what makes people think they're going to bother to jump when the hurdles are removed?
Competitors.
They'll market their reactor as the safest, (...)
Lets compare a 'heavy regulation' with a 'lower regulation' example.
Do you dig in various banks balance sheets before you create a checking account? Can you imagine how pissed off Madoff's 'customers' are at the SEC right now? I'm guessing mighty pissed.
Now, how much research do you do when you're buying a five grand flat screen TV? Do you just buy the first hunk of crap with the fancy ad?
So, if average consumers are so careful to buy an appliance, what makes you think that purchasers of 500 million dollar reactors would suddenly act like brain-dead retards?
They won't, unless all US made reactors are exactly the same - except for the brand name, since they all used the corresponding volumes of the Federal Register as their blueprints, which leads to my previous point about regulations being simply an anti-competition gimmick.
Marketing is more useful the more the product you make is regulated, since an increasing number of product characteristics are simply standardized by law. Do you find it a coincidence that it has been one of the fastest growing careers in the past century?
(...) and when it blows up, they'll have pulled their cash out of the corporation and run for the hills, leaving behind a husk of a limited liability corp and the taxpayers holding the bag of a really, really expensive Superfund site.
Limited liability laws are shit, I wholeheartedly agree. But they are what they are: laws. Remember who makes them?
In a truly free market, corporations might declare limited liability or they might take unlimited liability, but in such a scenario I'm guessing a limited liability corporation building a 1.21 gigawatt nuclear reactor in downtown Manhattan is gonna have a little difficulty getting capital.:-)
You say that 'regulations could decrease this probability (of another accident) by orders of magnitude(...)'. Regulations?! Like SEC regulators that caught Madoff before he could do any real damage with his fraudulent operation? Oh, wait...
People don't create the fail-safe reactor by following guidelines and rules written by politicians who know shit about nuclear physics. They do it because the incentive of being the safest and most marketable reactor will make them a truckload of money!
The only thing regulation does is remove a characteristic of a product from the sphere of market competition and turn it into a standard throughout the industry.
I guess the corporations must like it, its one less thing to be concerned about, but for the rest of us? I don't know. If that's well thought of, great, no harm done, if not, tough luck people, we all blow up at the same time. Did we forget the old adage of 'having all eggs in one basket'?
I don't know where comes this blind faith in 'regulation'. Does _God_ write them?
Dan, this simple thing of 'the initial capital investment' isn't quite that simple.
There's R&D, the actual cost of hardware, some of which may not even exist, requiring more R&D funding and time, personnel expenses. All of that must add up in the end with a healthy profit, otherwise nobody will do it.
As if these weren't enough of a hurdle, there are also regulations with a compliance cost. Environmental legislation may outright ban or make such a project a net loss.
Oh, and they need to pay taxes too, a bigger chunk in proportion to how successful they are. There's a great quote by Hazlitt that goes:
When a corporation loses a hundred cents of every dollar it loses, and is permitted to keep only fifty-two cents of every dollar it gains, and when it cannot adequately offset its years of losses against its years of gains, its policies are affected. It does not expand its operations, or it expands only those attended with a minimum of risk.
While I agree that subsidies are bad, I don't understand how you then proceed to say that the 80 billion subsidies for alternative energies are 'good'.
How can stealing MORE resources from the US economy be better than simply ending all subsidies to whatever technology, ceasing government intervention in the energy market, actually using property rights laws to allow for the pollution externals to be correctly priced and internalized, and let the market, i.e. we the people, sort out which work better.
I sincerely don't think that trying to 'over-subsidize' Green energy over Oil is a sensible solution.
Lesson, you are replaceable. If you are not replaceable, then you are too dangerous to have.
That's a good warm blanket for mediocre people to snuggle under, but not really true. There is a reason Josh wasn't fired for a long time and quit his job just like that, and that is because he was probably just picked up by a competitor in a snap.
Nuclear weapons may be dangerous, dirty and hated by many, but you'd rather have them, than your adversary.
I'm sorry, but this story is laughable. Comments about a dark, cave-like office? "I tried to sound cheerful: 'Hi Josh!'"? Smells?
