And then there's dark pools. Trading isn't even done on the market anymore.
This is such a non-sequitor, it undermines your entire post.
Food: - restaurants definitely compete with each other, mostly in each local area - and within that, different slices of the restaurant business more directly compete, e.g. fast food is more competing with each other than fine dining. - BUT: we have a huge problem with a lack of competition in the supply chain driving prices up for everyone, at least in the US. - Groceries are similarly impacted by supply chain monopolies
Smartphones: high end smartphones are a oligopoly: - Apple vs Samsung vs HTC and several other tech companies producing phones; Apple definitely commands quite a bit of a premium, as do some of the nicer Android phones. But on the whole, the companies really are fighting to one-up each other with better features, battery life, etc. - quality is improving, even if the price is over-charging vs the ideal competitive market. Low end phones are even more fiercely competitive
Other electronic categories seem to show decent market dynamics; headphones, earbuds, usb peripherals, keyboards, etc. all seem very commoditized; there certainly are brands that try to command a bit of a premium based on reputation / marketing, but the cheap options are often good enough and definitely have a very competitive market. Big electronics like GPUs and gaming consoles though I think it's easier to start considering market distortions due to more monopoly power.
Of course there are no shortage of monopolistic practices out there, e.g. for utilities, collusion on rent, online retail (Amazon), textbook prices, medical care & pharmaceuticals, and even more mundane things like frozen potatoes and chicken.
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The thing that bothers me most with the simplistic view that "the market will do it better" is that the whole premise of market forces giving the most efficient price assumes that (a) a commodity is being traded by (b) a large number of buyers and sellers, none of whom have any significant share of the market. Many markets either (a) aren't trading a commodity (e.g. iPhones and Android phones aren't interchangeable so Apple can command a premium price) or (b) have consolidated buying or selling to the point that they don't have the large number of independent buyers or sellers necessary to have the price be set by market dynamics rather than the monopolist or monopsonist. And the people promoting "let the market fix it" either are too dumb to realize that, or more likely are letting their rich friends make a quick buck or want to score political points by promoting smaller government.
What could be interesting is to have the local government found a co-op, i.e. they issue a bond to do the build-out and then hand the network to a co-op in exchange for a contract to pay the debt, essentially giving the co-op the backing of the government's credit rating for the initial build-out. Then the co-op board gets separately elected by its customers so they're directly accountable to the customers for any shenanigans.
All that to say, voters here do care about utilities, and the coop solution worked for about 25 years iirc but it can't work in today's "one solution fits all" regulatory context anymore, at least where i live. Things are far from that simple in practice.
For trains it's much harder - yes, there are two providers on the WCML, but they're not equal (one runs faster trains) and as such there's zero real competition.
So you have the government own the tracks, contract with a private company to maintain them. Then anyone can use the tracks, like anyone can use the roads. Private companies offer train service to the public. All they need is rolling stock and they can start selling tickets. You then get a market that looks like airlines, i.e. entering the market is a moderate investment (millions; buy rolling stock/planes) rather than needing billions to build the network itself. More popular routes get more suppliers, which turns into more frequent service. There is plenty of competition because rolling stock is mobile and can easily be reassigned according to customer demand.
That said, who is to say the trend isn't reversible some day.
Also let's not forget the selling to private operators does provide benefits, not always, it's not the magic fix we pretend it is.
To see some examples of this, look at the arguably social democratic Keynesian US from the fifties, and where they're at now. Similarly for the United Kingdom. Labour used to fight for social democratic policies, and since the advent of "New Labour" (Thatcher's greatest victory), they're essentially a right wing party. For a much more harrowing example, look at Allende in Chile and the US sponsored coup by Pinochet.
In general what you see is that the social democratic status of a state is an unstable one. Roughly speaking, the people who would benefit from neoliberal policies happen to have a lot of money with which they can and do influence politics. There's campaign funds, lobbying, but much more importantly owning the media[1]. Propaganda is incredibly powerful (we are not immune), and it has been used successfully time and again to get people to vote against their own interests, such as abolishing social democratic practices.
[1] In the case of Chile, and for example Indonesia, the mechanism is much more violent, but the principle the same. Capital is spent to successfully influence politics in favor of capital.
The best system is a free market, if possible. But the second best system may not be close to the best system, it may be a local minima that is very different.
A classic example is that small companies and no unions is theoretically best, but monopoly unions vs monopoly companies is the second best (since there's no single monopoly, so they negotiate something close to the theoretical ideal).
Free markets are best, but if the government is going to heavily subsidise and regulate the power companies (as they are natural monoplolies, so they either get regulated or they abuse their position) then maybe it's best to just cut out the middle man.
