Regulation won't lower prices... ever. Forget about it. The companies would rather fold, move, or push the costs through some other means. No one is going to be a slave and work at a definite loss on their own free will. If the government says "you can't sell X above Y price", people who aren't selling it below Y will be compelled to STOP SELLING, more than marginally lower their prices below Y (and if they do it, they will offset it on quality, other costs, paychecks, whatever)
Uh, who owns the public garden? My answer is very long-winded so... I won't even bother explaining what I and/or libertarians in general think about government giving or lending the "public garden" to big business. But it's not support, I'll tell you that, and, therefore it can't be something that they rely on libertarians for getting support from.
The idea of getting support from an extremist, minority group, for the ends of political advancement is kind of silly, too. but okay.
Okay. I'm sorry then that I was at least explicitly wrong in my assessment. But implicitly, the government does own the infrastructure, even if not explicitly so - if one unauthorized company were to install lines on multiple privately-owned (whoever owns them, I do not know, and I still doubt they're not state owned, but great, regardless) electric posts and roads, then, the government would see to it that they stop doing that. They would initiate force, on behalf of the actual infrastructure owner (or perhaps against it, if it was both the startup telco installing the lines AND the infrastructure owner), to stop those lines from being installed
That is, at least implicitly, government ownership of the infrastructure. The government can't both be said to not have control over a domain, and have a control over a domain. There has to be at least *some* control there. I would in fact say, consistently, that the government owns everything in that country's arbitrary geographical area, for it has at least some control over everything, and the nominal proprietors ownership is conditional on the acceptance by the part of the state, in other words, as long as the state chooses not to exert the superior right it has over your property.
Sorry for going off a bit. In short, you are probably right in the short end, but I feel I'm still right in the point I wanted to make. It is an implicit ownership of infrastructure by the part of the state, no matter how you word it.
Your use of barriers of entry is incompatible to mine, and I have to say that your use is meaningless - it is reduced to capital. Every business requires capital, so your contempt is with every business and every property owner on earth that has more than what you consider "too high" of a "barrier of entry". How high is too high? $100,000? $1,000,000? One billion? Ten billion? Would you then be in favor of breaking every business which has assets summed to be higher than your stipulated number? This is completely arbitrary and not at all focused on giving the customer (and the economy) what it demands, but merely changing the market to your preconceived notions of what is fair or efficient.
The market is value free, and what you consider efficient can only be proven efficient when people by it. The idea that a single entity can figure out the most efficient means of achieving x without going through that test is discredited, socialist, utopia. You need the minds of at least thousands, freely assembling individuals to achieve even the slightest fraction of what the market has already done for the world.
And for the regional advantage, well, good for that region's consumers - they have attracted an entrepreneur to dump products or services in it, for lower prices than they would otherwise get. I think that's a great thing, thought I understand why interventionists, in their uniform thinking, might think that's bad.
You mean, they maintain low prices at a loss, only until other businesses go bankrupt, then raise them higher than it would otherwise be? If I were mean, I could ask you to cite a real life example of this (there are none), but I'll just say that, when they rise it back up, it leaves open a profit, ROI window for other entrepreneurs to come in. The monopoly would also suffer from popularity for using that strategy so it's not good PR either. Why would you 'gouge' and risk losing everything, as the leader of a market, when you can just carry along and earn a living doing what you do?
The answer to that dilemma of course is using government to raise barriers of entry (there is little to no repercussions and the cost is low), or use government to make you a de-facto monopoly (or a cartel with a few other buddies)
I don't know how much it would cost, but that's what entrepreneurs do, better than bureaucrats. They analyze if an investment is worth by the evaluated return on investment, by how much, how much time it would take, what sorts of advantages they have over the leading company, etc. True economical progress can only be made that way, not with bureaucrats and econometricians sitting in a white building thinking they know how to provide to the population better than the thousands of entrepreneurs that are spread all over.
In sum, yes, capital is hard to accumulate; no, it doesn't mean that therefore you can know how to best use other's capital.
I wish it was the case, at least mises.org would receive tons of donations that way. But no, big business is into government privilege to secure their shares, not free markets where their positions can be challenged by rising entrepreneurs.
Certainly the first to build it has an advantage, but that goes for everything: first to invent, first to write, first to sell, first to buy, etc. etc. That's not a valid criticism against monopolies, and besides, so what? What are you going to do, create regulation against first-movers? I mean... I understand what you're saying but it's a bit pointless in the scope of getting the customer what he wants. A road to the bottom IS actually what raises standards ofliving. We wouldn't be quite well off if we hadn't had a road to the bottom on food, phones, electricity, metals, gas, plastic junk, big macs, gay strippers, silicon, etc. etc.
