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Comment by dovereconomics | Hacker News Reader

Obviously, companies want less competition, but if they use a political system to do that, it's not free market capitalism.

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The line dividing "market" and "political system" is blurry and pretty arbitrary, like most lines in models we make. There's nothing in reality that makes meddling with politics unkosher; if it increases profit, then the incentives created by the economy will make companies choose to do so. The problem isn't that they're crossing some arbitrary lines - the problem is with the incentives that lead them to it.

I think it's an important question of whether or not lasting monopolies are possible without political intervention.

A big enough monopoly looks surprisingly like a nation state. I don't think you can really disconnect those two worlds.

Seems clear to me. The market consists of voluntary associations. An association is voluntary if it is entered into without coercion. The "political system" more properly called the state, depends on coercion. There is no purpose to a law other than to involuntarily compel, by violence if necessary.

Government regulation is one specific form of power. Human hunger is another, hence the trouble that started the labor movement / unions.

Voluntary trade at the level of basic needs is bullshit. Fear of hunger or death from sickness is coercion. I have to have a job, and I have to buy food. Companies are very happy to exploit that. A lot of blood was shed a century ago to establish some minimum safety net for this "voluntary trade".

You must obtain food but not from any one specific provider. No company will long "exploit" you (Hmm, where have we heard that term before?) unless they are protected from competition by a coercive state.

Read up on e.g. lives of miners in the United States in the past. It happened many times that a private interest controlled all your life - your housing, your food, your tools. Companies can, and if allowed will, create conditions where competing with them is impossible. One of the reasons we have states is to prevent exactly that from happening.

> Read up on e.g. lives of miners in the United States

We all know the about the suffering of industrial workers. What's less well known is the far greater suffering of the pre industrial revolution peasant. What's also less well knows is that the advances in conditions and prosperity that bring us to today were will under way before, and had very little to do with, progressive state interventions.

Whether or not there was a progressive reduction of suffering, it doesn't in any way support the statement that real-world market is based entirely on voluntary trade. We still have to eat; in the past this coerced us to deal with nature, today it coerces most of the world population to deal with market economy.

What you present is a naive fantasy. There do not exist any corporations that do not engage in coercion. Coercion is human nature. Corporations are run by humans. In the real world things are messy. Politics and capitalism go hand in hand.

A corporation cannot kill me or put in a cage and call it legal.

In the west. Yet. They can and do that in poor/failed states, even if indirectly (by funding local mercenary armies).

Also, there are many that could kill you and get away with it even in a western democracy. It may not be "legal" if the public ever found out (it won't), but the end result will be the same - you'll be dead.

The current, legal solution is to drive you to financial ruin. Equally effective as means of coercion.

> Politics and capitalism go hand in hand.

Indeed, that's the problem. The state gains support of corporations by "partnering" with them. I will certainly not dispute that a free market system is often perverted by state cronyism.

And if they use private guns for hire to do it?

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