Comment by stopping | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stopping | Hacker News Reader

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You really need to answer questions directly as asked, and not whatever question it is you think the other person is asking. Doing this only creates confusion. There are many occasions where I see this kind of miscommunication happening between users on this site without either person realizing it.

In this case I asked a yes or no question because I simply wanted to clarify and understand the nuance of your position. You shouldn't always assume that every person responding to your comments is immediately trying to argue against you (although I'll admit this a fairly accurate heuristic for internet discussions in general).

Instead of answering with "Yes, (I believe) it is impossible" or "No, it is possible", you answered with the following:

"You can always present a case history of one".

Because I asked you a yes/no question, I am going to interpret your response as a framing of a yes/no answer. I interpreted your comment as: "(No), you (one) can always present a case history of one".

Hence my confusion: it sounded like you were holding both beliefs simultaneously: "Yes, natural monopolies are impossible, but there are counterexamples".

In the future please just answer the questions as they are asked.

If some believes free market monopolies exist, they ought to know of some examples. Hence why I ask for a case, it's the easiest way to point out that they don't exist.

I mean, they don't exist by construction per your definitions. A free market is a market that lacks state intervention beyond what's required to enforce property rights, and a monopoly is a state-imposed single seller in a market.

A free market in this construction must necessarily lack monopolies. There is no counterfactual observation that could falsify the proposition because the definition of free market doesn't admit a counterexample.

Congratulations. That's an epistemic trap.

A monopoly is not a "state-imposed single seller". Where'd you get that definition from?

There are many examples of natural monopolies, which is a concept that has been recognized in economic theory for at least two centuries. Walter is either being deliberately obtuse or is ignorant of history.

AT&T, Western Union, most railroads, many local utilities—all examples of monopolies that formed "naturally" i.e. without state intervention.

Insofar as there was state intervention in the formation of these monopolies, it was because the state intervened on the company's behalf to suspend antitrust law—such as in the case of AT&T, where the government decided it would be most efficient to permit AT&T to continue operating as a monopoly (until it didn't, and broke AT&T up).

This is WalterBright's operative definition of a monopoly[0], and I'd agree that he's being either deliberately obtuse (perhaps via ideology?) or is misrepresenting history (perhaps also via ideology?).

I'm honestly fine with whatever definitions, but they need to be able to cross the chasm from concept to criterion in conjunction or disjunction to be useful as a means of discriminating. So far, Walter's proposed definitions for monopolies and free markets together fail this test even if they're separately some measure of fine, inaccuracies relative to their term-of-art counterparts notwithstanding.

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0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49617983

You have completely missed the point of my comment. What do you think I am trying to communicate to you?

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