Comment by greiskul
3 years ago
We really need to have much stronger anti trust legislation and enforcement. It is absolutely ridiculous to allow companies to behave this way.
And before someone says that "free market is always good and government is bad", the optimum free market strategy if there is no government is to hire hitmen to assassinate the executives of competidor companies. A real competitive free market will always require the government to prohibit companies from forming artificial mottes around their monopolies.
> And before someone says that "free market is always good and government is bad"
I've never really understood that dichotomy myself. The free market IS good, that is for sure. But it won't exist unless the gov't uses its power to create it. Companies have to be kept small enough that there will always be a bunch of choices. And that won't happen by itself.
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I generally agree, but I tend to turn the perspective around to this: truly "Free Markets" are basically the natural, unevolved state of affairs when you don't have a better system in place. The whole reason we invented those better systems is to improve the "consequences for the majority".
A true libertarian wouldn't support corporations at all. They are as bad as tyrannical governments. Proprietorships and partnerships would limit exposure to tyranny of the corporation. They focus the responsibility of the business on the owner and not some protected class of employee.
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The optimal free market with no government is for corporations (collections of people) to use violent force to enforce their goals. A sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government.
A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules and in a lot of cases, does. The issue is the rules themselves, which were crafted by? Corps.
Corps are entirely different. They push harder and harder and harder for PROFITS and will inevitably cross lines. When crossing those lines not only has no meaningful penalty, but actually turns a profit, after the fines are subtracted, they will not only continue to do it, but push even harder. After all, there's no real consequences, so why worry?
Authoritarian governments exist, and are more common than democratic ones.
Besides, democratic corporations exist too. They are just incredibly rare.
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> A sufficiently powerful corporation is worse than a government, because the current government at least pretends to play by the rules
The most despotic and scary governments of history would probably like a word with you. Maintaining a believable pretense of following any rules is a luxury we take for granted in many countries today, but Mao and Stalin didn't worry about the appearance of propriety.
Not really arguing against your main point though, I think you're right. Just don't forget how bad totalitarian governments can be.
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> A sufficiently powerful corporation is indistinguishable from a government.
Only if the government is a dictatorship. A sufficiently powerful corporation will never look like a functional democracy.
Boards appoint executives, boards are voted in by shareholders, shareholders are determined by $, the more money you have the more votes you can buy.
Companies are, in theory, dysfunctional representative republics.
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> A sufficiently powerful corporation will never look like a functional democracy.
True, but neither will a sufficiently powerful government.
looks around for an example of a functional democracy
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No, if you remove either corporations or governments from the equation, the remaining thing will morph and split to recreate this. Corporations aren't fixed in stone - a sufficiently powerful one may be indistinguishable from a dictatorship, but it'll also evolve the same way.
That wouldn't be a free market. It would be some kind of oligarchic corporatism. Government is necessary to truly enable free markets. The key to understanding that is to understand what "free" truly means [0]. It isn't "do what thou wilt".
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38537665
A freely competitive market (as envisioned by Adam Smith) is very different from a free market (as the term is commonly used today, at least by many conservative political parties). I fully agree that without sufficient regulations markets cease to be freely competitive.
This reminds me of the East India Company: forcing China to buy opium even if it really harmed both its population and economy.
Indian may not be too happy with all the Marathas wars and colonization.
Anyway, is not a matter of which is the worse but of how can we get the best from both of them
The East India Company didn’t directly even ship opium to China, that was all done by private merchants.
And in any case initially it wasn’t so much about opium as about free trade in general. The British would’ve been fine with selling textiles, tools and other stuff to the Chinese people who wanted to buy them. Opium was just much easier to smuggle than anything else.
We simply need meaningful penalties that involve jail time and % fines, on top of the ill gotten gains. The current model is steal $1 million, get fined $250k, enjoy the profits.
Sadly, that'll never happen, because CU made bribery legal and who's congress going to listen to? The 100s of millions they allegedly govern or the guy that handed them $25k for a kitchen remodel.
Spoiler: It's not the citizens.
> Sadly, that'll never happen, because CU made bribery legal
Citizens United was a USSC ruling; TFA is about Poland.
Poland is in the EU; NEWAG seems to be a formerly state-owned company, that was fully privatized in 2003.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newag
I'm awfully worried about both Poland and Hungary, and their place in the EU even though I'm a brit, and now out of the EU. I think both countries should have had their EU membership suspended years ago, for corruption; meddling with judicial appointments; and generally not allowing free media. I suspect Hungary is much worse, but for me, a major reason for supporting Brexit was that I didn't want to be in a political alliance with countries that didn't comply with international treaties, which the EU was so reluctant to enforce.
> and generally not allowing free media
To be fair not something Britain can be particularly proud of considering its libel laws.
Arguably free media is suppressed in most of Europe. In Sweden state press subsidies are not given to press considered extreme by those in power to give it. Of course, and no wonder, those in power is the opposition. The situation is similar in other European countries.
