MenKlash
joined 2 years ago
Economists of the classical school were right to define a monopoly as a government-grant privilege, for gaining legal rights to be a preferred producer is the only way to maintain a monopoly in a market setting. Predatory pricing cannot be sustained over the long haul, and not even the attempt should be regretted since it is a great benefit to consumers. Attempted cartel-type behavior typically collapses, and where it does not, it serves a market function. The term "monopoly price" has no effective meaning in real market settings, which are not snapshots in time but processes of change. A market society needs no antitrust policy at all; indeed, the state is the very source of the remaining monopolies we see in education, law, courts, and other areas.
Amazon is just another big company that benefits from corporatocracy.
Property rights' moral basis flows from the moral principle that the de facto responsible party should be held legally responsible.
Property rights are deduced by the natural right to self-ownership.
"Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a "property" in his own "person." This nobody has any right to but himself."
The voluntariness of the employment contract is irrelevant because de facto responsibility cannot be transferred even with consent.
As I said before, you're denying the natural right of the employee to free will.
Every individual employs scarce resources to attain a desirable end. If you are against social cooperation, you're making human action more difficult.
"For a contract to exist as property, each contracting party has a property interest in specific performance on the part of the opposing contracting party. But a property interest in specific performance is not a property interest in the person. The employer contracts with an employee for specific performance. The employee also contracts with the employer in similar style. Each has a property interest in the performance of the other, but neither owns the person of the other."
One example alone I can think of of how privatisation is bad is that redundancy is ignored because it is not profitable.
At worst, it leads to people suffering, at best, it needs constant regulation and enforcement by the government to stop them running in an unsafe manner.
There you go. The classical myth of "natural monopolies" and the intervention of the government, such as licenses, protectionism, "public utilities", subsidies, etc. are the mere cause of this problem.
"The fact that the government must give permission for the use of its streets has been cited to justify stringent government regulations of 'public utilities,' many of which (like water or electric companies) must make use of the streets. The regulations are then treated as a voluntary quid pro quo. But to do so overlooks the fact that governmental ownership of the streets is itself a permanent act of intenention. Regulation of public utilities or of any other industry discourages investment in these industries, thereby depriving consumers of the best satisfaction of their wants. For it distorts the resource allocations of the free market."
Companies will literally use child labour if you let them
"[...] the only reason our children don't have to do this type of labor is that we are wealthier, not because of our child-labor laws nor because we are somehow culturally or racially superior."
Any ban on child labor is utterly counterproductive and potentially life-threatening to the very people the government is "trying to protect". Only economic development can improve the lives of these children, and nothing short of unrestricted free trade will do.
Rent seeking, manufacturing wants/needs, extortion, the list goes on and on, but…
Aside for your idea of "manufacturing wants/needs" (as they are unlimited), rent seeking and extortion (such as subsidies and taxation) are not legit means to profit in a market-setting.
"Those who particularly flourish on the free market, therefore, will be those most adept at production and at serving their fellow men; those who succeed in the political struggle for subsidies, on the other hand, will be those most adept at wielding coercion or at winning favors from wielders of coercion."
You’ve defined capitalism so that all these inevitable features of a capitalist economy are “external factors”.
Corporatocracy is not the same as capitalism. The state is not intrinsically bounded to the formation of markets and voluntary exchange.
because any solution that would end scarcity for a good or service would thereby end profitability for the same.
There is no such thing as a permanent solution to the economic problem of scarcity. Any superabundance theory is destined to fail, such as keynesian economics.
Or in the case of the Great Depression, they’d sooner set fresh produce and livestock on fire than let other consume it without profit to themselves.
The Great Depression represented the most visible sign of a necessary correction in an economy artificially inflated by expansionary monetary policy. The interventionist measures made to boost the economy only drove it further into depression.
"Future recessions can be prevented by reforming the monetary system that creates the boom in the first place."
Markets cost us nothing because they emerge spontaneously? Things that emerge spontaneously cost us nothing?