I actually cherish first-movers, because without them, there would rather be no service provided at all! But interventionists don't think like that, do they... they can only criticize the market after it has been formed after all; else there would be nothing to intervene with.
I'm sure you know all that though because unlike others, you at least know what Austrian Economics is
I think we (free marketeers, sorry for the collective pronoun) are overrepresented too; but I don't post on or debate or even read economics/politics comment sections as often as I'd like to know by how much...
Certainly for the purposes of delivering cheap electricity, the oh-so-evil-monopoly has therefore fulfilled the exact task it was payed to do. I consider that to be a success in raising people's standards of living, more than any state can be trusted with or has achieved.
What kind of entrepeneur has or could obtain the money required to build a large-scale electricity distribution system in competition with an established player?
The same kind which built the first one
Especially an established player can use its status to guarantee that the competitor can't make a profit - by undercutting as long as necessary.
If no one else can make a profit, then the price is already low by the market standard. It may not be low enogh to your econometrical standards, or pterry graphs, but that has no bearing on reality, and is more accurately called an instance of the Nirvana Fallacy.
Telefonica (now Movistar), which was 100% private and had monopoly rights.
"Monopoly rights" don't exist in a free market. You can't have a right over the domain outside your own lines and pipes. Thanks for proving my case. Seems like the state did stop competitors after all.
I'm fine with non-priviledged monopolies. But if you're against monopolies period, may I council you to consistently be against the biggest of them all, the State?
Yes, I'm not an empiricist, and I won't be debating specifics, to your and mine delight. I aim only to break the fallacious comments and cast doubt on the touted status-quo theories - that monopolies always arise; that monopolies are always bad; etc.
Standard Oil did not become a monopoly and was in decline on it's market shares before the anti-trust folks kicked in. It is impossible for one company, one that does not have a competitive advantage over the entire country, to successfully out-compete every localized business, businesses that can better assess a locality's demand. It would only be possible with government; and it is my belief (however unsubstantiated) that the big oil cartel of today is only menacing in its use of state power; it is otherwise very efficient for us to be buying cheap oil, and so was Standard Oil in its time - decreasing the price of kerosene many times a decade.
Let me complete that paragraph for you. "and so, we need the biggest monopoly of them all, aka the State, to break the other monopolies, so we can be free of monopolies! We need the state to take all the wealth, so no one entity owns 'too much' wealth anymore!"
Okay. That isn't oxymoronic or anything, yeah
The question I think you should ask yourself is, why is a single provider bad?
It may very well be that the end result of a free market is that one person or group is found to be more efficient (and trustworthy) than all others, and so people voluntarily decide to give him all the resources for him to work on what he can do best. So what?
What keeps the "free market monopolist"'s prices low isn't the anti-trust board, it's his performance and revenue below the market ROI rate. That competing entrepreneurs are able to come in if he dare make to much of a profit - there doesn't even need to be any, actually competing, at all. The threat is stronger than the execution.
I believe it wasn't uncommon for multiple utility grids to be made, before the state mandated that there could only be one...
http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae9_2_3.pdf
But I don't blame you if you don't believe it, because after all, yours is the most recited story taught in government schools.
The banking system is a complete cartel (do I have to introduce you to Ben Bernanke?), and the housing market has at least a dozen federal agencies regulating it; tons of price floor regulations, mandated easy credit to inflate prices all over; etc. It's not a clear cut case as you make it to be. I would also go on and say that the free market has indeed solved famine whenever it's been allowed to exist in the food market. The poorest places in Africa where thousands (millions?) still die of hunger, are the same places where private property is disallowed by law/custom.
There is just no possible way that telcos anywhere, in any civilized state, doesn't have an agreement by law with the state to utilize the common infrastructure. Whenever roads and electric poles are "public", cable and telephone markets are necessarily, not a free market.
Anything and everything can be argued to be "essential"... where's my free food, free water, free house? What remains of the argument is simply an appeal to tradition.
I don't even have to know the specifics to say that, in order for the prices to be artificially high in the scenario above, the plant owners had to have a superior advantage over other entrepreneurs. Most likely, outside entrepreneurs weren't allowed to build a competing plant, or build a competing grid. The "monopolist's" prices can only be as high as the return on investment isn't high enough for others to undercut them.
Republicans aren't particularly free market either... In fact, the "deregulation" talking point has been used and abused so much by both parties it barely means anything anymore. Turning a government-provided service into a government-mandated one shouldn't be called deregulating, as it is often done. It paints the illusion of a free market where there isn't.