You're absolutely right. My bad.
> the optimum free market strategy if there is no government is to hire hitmen to assassinate the executives of competidor companies
There's a huge difference between opposing regulation and permitting murder. Equating the two is a strawman, given that there are a large number of people who oppose various regulations and very few who would want to legalize murder.
I mean.. I'm not up for outright legalizing murder, but as the world turns, I understand it more and more. Some people just need a killin.
As far as I understand the conditions of a free market are not met in this case:
According to the english Wikipedia: * A capitalist free-market economy is an economic system where prices for goods and services are set freely by the forces of supply and demand [...]
Here one can argue that the available services (i.e. maintaining a train) are not set freely by the forces of supply and demand, but by the constructor of the train; at least to some extend.
You said that "[a] real competitive free market will always require the government to prohibit companies from forming artificial mottes around their monopolies". I partially agree in this case. A free market that contains competitors that are able to fully satiate it will always require a government that hinders it from working towards a controlled market. By a controlled market I mean monopoles, oligopoles, cartels, or otherwise controlled environments(1). So if there's no competitor I can walk to in case I am unhappy with my trading partner the market isn't free by definition. I can hardly think of bakeries in town requiring governmental intervention (unless they form a cartel, that is).
Not every market should be free, however. I guess you've just met too many hard-liners arguing for shady business practices in the name of the free market. I'd argue that a shady business will cease to exist in a free market due to the customers running away.
PS: Funny enough, I am fully onboard with stronger anti-trust enforcement (legislation only if that proves to be insufficient), only that I am doing it as a proponent to regain market freedom.
(1) Intentionally left broad as I can't be bothered to come up with a definition that fits what I have in mind.
Funny that your optimum free market strategy is murder. A market where murder is a legitimate strategy is anything but free. In fact a good litmus test as to the freedom of a market (or any social structure) is the legitimacy of murder.
Comparing murder to antitrust therefore seems to be a pretty weak argument. Deontological libertarians would view the use of force required to enforce antitrust as authoritarian overreach. They would see no moral justification in the enforcement of arbitrary limitations on the voluntary transactions of consenting parties. They would see these as tyrannical.
This stems from a core disagreement about the nature of society. Some people see it a as a collective project for the good of all participants (the sticky points being the definition of "good", and the non-optionality of "collective"). Others see it as simply an agreement to coexist peacefully and cooperate only voluntarily, while embracing the Darwinian nature of said coexistence.
Each side is well meaning I'm sure, but I find it hard to reconcile these two worldviews.
Coexistence - peaceful - darwinian. A circle that's hard to square.
I don't see why. It's basically what happens in any free society - we (as individuals, organizations, social orders) compete over finite resources. Disputes are resolved via due process. Winners win and losers lose. The difference between civilized and uncivilized is only in which actions are available to the players, not in the nature of the game.
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> We really need to have much stronger anti trust legislation and enforcement. It is absolutely ridiculous to allow companies to behave this way.
You think? I have been wondering the same thing myself for years and i'm still flabbergasted that people don't treat this stuff more seriously.
No one literally says that.
> "free market is always good and government is bad"
This view seems especially American, but it is also a very liberal view (in the philosophical sense, not the somewhat weird partisan sense). Liberalism reconceives the common good, private property, and freedom dramatically. Whereas traditionally, the state is viewed as steward of the common good (that is its essential function), and private property as something instituted for the sake of the common good, liberalism conceives of private property as primary and the common good as something grudgingly ceded from the private good. Freedom is traditionally understood as the ability to do what one ought (the freedom to be what you are by nature, that is, a human being), but liberalism construes it as the ability to do whatever you please. (It's an odd idea. If I happen to want to gouge my eyes out and cut my arms off for no reason, doing so does not make me free. It makes me less free, because now I am less capable of functioning fully as a human being. I am confined and prevented from doing all sorts of good things. Human nature is the yardstick by which freedom is measured.)
What does this all mean? Well, it means government becomes construed as an artificial, even malicious construct that stands in the way of freedom. Certainly corruption exists, but this is not a valid argument against government as such. And besides, without government, something fills the vacuum. The absence of authority isn't freedom, but exposure to power that lacks authority.
So, yeah, free markets are good, as long as freedom (and thus the good) is construed in the traditional, not the liberal sense. That means that government, properly understood, is not an obstacle to free markets, but a sine qua non of truly free markets.
> We really need to have much stronger anti trust legislation and enforcement
The Microsoft disaster you are replying to could just as easily be blamed on the government in the first place. Why were they so slow to react? Why couldn't the FTC have seen that, or been alerted and acted immediately? There is no legitimate reason, other than the government is a socialist organization that has no incentive to actually get anything done. This is why USPS, VA, Amtrak, etc all suck. Throwing more government at the problem will have the opposite effect: less will get done!