The bottom line is, people feel threatened and diminished when they just can't do what you do. Especially if you look weird and act weird.
He's trying to say 64% isn't enough to be a monopoly? What standard will you accept as "not a monopoly"? 64% is huge. I'd go so far as to say that over 50% is monopolistic.
Gee, that's what I call stretching a concept. What monopoly MEANS is 100%, and you can't get what you want anywhere else.
You're pouring emotion here, not reason. Any successful company in your view is a moving target to be split in many. Perfect competition does not exist.
So what. What matters, is were they able to gouge? Yes. Was the price totally unrelated to Standard Oil's costs? Probably, in some places at some times.
Prices have nothing to do whatsoever with costs. Where do you get that from?
So if an economic agent has the freedom to set a very high price do you make it a case for trust-busting? Heck, you better chop me up into small pieces, I have been known to charge a stiff fee for freelance work and gotten away with it.
So, everyone got it wrong? I find that highly unlikely. Whenever someone says everyone else is wrong, that's when you should be extremely skeptical.
You're saying a million people can't be wrong? Argumentum ad populum?:-)
I don't know, but in my experience 'everybody' is wrong very often. It's either that, or you and me are batshit insane for being opposed to granting monopolies on ideas and creating artificial scarcity.
First, I think your anger at the SEC is misplaced. I grant you that there have been some monumental screwups in that institution, and that in the light of our current economic woes some of the trust we placed in our financial institutions seems misplaced. Having said that, the institutions most responsible were not the regulators but the regulatees- AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, the now endless litany of failed or failing banks- we were deliberately deceived, and they were foolishly wrong in their calculation of risk. Should the economic regulations surrounding these institutions, and the government agencies that enforce them, be changed? Absolutely. Should we allow the scoundrels of industry a freer reign with which to abuse our trust once again? Absolutely not. Re-regulate, don't de-regulate.
You think my anger is misplaced? This is a government agency with a budget that went from 400 million dollars in 2000 to almost a BILLION dollars today and almost four thousand full-time staff that do its job of cracking down on a Ponzi scheme that they were WARNED about in 1999 and again in 2005?
So you think the SEC should be 're-regulated' instead of being trashed to give that money back to the taxpayers?
Fannie and Freddie are government sponsored enterprises, so they are hardly 'regulatees' in my book. All that leaves for me to blame is AIG. Ok, I blame them, let them go bankrupt! That's the best discipline to keep those 'scoundrels' from overreaching! Oh, seems the federal government can't let that happen either... And is even giving them more money for their failure. See where I'm getting at?
Secondly, you seem to be arguing that the economy has grown past the point where it needs the abuses of the past. You then go on to mention "even worse informal market jobs" as being the consequence of the absence of minimum wage. This is a contradiction, and it reveals the extent of your experience with the truly deregulated markets. Outside of the minimum wage economy lies misery, particularly where it relates to the (totally unregulated) labor conditions under which illegal immigrants work. It would kill you to work like that, and if you suspect for even a moment that it was more than the accident of your birth that protected you from that fate, think again. The companies that abuse immigrants, if given even the faintest whiff of an opportunity, would cheerfully work you to death too.
The fact is that while companies do bid for the services of workers, in the swollen uneducated labor market the cost of the mobility required by the free exchange of services is prohibitive to most workers. Those that do migrate do so constantly, unable to scrape together enough savings to escape their lifestyle, and denying their children the education needed to eventually find a better life. Even if you maintain that those workers have earned their lives- an attitude I find repugnant- I have found few people willing to callously condemn the children of this country to lives of ceaseless misery on the back of an empty economic principle.
How is what I said a contradiction? The fact that people are working for less than the minimum wage in horrid conditions is because they are forbidden to work in the normal conditions of the formal market because _working and employing for less than the minimum wage is ILLEGAL_. Illegal things have a way of happening in less than nice ways.
Compare the living standard of a hooker working in a brothel in Nevada to one in different state. If the latter gets the crap beat out of her by her pimp she can't go to the cops because then she's a criminal. The first one doesn't have a pimp, she has a contract with which she can sue her boss for any violations.