This premise is highly questionable. Certainly for competitive markets it's entirely false. Uncompetitive markets suffer largely the same failure mode as government bureaucracies, but it's not even clear that this is actually worse, because government bureaucracies are susceptible to not only charging bloated service fees for mediocre service, they can also be captured into diverting tax dollars to private cronies. Just because the government owns the real estate doesn't mean it's manufacturing its own trucks and networking equipment and copy machines, but as soon as it isn't, it's buying that stuff from the market and you need a competitive market or you're still screwed.
So what it comes down to is, you need a competitive market.
Apologists love to complain that <insert problematic market outcome> isn't the product of a true market but that dog doesn't hunt. We have the economic system we have. We call it capitalism. It produces the above mentioned (and countless other) excerable outcomes. No excuses.
Cost disease induced by regulatory capture and a massive housing shortage induced by zoning regulations.
> Once you've cleared that hurdle your next task is justifying the current massively skewed (and worsening) income distribution in the US.
Poverty traps created by social assistance programs that put overlapping benefits phase outs on the lower middle class, causing them to incur oppressively high de facto marginal tax rates that in some cases exceed 100% of marginal income.
> Clear that bar and all that's left is justifying private equity eating everything from fast food franchises to the healthcare system.
This is regulatory capture again. Captured markets consolidate and then corporate raiders notice that the incumbents have a monopoly but aren't screwing their customers quite as hard as a monopolist can do. The underlying cause is government regulations insulating the incumbents from competition; private equity are the maggots that come to eat the corpse once the market is already dead.
Notice how there was "capitalism" in the 1950s but lower levels of corporate raiders or income inequality etc. So then you might wonder what has changed between then and now, and an interesting proxy is the number of pages in the US Code and Code of Federal Regulations.
> We have the economic system we have. We call it capitalism.
If you judge an economic system by what people call it, we called the thing that happened in 20th century Russia "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and the thing that happened in WWII Germany "National Socialism" and by this logic we shouldn't attempt anything called "Socialism" ever again.
But if socialism is the thing where you put the government in charge of the economy and capitalism is the thing where you limit the government from interfering with the market then socialism is the thing we've actually tried. How are you going to put e.g. the US healthcare system on "free markets" when it's the most regulated market in the US?
Ish. While regulatory capture is at the heart of most of the truly ass outcomes attributable to capitalism it's comical that an attempt would be made to assert less government oversight would in some way be beneficial. What, are we pretending the last several decades of blissfully ignored potential anti-trust cases, questionable mergers, etc. aren't the direct result of captured legislators being told to just sit on their hands?
Incidentally the "housing crisis" has nothing to do with zoning. Offshoring manufacturing and permitting AG conglomerates to bankrupt the majority of family farmers has resulted in rural communities being stripped of economic opportunities which caused a flood of economic refugees into high cost residential markets. Proof: pundits screech about a lack of affordable housing when ~8 million units sit unoccupied, many outright abandoned. In Other News: when zoning changes are made to permit the kind of multi-story mixed use structures that are hyped as a solution to the housing crisis what happens is they get built, the local market gets an influx of condos that nobody who lives in the area can afford and nearby housing increases in cost (a net reduction in affordable housing), literally the exact opposite of the effects advertised.
> How are you going to put e.g. the US healthcare system on "free markets" when it's the most regulated market in the US?
Most regulated...the what now? Private equity firms and healthcare megaconglomerates (oh I'm looking at you Duke Health) that are sweeping up private practices and hospitals all over the country. Without exception this leads to measurable decline in quality of care, and is the leading cause of rural hospital closure nationwide. This phenomenon is also driving up the cost of performing clinical trials as these outfits are savvy enough to intentionally target practices that perform trials. The resulting increase in fees to run a clinical trial are so steep they trigger fraud warnings in industry benchmarking software. Anyway, given we're the only industrialized nation who's healthcare system isn't entirely controlled by the government this claim seems pretty rich. One of several ironies here being freeish marketish healthcare produces some of the worst healthcare outcomes of any industrialized nation, at four times the cost. Wheee.
Put another way yeah the government is culpable only in the sense they decided to not actually govern, thus letting The Market run rampant.
Regulatory capture isn't just industry capturing the government so they can avoid regulations. They capture the government so they can control the regulations, and then use them to exclude competitors by increasing regulatory barriers to entry.