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Regulation won't lower prices... ever. Forget about it. The companies would rather fold, move, or push the costs through some other means. No one is going to be a slave and work at a definite loss on their own free will. If the government says "you can't sell X above Y price", people who aren't selling it below Y will be compelled to STOP SELLING, more than marginally lower their prices below Y (and if they do it, they will offset it on quality, other costs, paychecks, whatever)
Interventionism always fails, in the end.
Uh, who owns the public garden?
My answer is very long-winded so... I won't even bother explaining what I and/or libertarians in general think about government giving or lending the "public garden" to big business. But it's not support, I'll tell you that, and, therefore it can't be something that they rely on libertarians for getting support from.
The idea of getting support from an extremist, minority group, for the ends of political advancement is kind of silly, too. but okay.
Okay. I'm sorry then that I was at least explicitly wrong in my assessment. But implicitly, the government does own the infrastructure, even if not explicitly so - if one unauthorized company were to install lines on multiple privately-owned (whoever owns them, I do not know, and I still doubt they're not state owned, but great, regardless) electric posts and roads, then, the government would see to it that they stop doing that. They would initiate force, on behalf of the actual infrastructure owner (or perhaps against it, if it was both the startup telco installing the lines AND the infrastructure owner), to stop those lines from being installed
That is, at least implicitly, government ownership of the infrastructure. The government can't both be said to not have control over a domain, and have a control over a domain. There has to be at least *some* control there. I would in fact say, consistently, that the government owns everything in that country's arbitrary geographical area, for it has at least some control over everything, and the nominal proprietors ownership is conditional on the acceptance by the part of the state, in other words, as long as the state chooses not to exert the superior right it has over your property.
Sorry for going off a bit. In short, you are probably right in the short end, but I feel I'm still right in the point I wanted to make. It is an implicit ownership of infrastructure by the part of the state, no matter how you word it.
Your use of barriers of entry is incompatible to mine, and I have to say that your use is meaningless - it is reduced to capital. Every business requires capital, so your contempt is with every business and every property owner on earth that has more than what you consider "too high" of a "barrier of entry". How high is too high? $100,000? $1,000,000? One billion? Ten billion? Would you then be in favor of breaking every business which has assets summed to be higher than your stipulated number? This is completely arbitrary and not at all focused on giving the customer (and the economy) what it demands, but merely changing the market to your preconceived notions of what is fair or efficient.
The market is value free, and what you consider efficient can only be proven efficient when people by it. The idea that a single entity can figure out the most efficient means of achieving x without going through that test is discredited, socialist, utopia. You need the minds of at least thousands, freely assembling individuals to achieve even the slightest fraction of what the market has already done for the world.
And for the regional advantage, well, good for that region's consumers - they have attracted an entrepreneur to dump products or services in it, for lower prices than they would otherwise get. I think that's a great thing, thought I understand why interventionists, in their uniform thinking, might think that's bad.
You mean, they maintain low prices at a loss, only until other businesses go bankrupt, then raise them higher than it would otherwise be?
If I were mean, I could ask you to cite a real life example of this (there are none), but I'll just say that, when they rise it back up, it leaves open a profit, ROI window for other entrepreneurs to come in. The monopoly would also suffer from popularity for using that strategy so it's not good PR either. Why would you 'gouge' and risk losing everything, as the leader of a market, when you can just carry along and earn a living doing what you do?
The answer to that dilemma of course is using government to raise barriers of entry (there is little to no repercussions and the cost is low), or use government to make you a de-facto monopoly (or a cartel with a few other buddies)
I don't know how much it would cost, but that's what entrepreneurs do, better than bureaucrats. They analyze if an investment is worth by the evaluated return on investment, by how much, how much time it would take, what sorts of advantages they have over the leading company, etc. True economical progress can only be made that way, not with bureaucrats and econometricians sitting in a white building thinking they know how to provide to the population better than the thousands of entrepreneurs that are spread all over.
In sum, yes, capital is hard to accumulate; no, it doesn't mean that therefore you can know how to best use other's capital.
I wish it was the case, at least mises.org would receive tons of donations that way.
But no, big business is into government privilege to secure their shares, not free markets where their positions can be challenged by rising entrepreneurs.
Certainly the first to build it has an advantage, but that goes for everything: first to invent, first to write, first to sell, first to buy, etc. etc.
That's not a valid criticism against monopolies, and besides, so what? What are you going to do, create regulation against first-movers? I mean... I understand what you're saying but it's a bit pointless in the scope of getting the customer what he wants. A road to the bottom IS actually what raises standards ofliving. We wouldn't be quite well off if we hadn't had a road to the bottom on food, phones, electricity, metals, gas, plastic junk, big macs, gay strippers, silicon, etc. etc.