'Totally deregulated market' does not mean a lawless society where might is right. A free, unregulated market system presupposes
I find the term 'robber baron' quite amusing. Did they really put on masks and hold people up on train tracks?;-)
Seriously now, these companies weren't busted because they were 'monopolies'. In fact there was more competition then then there is today. They were simply singled out because they big, successful and efficient.
This is a small excerpt from D.T. Armentano, the author of the book "Antitrust and monopoly". It's all a worthy read, but I took just a small nip that pertains especially to the Standard Oil case.
One of the most famous (and misunderstood) antitrust cases in history is US v. Standard Oil of New Jersey (1911).
The popular explanation of this case is that Standard Oil monopolized the oil industry, destroyed rivals through the use of predatory price-cutting, raised prices to consumers, and was punished by the Supreme Court for these proven transgressions. Nice story but totally false.
First, Standard never even monopolized petroleum refining, let alone the entire oil industry (production, transportation, refining, distribution) which would have been an impossibility. Even in domestic refining, Standard's share of the market declined for decades prior to the antitrust case (64% in 1907) and there were at least 137 competitors (firms like Shell, Gulf, Texaco) in oil refining in 1911.
"A free-market 'monopoly' supplier is theoretically possible but not necessarily harmful and would not rationalize any antitrust regulation."
Second, although predatory practices were alleged by the government at trial, Standard offered rebuttal on all counts. Neither the trial court nor the Supreme Court ever made any specific finding of guilt on the conflicting charges of predatory practices.
Third, petroleum market outputs increased and prices declined for decades during the alleged period of "monopolization" by Standard Oil. For example, prices for kerosene (the industry's major product) were 30 cents a gallon in 1869 and fell to about 6 cents a gallon at the time of the antitrust trial.
Finally, the Supreme Court broke up the Standard Oil holding company not because of any demonstrable harm to consumers (there was none) but because it discerned some vague "intent" to monopolize through Standard's many mergers, an "intent" that just as clearly never succeeded in producing any monopoly. Yet generations of economic and legal commentators have been misled about monopoly and the alleged efficacy of antitrust policy because of the "facts everybody knows" concerning the Standard Oil antitrust case.
Well, that's what fraud laws are for. People who commit fraud really should be in jail.
The thing is, regulation fails on two counts off the top of my head. One, if there were no SEC, Federal Reserve and FDIC people would take as much care, if not more, when picking banks, investment funds, etc, as they do when picking any other product in the market. What government does is take this individual decision away from people and substitutes it for a false sense of security.
We all saw what happened, the SEC got many calls saying that something was up in the Madoff business did nothing about it. Which leads us to Two, the government and its agencies fail big just as anyone, except we are all FORCED to put all our eggs on their basket, sometimes against our better judgement.
While I acknowledge this extreme example you gave about working hours, which is factual for the beginning of the industrial revolution, it does not follow to conclude that it was minimum wage laws that changed that picture. The reason for wage increases is increased productivity which is made possible by the accumulation of capital. That is what enables a worker to produce 4.800 gadgets a day, instead of producing maybe one with his hands, if he's good at it.
When I read your last paragraph I must stop and think too. Does this person not understand how a market works? Does he not know that employers bid up the employee's labor 'price' just as consumers bid up the prices of goods? That all minimum wage laws do is unemploy young people, disadvantaged minorities and unskilled people who are now forced to: 1. starve, 2. welfare or 3. work even worse informal market jobs?
Regulation is just a word. I think people usually support it on emotion alone. As with everything, the devil is on the details
Yes I do. The point is, the current rules do NOT level the playing field, they simply protect the politically favored market players from competition. They are designed to preserve people with a lot of power in place.
The fact of the matter is, cartels, price-collusion, big mergers, they all failed miserably back in the time when we were much closer to true laissez-faire than today, i.e. late 19th century USA. That's because these schemes are very unstable in a free market since participants can always just walk out when it benefits them. Moreover companies that attempted consolidation were consistently undercut by a smaller, more efficient competitors.
