The passivity against monopolies has more to do with international competition and the fear of losing world domination.
They will also be financially entangled with elites in former colonies, and the operators of extractive industries in weak countries that depend on outside investments, and with everyone in the financial industry globally. They're also financially entangled with family members and friends.
The only people anti-monopoly legislation helps are people who are less connected and less influential. The only place it will be supported (by the well-connected and influential) is in countries who are trying to protect domestic industries. Once the protectionism (or the nationalized industries) are destroyed, then monopoly becomes ok in time to get control over entire sectors of the economy and raise prices to maximize profit extraction.
Any concern about whether the US is dominating the world or not is only practical. It's useless to sic the US against a country that is being protectionist or refuses to denationalize if the US doesn't have the strength to properly make the people who reside in those countries miserable enough to support the opposition.
A geographically contiguous group of people who see themselves as having a common culture and values, combining for economic/military coordination and centralized decision-making for certain kinds of decisions certainly seems like a natural unit for humans to organize themselves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Antitrust_Paradox
Before then, things were very different. Here's an example of an anti-trust court case against a company selling shoes - read the court's rationale for applicability of regulation, and consider how many of them would apply to any of the large tech companies today:
1) having real international influence without resorting to military action
2) being resilient against international influence from others
The trillion dollar question is how to effectively keep private businesses in check without sacrificing on those points.
For example: Matt Yglesias
I'm neither for or against this strategy. I only wish, quixotically, the misc belligerents in policy debates would be intellectually honest.
It's ridiculous to use liberation theology terms, eg "freedom markets", when referring to Fortune 500 corporations.
If the people you have seen spouting what seems like the most progressive rhetoric do work at such places, that doesn't mean they're representative of all people who believe in progressive ideology.
It doesn't mean that the source of this ultimately deeply destructive ideology isn't the political right.
Scale and logistics are good. I think they should be managed by federation (and through regulation), but I'm sick of having bosses who see my salary (rationally) as something directly coming out of their bank account. I prefer a little indirection and mediation in the relationship.
Efficiency is good for everyone. The more time and effort you save, the more time and effort you have to waste. There are scales that are ideal for particular businesses, and that scale doesn't always coincidentally coincide with the scale a small-business owner can handle. Business should be as big as real (not paper or regulatory) efficiencies can be found at, and against those efficiencies we should maximize the flexibility and ability to innovate of individual businesses and workers.
Instead we just subsidize the biggest businesses most, and through legislation create false efficiencies to subsidize them even more (and guard them from any externalities.)
Maximizing for efficiency is not. It leads to a variety of problems, including (but not limited to) a strong tendency toward consolidation of power in too few hands (thus leading to abuses), and fragile systems that break down when a shock comes (like we saw with the supply chain issues during the height of COVID lockdowns).
The US has been turning away from free markets for at least a century now.
Anarcho-syndicalists that argue for workers councils run by experts basically got that but it comes coupled to outdated story of ownership.
In real terms the logistics and infrastructure are determined by experts but with the extra steps of getting validation from financiers who have no experience with the engineering methods, but their name is on some paperwork somewhere saying “they own that”.
I am cool with centralization effort to minimize duplication of effort. Not the kowtowing to some financier who lucked into money in the past in unrelated business, picking and choosing what I work on today as an engineer with nearly 30 years experience ranging from hardware design to kernel hacking, onto web app stacks with everyone else.
The ownership story is political double speak and corrupt expropriation of agency; replacing pols has improved economic gains for public and flushed corruption: https://www.nber.org/papers/w29766
Has there ever been a socialist operation (or any other operation) that didn't also do this?
Like, say, Chernobyl?
edit: I think Communism, or at least Soviet communism, is as bad or worse for the environment as capitalism. The difference is that the benefits of Soviet environmental disasters flowed to the nation in general. The benefits under capitalism generally go to fewer people than I could fit in my bathroom.
As for the benefits of capitalism, it's the only system that has managed to lift millions of poor people into the middle class and beyond.
If you consider the settler colonial projects like the USA, the wealth comes from ignoring the property ownership of the indigenous people, and then also the slavery, and the ignoring or intellectual property for inventions and arts.
If you look at Europe, there's the extreme wealth transfer of living and shifting the Indian economy into Europe, along with you know, stealing the world's gold, silver, and other valuables.
For more modern times, you also need to contend with unions and government regulations(including socialist policies), along with more wealth redistribution from things like the GI Bill. The people(and descendents) who benefited from the GI Bill are significantly wealthier than the people who didnt.
Wealth and land redistribution, especially at the expense of poorer people gives a clearer direction for what has lifted people out of poverty.
1. if wealth comes from owning property, why weren't the indigenous people wealthy?
2. In South America, the indigenous people were pushed off their land, too. Why did South America remain poor up to the present?
3. How did Japan become such an incredible economic power despite having little land and no natural resources?
4. The American slave states were never particularly wealthy, and what wealth there was was erased in the Civil War. Literally burned to the ground. Slavery did not build the wealth in the US.
5. The GIs earned the benefits from the GI bill. It is not wealth redistribution. They risked everything for yours and my freedoms.
6. The Spanish indeed took tons of gold & silver from S. America. Do you know what happened? Inflation! The same thing that happened after every gold rush. The reason is simple - gold is not wealth. Gold represents wealth.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosper...
What they did after WW2 was adopt a free market.
Property might not be 100% of what causes wealth cause you know, gotta mix capital with labor, but are you really arguing that America didn’t benefit off the stolen wealth of other nations? Is all the land that was taken from them valued at 0?