It's pretty hard to sustain a monopoly in a market with low barriers to entry because the entry cost is lower than the prevailing prices, and new entrants don't sell to the monopolist unless they're offered more than they could make from staying in the market, which is in turn more than the cost of entry. So entering the market stays profitable because you either make money by selling to customers or you make money by getting acquired. But the monopolist doesn't actually have an unlimited supply of money for acquisitions, so new competitors keep popping up until they run out of cash and then one of them sticks, or one of them is e.g. a co-op that isn't interested in selling.
To prevent this the monopolist needs the market to have higher barriers to entry. One way of doing this is to become so vertically integrated that new entrants would have to reproduce the entire supply chain to enter the market, and this is the case where you actually need antitrust enforcement, but it also isn't the common case. And it's hard for anyone to get a vertically integrated monopoly to begin with without the common case, because it's hard to monopolize the vertical before you have a monopoly in the original market.
The common case is the monopolist gets the government to pass laws making it more expensive to enter the market until new entrants are deterred.
> Offshoring manufacturing and permitting AG conglomerates to bankrupt the majority of family farmers has resulted in rural communities being stripped of economic opportunities which caused a flood of economic refugees into high cost residential markets. Proof: pundits screech about a lack of affordable housing when ~8 million units sit unoccupied, many outright abandoned.
This is just "demand is not always in the same place as it was before", it's only a problem if you constrain supply from increasing in the places where the demand has moved. This is the same reason you can have unoccupied units and a shortage at the same time, when the units aren't in the same location as the demand. The vacancy rate in e.g. Manhattan is at record lows.
Also, the shortage is by significantly more than 8 million units.
> when zoning changes are made to permit the kind of multi-story mixed use structures that are hyped as a solution to the housing crisis what happens is they get built, the local market gets an influx of condos that nobody who lives in the area can afford and nearby housing increases in cost (a net reduction in affordable housing), literally the exact opposite of the effects advertised.
This is the "induced demand" theory, which is rubbish. There is more demand for higher density areas than there is supply, so the price is high. If you increase the density of an area, you satisfy some of the demand, not only by creating that housing but by increasing the density of that area, which makes it more attractive because it can now sustain more local shops etc., so more people also want to move into the directly adjacent existing housing.
This does decrease the cost of housing, it's just that the housing that becomes more affordable isn't the housing directly adjacent to the new housing. It's in the place people left in order to move there.
What's happening is essentially this: Suppose you have areas with density levels 1, 2 and 3. Level 3 is the most dense, most desirable and most expensive. You increase the density of a level 2 area so it becomes a level 3 area by building more housing. The price of all three density levels goes down across the region, because there are now more level 3 areas available, so you don't have to bid as high to live in one, and some people move from level 1 and 2 areas to the new level 3 area, which makes more supply available there too. But that specific neighborhood used to be level 2 and is now level 3, so it, unlike the region as a whole, can increase in price, because the new level 3 price might still be more expensive than the old level 2 price.
And even that can be solved by building enough level 3 housing across the region so that the cost of level 3 housing falls below the previous cost of level 2 housing, but for that you have to build even more.
> This phenomenon is also driving up the cost of performing clinical trials as these outfits are savvy enough to intentionally target practices that perform trials. The resulting increase in fees to run a clinical trial are so steep they trigger fraud warnings in industry benchmarking software.
To take one example, the US requires separate clinical trials from the ones already done in Europe. There is no legitimate reason to even be doing them a second time, the European ones should be accepted for approval for sale in the US, but they're not. Because the incumbents like it that way, because it reduces competition and they own the regulators.
Another solid example is the entire concept of certificate of need laws. It's quite possibly the most naked example of anti-competition legislation in existence.
> Anyway, given we're the only industrialized nation who's healthcare system isn't entirely controlled by the government this claim seems pretty rich.
There are several industrialized countries with private healthcare systems that are all more efficient than the US system. The US system is notoriously corrupt and inefficient because the incumbents use regulation to inhibit competition.
It seems there are at least two, such as in the case of utilities: best services or best profits for the shareholders. Again in the case of utilities we see time and again that these are mutually exclusive optimums as a privatized utility makes cuts to investment, build out, maintenance, customer service, or other aspects of the business in the goals of increasing profits, to the detriment of the quality of their service.
This is a pretty bad example because monopoly unions vs. monopoly companies is extraordinarily bad to the point of being a plausible worst case scenario. The company is then free to run roughshod over its customers and suppliers and use its resources to capture the government and the union not only does nothing to prevent this but actually encourages it because then they can extract more of the monopoly rents for themselves. Then the normal tendency for the public to demand antitrust enforcement when met with an abusive monopolist is blunted by the union's support for the monopoly and prevents the monopoly from being toppled.
I think you mean neoliberal democracies.