So antitrust laws and the rest of the 'progressive' political movement didn't happen because there was monopoly and it needed fixing. It was because of the lack of it. They are a direct result of a reaction from segments of business to declining profits due to the downward pressure on prices that is a direct consequence of free competition. They just wouldn't have that, and went to the government to fix it.
With governmental support, cartels had a way do discipline their members by the force of law. And huge stable corporations become possible once the government issues regulations that used to be in the scope of the market, therefore hindering small companies while giving the big players a comparative advantage.
So I suppose all inventions and creative works before the patent system was implemented were all freak accidents in your view?
It is not because of the patent system that people use their heads. They use their heads to gain a competitive advantage, which they seek whether or not they are granted a monopoly.
If someone has a patent on the '1st method' you CAN'T improve on it, unless you want the original patent holder to own your improvement too. And since the owner of a patent enjoys a monopoly he has no incentive to improve on it so a patent is effectively a 'time out' on technological development as long as it is valid.
This excerpt from the 1st Chapter of Mr. Boldrin's book is a very compelling example of how patents stifle innovation instead of promoting it.
There is no 'Capitalism'. There is classical Liberalism, and there are other 'systems' that depart from it in degree, some more than others.
Liberalism is more advantageous for everybody and benefits nobody in particular, while all systems we currently experiment today are attempts to favor certain groups while necessarily screwing everybody else in the process. Which is kind of why they're so popular today.:-)
So? Why do we care, since democracy is obviously so susceptible to be taken over by special interests who proceed to craft laws to be granted a monopoly on 'intellectual property' we then are forced to battle in court?
Democracy clearly sucks, we should just give up on the whole government idea altogether, the problem on who is on it is just too damn hard.
What do you mean unprecedented? It happened many times in the past. The government, by itself or thru a central bank increases the money supply which is is further pyramid when it enters the fractional reserve banking system, making interest rates artificially fall.
This leads to malinvestment, i.e. economic activity that cannot be sustained except in these exceptional easy credit conditions. When that credit expansion invariably becomes unsustainable because that credit was not backed by genuine savings and interest rates inch upwards, the whole deck of cards comes crashing down.
Happened in the 19th century, happened TWICE in the 20s and is happening now.
Global warming had nothing to do with the Australian incident. Bush, forest, snarf fires have pretty much always happened.
What happened to make it bodycount was that their government has more and more been taken over by envirowackos that prohibit people from putting trees down, even if it means living surrounded by a potential inferno.
I read about this guy that was gonna put down some two hundred trees to make a 100-meter fire clearing for his house. The government fined him. He said fuck it, and did it anyway. His house is one of the few that didn't burn to the ground.
Bottom line, even if global warming is that big a problem, the last one we should have fight that problem is the State and its army of mediocrity, incompetence and lust for power.
He and other state officials say it is a matter of fairness: Internet vendors shouldn't have a tax-exempt advantage over Wisconsin's brick-and-mortar retail stores."
Of course. Its all about fairness. The extra 7 million dollars really haven't weighed on the decision at all.
But that doesn't mean that "copyright infringement" is ok, it's not. The marketplace works on supply/demand, and bootlegging music destroys the demand side of the marketplace, and it's to the interest of the marketplace (including its consumers) to see that the demand side of the equation is preserved so that the engine of the free market can still operate.
Artificially restricting supply by legislation hardly goes along with any free-market concept. By the same logic, Katrina was great. It increased the demand for basic services, building contractors and much more.
Copyright infringement is not theft, it merely makes a dent in what otherwise is a monopoly profit.
Book tip for a very good exposition of the view opposing patents, copyright and trademark legislation.
Slashdot Mirror
what makes people think they're going to bother to jump when the hurdles are removed?
Competitors.
They'll market their reactor as the safest, (...)
Lets compare a 'heavy regulation' with a 'lower regulation' example.
Do you dig in various banks balance sheets before you create a checking account? Can you imagine how pissed off Madoff's 'customers' are at the SEC right now? I'm guessing mighty pissed.
Now, how much research do you do when you're buying a five grand flat screen TV? Do you just buy the first hunk of crap with the fancy ad?