Land by itself does nothing. Japan proved that land is not a crucial factor.
Bill Gates' wealth didn't come from land.
> mix capital with labor
This is also not necessarily true. Slavery was certainly applied, but the wealth created thereby was minimal.
The common factor with wealth creation is free markets. None of the other factors you mentioned.
Can you show me a single successful enterprise that does not require any land?
> This is also not necessarily true. Slavery was certainly applied, but the wealth created thereby was minimal.
> The common factor with wealth creation is free markets. None of the other factors you mentioned.
Jesus Christ guy, I’ve seen free market bootlickers before but this is a new, amazing level. Next are you going to tell us how the free market was so amazing before that rapscallion FDR came in and ruined the masterpiece of the free market that was the Great Depression? Or does the result of one of the most laissez-faire economic system a of all time not count because it ended bad?
Businesses often rent office space. Microsoft got its start from a rented building. As I mentioned before, Japan became a world economic power with very little land. South Korea is another example. South America has plenty of land, and is mired in poverty.
> Next are you going to tell us how the free market was so amazing before that rapscallion FDR came in and ruined the masterpiece of the free market that was the Great Depression?
WW1 showed that the free market had turned a nation of poor immigrants into a super power. The doughboys arrived taller than the Europeans, and far better equipped and fed.
The Great Depression was caused by the creation of the Fed in 1914. The Fed proceeded to the inflate the dollar, while keeping a fixed exchange rate with gold. The disparity led to what always happens with pegged currencies - collapse. The depression was deepened and lengthened by FDR not understanding what was going on.
> bootlickers
I suspect you've never heard the case for the free market before. It isn't taught in school or in college. Which is sad, because the schools graduate students into a market economy with little idea of how it works. For example, I saw some 12th grade history materials a few years ago that asserted that the middle class did not exist in the US before FDR. This is the nonsense taught in schools.
> amazing
Yes, it is amazing. The evidence is right in front of us. Feel free to refute the evidence I presented that free markets are the common thread in prosperity, not land nor slaves nor socialism.
If you want some more, look at the historical statistics of height in the US. It went up all through the 19th century, up to WW2 where it leveled out. That's pretty good objective evidence of growing prosperity. Remember that the US was peopled by immigrants who arrived with nothing.
> Businesses often rent office space. Microsoft got its start from a rented building. As I mentioned before, Japan became a world economic power with very little land. South Korea is another example. South America has plenty of land, and is mired in poverty.
Just to be clear, I am taking that as no, you cannot show a single successful enterprise that does not require land. Redefining renting land as not requiring land does not pass any sort of logical muster.
As for the rest of your comments, I'm not going to engage with your Gish Gallop when you cant even pretend to deal with the very first point. It's obvious you have an opinion and you are going to work your way backwards to any argument that supports your conclusion
Edit: Oh god, I was just going through other comments I had this week and realized you are the guy who was arguing that seatbelts are dangerous and shouldn't be required. I legitimately think you might be having a schizophrenic breakdown and you should seek therapy.
You're engaging in reductio ad absurdum, because the space every person occupies is required for them to exist. Your argument is simply silly. A land-based business would be one that farms or mines or puts a racetrack on the land. Two businesses can be contained in offices right next to each other, and one goes bust and the other gets rich. The office is irrelevant.
> you are the guy who was arguing that seatbelts are dangerous and shouldn't be required.
That's a gross misrepresentation of what I argued. You got that one so wrong, perhaps you should try carefully reading my posts again in this thread.
> I legitimately think you might be having a schizophrenic breakdown and you should seek therapy.
Insulting others is not a convincing argument.
It is not a reductio ab absurdum argument to ask you to give proof to a statement that you declared.
I have already been warned about engaging in flame war arguments, so I will not respond to your other points unless you can provide evidence for what I consider your very incendiary claims that the land taken from other peoples was not in involved in wealth creation.
At best, we simply do not agree on basic interpretations of reality if you are pro free markets and capitalism but also don’t think plundered land had anything to do with wealth creation
Instead, posted insults. But it's fine if you want to start taking the high road. I'll forgive you :-)
> your very incendiary claims that the land taken from other peoples was not in involved in wealth creation.
First off, if you read the known history of the indigenous peoples of America, they were constantly engaged in taking land from each other. (For example, read "The Commanche Empire" by Pekka Hamalainen.) Secondly, they lived at a subsistence level. This is not much in the way of wealth creation.
The Aztecs, Mayans, and Incas did go much further, and did create wealth from the land, but far less effectively than the Europeans did. They were also in Central and South America, not North America.
> also don’t think plundered land had anything to do with wealth creation
This is not what I wrote. I wrote that land is not required for wealth creation. It is not the common factor among wealthy economies. And whether it was plundered or not is irrelevant. (All land has been taken at some point in time.)
> It is not a reductio ab absurdum argument to ask you to give proof to a statement that you declared.
That's a misrepresentation of what I wrote about an office requiring land. Also, it is impossible to prove anything about economics. But what we can do is examine history. When we do, the common theme for highly wealth creating economies is free markets. Not land.
And that is bad. But it is different.
> As for the benefits of capitalism, it's the only system that has managed to lift millions of poor people into the middle class and beyond.
That's because capitalists take credit for China. Take China out of it, and capitalism is a no-op.
Nope. Even socialism has to run at a net surplus (i.e. profit) because you cannot subsidize everything.