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Comment by drieddust | Hacker News Reader

So much in the name of free market goes on. If IT industry will be allowed to progress unchecked, natural monopolies will emerge and it won't be good for consumer,smaller businesses relaying on big boys, and employees. But seems like free market cool aids is being served and drunk happily by the world.

On the contrary strong labour Laws and high productivity rate in quite a few European countries is a fact ignored conveniently by power greedy moguls. If left unchecked, they will happily move us back gloomy dawn of Industrial Age when it was ok to force workers to toil to death.

Adam smith didn't dream of monopolistic and unregulated market but only one part of his capitalism theory is cherry picked. Unregulated capitalism is a recipe for disaster.

Edit: fixed typos.

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Edit 2: Don't understand the down votes. Some explanation will help.

Honestly? You are promoting a policy of the traditional left (I say traditional left because the overton window has moved) on a forum that has a significant number (if not outright majority) of right/libertarian leaning people.

In theory that shouldn't get you a downvote but it does, much like reddit where you aren't supposed to get downvoted for an on topic post but you do if people disagree with you.

There has been a lot of talk recently of self re-enforcing echo chambers, ironically enough on here which is one of them.

Bias exists in all communities with no exceptions as far as I can tell.

For what it's worth I was arguing that programmers need to either unionise or have a professional chartered body (like Accountants, Lawyers and Engineers) decades ago, the writing has been on the wall for quite a while.

Getting programmers to agree what that would look like though would be a massive exercise in "cat hearding".

Unions aren't perfect but the abscence of Unions isn't perfect either, few things are and the question has to be "broadly, what is better for most people" and I think that is either really strong labour laws or unionisation.

Historically unionisation has occurred most when there is an abscence of strong labour laws (in the US and the UK this was certainly true, the reason a 40 hour work week is considered "standard" is because of unions (and Henry T Ford arguably)).

Yeah, I'm finding it really quite interesting to watch my total karma vary by 5 to 10 points as people read my comments. Maybe I should graph it on munin, would be interesting.

In regards to a union, perhaps that or a guild would be ideal, similar to the other major unions in the US. Strong labor laws generally do not get passed in a vacuum, often its at the behest of the union that good labor laws get passed to protect workers.

I'm a very pro-Union person myself, I've seen & experienced what an employer with total power and a divided workforce can do, and you are essentially powerless. The true power of a union is the ability to organize with your coworkers to walk out and picket your employer to fight for better working conditions & proper pay, which is a powerful tool to level the playing field.

Otherwise, you are a replaceable cog in the machine to your employer, since they can generally handle a fair amount of churn, just not a work stoppage.

You know you got some seriously good thought when your karma starts to swing like that. The opposite is, all of my posts with more than 30 points are stupidly obvious stuff that nobody would miss, but were slightly funny on the context.

Sure, what I write may be good, but it is polarizing. Its much easier to get karma writing the obvious answer that OP may not know as compared to writing about controversial things like worker protections & how their destruction hurts everyone, or how Soylent is unhealthy and we know very little about nutrition overall, let alone anywhere near enough to try to engineer a product to replace food entirely.

Probably I come across like that but I am not a far left proponent. My point is that power owners have cherry picked Adam Smith's Capitalist theory and completed moulded it to their own benefit. safeguards are completely ignored in the name of free market. Yet same they do not feel any shame accepting government grants when going gets tough.

> Historically unionisation has occurred most when there is an abscence of strong labour laws

Unions generally become power centers in themselves so only strong labour law is the solution in my opinion.

It's de facto already happening:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Natural monopolies to do not exist in a free market without government intervention - I'd be happy to see a counter example.

Private property sitting on valuable resources hard to find elsewhere. This plus economic games resulted in Standard Oil with it's owner one of the richest and most powerful men in history.

I understand your point, but I do not think the resource would become so valuable if only one company controlled this resource.

> Although Standard had 90 percent of American refining capacity in 1880, by 1911 that had shrunk to between 60 and 65 percent, due to the expansion in capacity by competitors [1]

Standard Oil did become hugely rich and powerful. It did reach massive marketshare as a result of cutting prices, but I wouldn't call it a natural monopoly. I see a monopoly as having no competitors.

[1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Oil#cite_note-47)

Ok so you are happy to 30 wait for competition to emerge against a monopoly? That's one full career.

That's one definition but in practice it's too weak. One company can get so dominant, esp if it fosters dependence, that it effectively has no competition. They also buy out competitors or bankrupt them by selling below cost. The dominant firm can do that longer. The biggest players pre-Antitrust used to love that technique.

Actually spend more than 5 minutes checking out the issue and you'll be surprised. Literally all public services that rely on urban networks like water, electricity, and natural gas are the definition of a natural monopoly. Unless you think it's competitive to have 20 unrelated urban gas pipelines or water services.

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