So, if average consumers are so careful to buy an appliance, what makes you think that purchasers of 500 million dollar reactors would suddenly act like brain-dead retards?
They won't, unless all US made reactors are exactly the same - except for the brand name, since they all used the corresponding volumes of the Federal Register as their blueprints, which leads to my previous point about regulations being simply an anti-competition gimmick.
Marketing is more useful the more the product you make is regulated, since an increasing number of product characteristics are simply standardized by law. Do you find it a coincidence that it has been one of the fastest growing careers in the past century?
(...) and when it blows up, they'll have pulled their cash out of the corporation and run for the hills, leaving behind a husk of a limited liability corp and the taxpayers holding the bag of a really, really expensive Superfund site.
Limited liability laws are shit, I wholeheartedly agree. But they are what they are: laws. Remember who makes them?
In a truly free market, corporations might declare limited liability or they might take unlimited liability, but in such a scenario I'm guessing a limited liability corporation building a 1.21 gigawatt nuclear reactor in downtown Manhattan is gonna have a little difficulty getting capital. :-)
Two words. Climate change. It is now considered a pollutant and has been for a few years now.
Then you are a polluter every time you exhale.
That is, unless you are a plant, which I'm not wholly unconvinced.
Shame on you otherwise.
That still would emit too much CO2. Unless you could get them to do it without breathing... hmmm.
Ouch, that Irving Fisher quip at the end probably pissed the Friedman fanbois. ;-)
You say that 'regulations could decrease this probability (of another accident) by orders of magnitude(...)'. Regulations?! Like SEC regulators that caught Madoff before he could do any real damage with his fraudulent operation? Oh, wait...
People don't create the fail-safe reactor by following guidelines and rules written by politicians who know shit about nuclear physics. They do it because the incentive of being the safest and most marketable reactor will make them a truckload of money!
The only thing regulation does is remove a characteristic of a product from the sphere of market competition and turn it into a standard throughout the industry.
I guess the corporations must like it, its one less thing to be concerned about, but for the rest of us? I don't know. If that's well thought of, great, no harm done, if not, tough luck people, we all blow up at the same time. Did we forget the old adage of 'having all eggs in one basket'?
I don't know where comes this blind faith in 'regulation'. Does _God_ write them?
Dan, this simple thing of 'the initial capital investment' isn't quite that simple.
There's R&D, the actual cost of hardware, some of which may not even exist, requiring more R&D funding and time, personnel expenses. All of that must add up in the end with a healthy profit, otherwise nobody will do it.
As if these weren't enough of a hurdle, there are also regulations with a compliance cost. Environmental legislation may outright ban or make such a project a net loss.
Oh, and they need to pay taxes too, a bigger chunk in proportion to how successful they are. There's a great quote by Hazlitt that goes:
When a corporation loses a hundred cents of every dollar it loses, and is permitted to keep only fifty-two cents of every dollar it gains, and when it cannot adequately offset its years of losses against its years of gains, its policies are affected. It does not expand its operations, or it expands only those attended with a minimum of risk.
While I agree that subsidies are bad, I don't understand how you then proceed to say that the 80 billion subsidies for alternative energies are 'good'.
How can stealing MORE resources from the US economy be better than simply ending all subsidies to whatever technology, ceasing government intervention in the energy market, actually using property rights laws to allow for the pollution externals to be correctly priced and internalized, and let the market, i.e. we the people, sort out which work better.
I sincerely don't think that trying to 'over-subsidize' Green energy over Oil is a sensible solution.
He said producing silicon is expensive, no that it is scarce in nature. Those are different things.
Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, though it is very expensive to produce.
Lesson, you are replaceable. If you are not replaceable, then you are too dangerous to have.
That's a good warm blanket for mediocre people to snuggle under, but not really true. There is a reason Josh wasn't fired for a long time and quit his job just like that, and that is because he was probably just picked up by a competitor in a snap.
Nuclear weapons may be dangerous, dirty and hated by many, but you'd rather have them, than your adversary.
I'm sorry, but this story is laughable. Comments about a dark, cave-like office? "I tried to sound cheerful: 'Hi Josh!'"? Smells?
