the second batch of people to the guillotine or whatever new technology of execution is in vogue at the time. Who will precede them? The political leadership recently overthrown and tried as 'criminals against humanity', 'counter-revolutionary plotters', or even simply 'murderers and thieves'.
Finally, Martin Shkreli is the worst sort of capitalist out there -- someone who finds a commodity to monopolize to the harm of everyone else. It's not surprising that an administration that dislikes corporations bleeding the government would turn on him and look for a pretext for criminal charges against him. Monopoly capitalism is good only for the monopolist.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.