"We might object to this on the grounds that markets, like any other construct, are man made, and therefore entail a real cost. While it is true that markets are a human construct, we must bear in mind that they are, as Hayek put it, the result of human action, but not the result of human design."
No. You can also profit by appropriating the fruits of somebody else's labor
Capitalism violates the ethical basis of property rights of getting the positive and negative fruits of your labor.
An entrepreneur can't "appropriate" somebody else's labor if the employee who agreed to work for a wage did it voluntarily. Denying this would imply denying the natural right of the worker to free will. Social cooperation is not the same as slavery.
and taking advantage of market failures.
These so-called "market failures" are the product of an utilitarian and scientific economic theory to understand the causes and effects of economic relationships, as it ignores completely the difference between the study of Human Action and economic history.
In fact, the intervention of the government makes it more difficult to have a good allocation of resources.
Often times, actions that benefit consumers fail to receive adequate funding due to involving public goods.
"Every good is useful "to the public," and almost every good […] may be considered "necessary." Any designation of a few industries as "public utilities" is completely arbitrary and unjustified."
Food is not scarce.
Food is not a superabundant resource. If it was, then the ends it satisfies would already have been attained, and there would be no need for action. Resources that are superabundant no longer function as means, because they are no longer objects of action.
An example of an actual superabundant resource is the air:
"Thus, air is indispensable to life and hence to the attainment of goals; however, air being superabundant is not an object of action and therefore cannot be considered a means, but rather what Mises called a "general condition of human welfare." Where air is not superabundant, it may become an object of action, for example, where cool air is desired and warm air is transformed through air conditioning."
Rising food prices are not because of food scarcity.
Of course. Rising the price of something could be caused by a lot of things. However, we should differentiate a change of the price caused by voluntary exchange of it caused by institutional coercion.
Milk hasn’t nearly doubled in price in the past two years because of a scarcity of dairy cows.
Descriptive economics is not the same as explanatory economics.
I guess capitalism would never dream of creating monopolies and artificial shortages to increase profit?
The only way to be a monopoly is to have a government-grant privilege, for gaining legal rights to be a preferred producer is the only way to maintain a monopoly in a market setting.
"Artificial shortages" are created by the mere existence of intellectual property. Even what you define "artificial shortage" is probably not artificial at all, as the price of a final consumer good is not determined by its cost of production.
And it wouldn’t dream of trying to trick customers to pay more for less?
"Prices are only incidental manifestations of [economic] activities, symptoms of an economic equilibrium between the economies of individuals." This means that the emergence of a realized price […] coincides not only with the consummation of the exchange process but also with the attainment of a momentary state of rest by the parties involved in the exchange.
Some people care about the latest thing, regardless if it directly affects them or not.
Consequently, the greater the sphere of public as opposed to private education, the greater the scope and intensity of conflict in social life. For if one agency is going to make the decision: sex education or no, traditional or progressive, integrated or segregated, etc., then it becomes particularly important to gain control of the government and to prevent one’s adversaries from taking power themselves. Hence, in education as well as in all other activities, the more that government decisions replace private decision-making, the more various groups will be at each others’ throats in a desperate race to see to it that the one and only decision in each vital area goes its own way.
Democracies get sick and then die from within.
Representative democracy has allowed for peaceful transitions from one ruling elite to another, but the use of institutional coercion is still there. The government is not the problem, it is the mere existance of the Monopoly of Violence, that is, the State.
"Probably no other belief is now so much a threat to liberty in the United States and in much of the rest of the world as the one that democracy, by itself alone, guarantees liberty."
Obviously, this mechanism of peaceful change is an important distinction, but does not absolve democracy of its shortfalls.
Instead of focusing in on how the various Republican candidates for speaker, both individually and collectively, embody how today’s Republican Party is an existential threat to the country’s multiracial pluralistic democracy
As mentioned before, the State itself is a threat. The model of the parliamentary dictatorship, that is, an oligarchy of politicians and public employees, does not serve our interests: it serves elites and violates rights to self-ownership, and efforts to limit governmental powers tend to fail.