The bottom line is, people feel threatened and diminished when they just can't do what you do. Especially if you look weird and act weird.
Yea yea, and the government stands up for the little guy against the big corporate interests. You're totally right. I'm an asshole.
He's trying to say 64% isn't enough to be a monopoly? What standard will you accept as "not a monopoly"? 64% is huge. I'd go so far as to say that over 50% is monopolistic.
Gee, that's what I call stretching a concept. What monopoly MEANS is 100%, and you can't get what you want anywhere else.
You're pouring emotion here, not reason. Any successful company in your view is a moving target to be split in many. Perfect competition does not exist.
So what. What matters, is were they able to gouge? Yes. Was the price totally unrelated to Standard Oil's costs? Probably, in some places at some times.
Prices have nothing to do whatsoever with costs. Where do you get that from?
So if an economic agent has the freedom to set a very high price do you make it a case for trust-busting? Heck, you better chop me up into small pieces, I have been known to charge a stiff fee for freelance work and gotten away with it.
So, everyone got it wrong? I find that highly unlikely. Whenever someone says everyone else is wrong, that's when you should be extremely skeptical.
You're saying a million people can't be wrong? Argumentum ad populum? :-)
I don't know, but in my experience 'everybody' is wrong very often. It's either that, or you and me are batshit insane for being opposed to granting monopolies on ideas and creating artificial scarcity.
First, I think your anger at the SEC is misplaced. I grant you that there have been some monumental screwups in that institution, and that in the light of our current economic woes some of the trust we placed in our financial institutions seems misplaced. Having said that, the institutions most responsible were not the regulators but the regulatees- AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, the now endless litany of failed or failing banks- we were deliberately deceived, and they were foolishly wrong in their calculation of risk. Should the economic regulations surrounding these institutions, and the government agencies that enforce them, be changed? Absolutely. Should we allow the scoundrels of industry a freer reign with which to abuse our trust once again? Absolutely not. Re-regulate, don't de-regulate.
You think my anger is misplaced? This is a government agency with a budget that went from 400 million dollars in 2000 to almost a BILLION dollars today and almost four thousand full-time staff that do its job of cracking down on a Ponzi scheme that they were WARNED about in 1999 and again in 2005?
So you think the SEC should be 're-regulated' instead of being trashed to give that money back to the taxpayers?
Fannie and Freddie are government sponsored enterprises, so they are hardly 'regulatees' in my book. All that leaves for me to blame is AIG. Ok, I blame them, let them go bankrupt! That's the best discipline to keep those 'scoundrels' from overreaching! Oh, seems the federal government can't let that happen either... And is even giving them more money for their failure. See where I'm getting at?
Secondly, you seem to be arguing that the economy has grown past the point where it needs the abuses of the past. You then go on to mention "even worse informal market jobs" as being the consequence of the absence of minimum wage. This is a contradiction, and it reveals the extent of your experience with the truly deregulated markets. Outside of the minimum wage economy lies misery, particularly where it relates to the (totally unregulated) labor conditions under which illegal immigrants work. It would kill you to work like that, and if you suspect for even a moment that it was more than the accident of your birth that protected you from that fate, think again. The companies that abuse immigrants, if given even the faintest whiff of an opportunity, would cheerfully work you to death too.
The fact is that while companies do bid for the services of workers, in the swollen uneducated labor market the cost of the mobility required by the free exchange of services is prohibitive to most workers. Those that do migrate do so constantly, unable to scrape together enough savings to escape their lifestyle, and denying their children the education needed to eventually find a better life. Even if you maintain that those workers have earned their lives- an attitude I find repugnant- I have found few people willing to callously condemn the children of this country to lives of ceaseless misery on the back of an empty economic principle.
How is what I said a contradiction? The fact that people are working for less than the minimum wage in horrid conditions is because they are forbidden to work in the normal conditions of the formal market because _working and employing for less than the minimum wage is ILLEGAL_. Illegal things have a way of happening in less than nice ways.
Compare the living standard of a hooker working in a brothel in Nevada to one in different state. If the latter gets the crap beat out of her by her pimp she can't go to the cops because then she's a criminal. The first one doesn't have a pimp, she has a contract with which she can sue her boss for any violations.