I actually cherish first-movers, because without them, there would rather be no service provided at all! But interventionists don't think like that, do they... they can only criticize the market after it has been formed after all; else there would be nothing to intervene with.
I'm sure you know all that though because unlike others, you at least know what Austrian Economics is
I think we (free marketeers, sorry for the collective pronoun) are overrepresented too; but I don't post on or debate or even read economics/politics comment sections as often as I'd like to know by how much...
If there is no common infrastructure, then how come the state has the power to give the telco's a monopoly over it?
Certainly for the purposes of delivering cheap electricity, the oh-so-evil-monopoly has therefore fulfilled the exact task it was payed to do. I consider that to be a success in raising people's standards of living, more than any state can be trusted with or has achieved.
What kind of entrepeneur has or could obtain the money required to build a large-scale electricity distribution system in competition with an established player?
The same kind which built the first one
Especially an established player can use its status to guarantee that the competitor can't make a profit - by undercutting as long as necessary.
If no one else can make a profit, then the price is already low by the market standard. It may not be low enogh to your econometrical standards, or pterry graphs, but that has no bearing on reality, and is more accurately called an instance of the Nirvana Fallacy.
Telefonica (now Movistar), which was 100% private and had monopoly rights.
"Monopoly rights" don't exist in a free market. You can't have a right over the domain outside your own lines and pipes. Thanks for proving my case. Seems like the state did stop competitors after all.
I'm fine with non-priviledged monopolies. But if you're against monopolies period, may I council you to consistently be against the biggest of them all, the State?
Yes, I'm not an empiricist, and I won't be debating specifics, to your and mine delight.
I aim only to break the fallacious comments and cast doubt on the touted status-quo theories - that monopolies always arise; that monopolies are always bad; etc.
Standard Oil did not become a monopoly and was in decline on it's market shares before the anti-trust folks kicked in. It is impossible for one company, one that does not have a competitive advantage over the entire country, to successfully out-compete every localized business, businesses that can better assess a locality's demand. It would only be possible with government; and it is my belief (however unsubstantiated) that the big oil cartel of today is only menacing in its use of state power; it is otherwise very efficient for us to be buying cheap oil, and so was Standard Oil in its time - decreasing the price of kerosene many times a decade.
Let me complete that paragraph for you. "and so, we need the biggest monopoly of them all, aka the State, to break the other monopolies, so we can be free of monopolies! We need the state to take all the wealth, so no one entity owns 'too much' wealth anymore!" Okay. That isn't oxymoronic or anything, yeah
The question I think you should ask yourself is, why is a single provider bad? It may very well be that the end result of a free market is that one person or group is found to be more efficient (and trustworthy) than all others, and so people voluntarily decide to give him all the resources for him to work on what he can do best. So what? What keeps the "free market monopolist"'s prices low isn't the anti-trust board, it's his performance and revenue below the market ROI rate. That competing entrepreneurs are able to come in if he dare make to much of a profit - there doesn't even need to be any, actually competing, at all. The threat is stronger than the execution.
I believe it wasn't uncommon for multiple utility grids to be made, before the state mandated that there could only be one... http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/rae9_2_3.pdf But I don't blame you if you don't believe it, because after all, yours is the most recited story taught in government schools.
How the hell did you come to blame the free market for the actions of a dictator?
I mean... really?
The banking system is a complete cartel (do I have to introduce you to Ben Bernanke?), and the housing market has at least a dozen federal agencies regulating it; tons of price floor regulations, mandated easy credit to inflate prices all over; etc.
It's not a clear cut case as you make it to be. I would also go on and say that the free market has indeed solved famine whenever it's been allowed to exist in the food market. The poorest places in Africa where thousands (millions?) still die of hunger, are the same places where private property is disallowed by law/custom.
There is just no possible way that telcos anywhere, in any civilized state, doesn't have an agreement by law with the state to utilize the common infrastructure. Whenever roads and electric poles are "public", cable and telephone markets are necessarily, not a free market.
Anything and everything can be argued to be "essential"... where's my free food, free water, free house?
What remains of the argument is simply an appeal to tradition.
They are still free to do anything they want - with their money.
I don't even have to know the specifics to say that, in order for the prices to be artificially high in the scenario above, the plant owners had to have a superior advantage over other entrepreneurs. Most likely, outside entrepreneurs weren't allowed to build a competing plant, or build a competing grid. The "monopolist's" prices can only be as high as the return on investment isn't high enough for others to undercut them.
Not a free market.
Republicans aren't particularly free market either...
In fact, the "deregulation" talking point has been used and abused so much by both parties it barely means anything anymore. Turning a government-provided service into a government-mandated one shouldn't be called deregulating, as it is often done. It paints the illusion of a free market where there isn't.