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Comment by _fnhr | Hacker News Reader

> Surely, even the most staunch supporter of the free market can admit that at a bare minimum, capitalism in this country is in desperate need of better anti-trust regulation to stop monopolies

Not taking the position, but free market supporters typically point to regulations as the main reason why monopolies exist.

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And they're somewhere between wrong and disingenuous to do so, though it's an awfully common trope.

Contrast the treatment of monopoly in Marshall's Principles (the leading text from the 1880s through the 1940s) -- a full chapter, plus numerous other mentions -- with, say, Hazlitt's One Lesson, where it escapes mention entirely, save a note at the end. Hazlitt's book is corporate propaganda.

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.217841/page/n5...

https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.217841/page/n9...

https://fee.org/resources/economics-in-one-lesson/ 9full text in one page)

I think Martin Gardner when writing about bad science roughly said unless there are strong countervailing forces orthodoxy eventually becomes a reflection of cultural biases. I feel modern economics is if anything about generating obsequious corporate propaganda.

That tendency goes way back. To the point of coopting anticorporate texts as corporate propaganda, such as Wealth of Nations.

On the flip side regulations are in place to protect the ill-informed consumers (either due to mental capacity or lack of information). I figure consumers enjoy being in their position anyways, they just want something to work without having to worry about any of the details. i.e. Using Salesforce instead of rolling your own solution.

Free markets are free to have monopolies.

And except pure anarchy this mythical free market has never existed and probably never will.

I like to think that we are actually living in a pure anarchy. The current state is just where it leads to.

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