'Totally deregulated market' does not mean a lawless society where might is right. A free, unregulated market system presupposes
I find the term 'robber baron' quite amusing. Did they really put on masks and hold people up on train tracks? ;-)
Seriously now, these companies weren't busted because they were 'monopolies'. In fact there was more competition then then there is today. They were simply singled out because they big, successful and efficient.
This is a small excerpt from D.T. Armentano, the author of the book "Antitrust and monopoly". It's all a worthy read, but I took just a small nip that pertains especially to the Standard Oil case.
One of the most famous (and misunderstood) antitrust cases in history is US v. Standard Oil of New Jersey (1911).
The popular explanation of this case is that Standard Oil monopolized the oil industry, destroyed rivals through the use of predatory price-cutting, raised prices to consumers, and was punished by the Supreme Court for these proven transgressions. Nice story but totally false.
First, Standard never even monopolized petroleum refining, let alone the entire oil industry (production, transportation, refining, distribution) which would have been an impossibility. Even in domestic refining, Standard's share of the market declined for decades prior to the antitrust case (64% in 1907) and there were at least 137 competitors (firms like Shell, Gulf, Texaco) in oil refining in 1911. "A free-market 'monopoly' supplier is theoretically possible but not necessarily harmful and would not rationalize any antitrust regulation."
Second, although predatory practices were alleged by the government at trial, Standard offered rebuttal on all counts. Neither the trial court nor the Supreme Court ever made any specific finding of guilt on the conflicting charges of predatory practices.
Third, petroleum market outputs increased and prices declined for decades during the alleged period of "monopolization" by Standard Oil. For example, prices for kerosene (the industry's major product) were 30 cents a gallon in 1869 and fell to about 6 cents a gallon at the time of the antitrust trial.
Finally, the Supreme Court broke up the Standard Oil holding company not because of any demonstrable harm to consumers (there was none) but because it discerned some vague "intent" to monopolize through Standard's many mergers, an "intent" that just as clearly never succeeded in producing any monopoly. Yet generations of economic and legal commentators have been misled about monopoly and the alleged efficacy of antitrust policy because of the "facts everybody knows" concerning the Standard Oil antitrust case.
Well, that's what fraud laws are for. People who commit fraud really should be in jail.
The thing is, regulation fails on two counts off the top of my head. One, if there were no SEC, Federal Reserve and FDIC people would take as much care, if not more, when picking banks, investment funds, etc, as they do when picking any other product in the market. What government does is take this individual decision away from people and substitutes it for a false sense of security.
We all saw what happened, the SEC got many calls saying that something was up in the Madoff business did nothing about it. Which leads us to Two, the government and its agencies fail big just as anyone, except we are all FORCED to put all our eggs on their basket, sometimes against our better judgement.
While I acknowledge this extreme example you gave about working hours, which is factual for the beginning of the industrial revolution, it does not follow to conclude that it was minimum wage laws that changed that picture. The reason for wage increases is increased productivity which is made possible by the accumulation of capital. That is what enables a worker to produce 4.800 gadgets a day, instead of producing maybe one with his hands, if he's good at it.
When I read your last paragraph I must stop and think too. Does this person not understand how a market works? Does he not know that employers bid up the employee's labor 'price' just as consumers bid up the prices of goods? That all minimum wage laws do is unemploy young people, disadvantaged minorities and unskilled people who are now forced to: 1. starve, 2. welfare or 3. work even worse informal market jobs?
Regulation is just a word. I think people usually support it on emotion alone. As with everything, the devil is on the details
Yes I do. The point is, the current rules do NOT level the playing field, they simply protect the politically favored market players from competition. They are designed to preserve people with a lot of power in place.
The fact of the matter is, cartels, price-collusion, big mergers, they all failed miserably back in the time when we were much closer to true laissez-faire than today, i.e. late 19th century USA. That's because these schemes are very unstable in a free market since participants can always just walk out when it benefits them. Moreover companies that attempted consolidation were consistently undercut by a smaller, more efficient competitors.
So antitrust laws and the rest of the 'progressive' political movement didn't happen because there was monopoly and it needed fixing. It was because of the lack of it. They are a direct result of a reaction from segments of business to declining profits due to the downward pressure on prices that is a direct consequence of free competition. They just wouldn't have that, and went to the government to fix it.
With governmental support, cartels had a way do discipline their members by the force of law. And huge stable corporations become possible once the government issues regulations that used to be in the scope of the market, therefore hindering small companies while giving the big players a comparative advantage.
I'd recommend both Antitrust and Monopoly and In Restraint of Trade as books that go more deep in this subject that I could ever could in a /. comment.
So I suppose all inventions and creative works before the patent system was implemented were all freak accidents in your view?
It is not because of the patent system that people use their heads. They use their heads to gain a competitive advantage, which they seek whether or not they are granted a monopoly.
If someone has a patent on the '1st method' you CAN'T improve on it, unless you want the original patent holder to own your improvement too. And since the owner of a patent enjoys a monopoly he has no incentive to improve on it so a patent is effectively a 'time out' on technological development as long as it is valid.
This excerpt from the 1st Chapter of Mr. Boldrin's book is a very compelling example of how patents stifle innovation instead of promoting it.
There is no 'Capitalism'. There is classical Liberalism, and there are other 'systems' that depart from it in degree, some more than others.
Liberalism is more advantageous for everybody and benefits nobody in particular, while all systems we currently experiment today are attempts to favor certain groups while necessarily screwing everybody else in the process. Which is kind of why they're so popular today. :-)
(...) activist rulings undermine democracy.
So? Why do we care, since democracy is obviously so susceptible to be taken over by special interests who proceed to craft laws to be granted a monopoly on 'intellectual property' we then are forced to battle in court?
Democracy clearly sucks, we should just give up on the whole government idea altogether, the problem on who is on it is just too damn hard.
What do you mean unprecedented? It happened many times in the past. The government, by itself or thru a central bank increases the money supply which is is further pyramid when it enters the fractional reserve banking system, making interest rates artificially fall.
This leads to malinvestment, i.e. economic activity that cannot be sustained except in these exceptional easy credit conditions. When that credit expansion invariably becomes unsustainable because that credit was not backed by genuine savings and interest rates inch upwards, the whole deck of cards comes crashing down.
Happened in the 19th century, happened TWICE in the 20s and is happening now.
Global warming had nothing to do with the Australian incident. Bush, forest, snarf fires have pretty much always happened.
What happened to make it bodycount was that their government has more and more been taken over by envirowackos that prohibit people from putting trees down, even if it means living surrounded by a potential inferno.
I read about this guy that was gonna put down some two hundred trees to make a 100-meter fire clearing for his house. The government fined him. He said fuck it, and did it anyway. His house is one of the few that didn't burn to the ground.
Bottom line, even if global warming is that big a problem, the last one we should have fight that problem is the State and its army of mediocrity, incompetence and lust for power.
Wow. BitTorrent is really freaking the control freaks out isn't it? I guess the Pirate Bay trial must be going worse than they thought....
Is that something they're spend their slice of the stimulus on?
Really, how do people take Keynesian economics seriously today?
He and other state officials say it is a matter of fairness: Internet vendors shouldn't have a tax-exempt advantage over Wisconsin's brick-and-mortar retail stores."
Of course. Its all about fairness. The extra 7 million dollars really haven't weighed on the decision at all.
You got the mascara right, the rest is off. Nice try tho. :-P
But that doesn't mean that "copyright infringement" is ok, it's not. The marketplace works on supply/demand, and bootlegging music destroys the demand side of the marketplace, and it's to the interest of the marketplace (including its consumers) to see that the demand side of the equation is preserved so that the engine of the free market can still operate.
Artificially restricting supply by legislation hardly goes along with any free-market concept. By the same logic, Katrina was great. It increased the demand for basic services, building contractors and much more.
Copyright infringement is not theft, it merely makes a dent in what otherwise is a monopoly profit.
Book tip for a very good exposition of the view opposing patents, copyright and trademark legislation.