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Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#51

Post by jtedward »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #23
jessaustin wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really opened my eye: a long time ago, there was actually a meaningful difference between voting D and voting R. I can't really imagine voting in such a context, but it sounds nice...

How can you call LGBT rights, women's rights, police consent decrees, environmental issues, and health care, just off the top of my head, meaningless?

He can't false equivalency is a common tactic used by conservatives to gaslight non-conservatives. You're not crazy, they just lie and don't feel bad about it.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#52

Post by backtoyoujim »

lawrencewu wrote: post #25
peacetreefrog wrote: post #9

Her two examples, the medical and agriculture sectors, are two of the most regulated industries around. A lot of these "monopolies" result because of regulation pushed by combination of well-meaning and self interested people and corporations (see bootleggers and baptists). Her examples suggest it'd be better to focus on the marriage between corporations and government, which allows companies to focus their energy on…

I don't know why you are getting downvoted because you're absolutely right. The first three markets named (airlines, telecommunications, health care) are all heavily regulated and the barrier to entries are controlled by the government, not natural market forces. Monopolies are not all bad. Sometimes a company has a monopoly because they just offer a better product (Amazon, Google) and they shouldn't be punished for…

Amazon is a infested with scam storefronts. And Amazon is really compelled to do anything about it because they have no competition.

Airlines have huge market barriers: getting and maintaining huge, expensive, gas guzzling aircraft. That is not a regulation barrier.

Both telecomm and health care are intwined monopsonies backing the play of regional monopolies (cartels) backing federal congresspeople.

I just don't buy any of your comment as fact at all.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#53

Post by adventurer »

mrgreenfur wrote: post #44

Does anyone else think that nearly all huge companies exist due to monopolies or near-monopolies? MS has monopoly on desktops. Apple on cell phones and tablets. Facebook on social networking. Google on search. I think any market without at least 3-4 strong competitors will devolve into one dominant player who can milk more from the customer base.

Aside from 2008-9ish where they had around 50% and Blackberry was king, Apple has had a very small share of the mobile phone market. There is a myriad of competitors. The tablet share is up there but not to facebook or ms windows levels of having almost no competition.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#55

Post by jgalt212 »

tanderson92 wrote: post #5

Highly relevant: Matt Stoller in The Atlantic: "How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul In the 1970s, a new wave of post-Watergate liberals stopped fighting monopoly power. The result is an increasingly dangerous political system." https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-dem...

Amen. Matt Stoller is basically the playbook and on how the democrats can regain the common man. My family are multi-generational democrats and it would literally blow the mind of my lost past immigrant grandfather if knew that his party's nominee was taking bigly money from Deutsche Bank and Goldman and soliciting donations from commodities oligarchs from lawless countries. And on top of that, not seemingly giving a sh1t that median real wages had not budge in 15 years.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#56

Post by cylinder »

IIIIIIIIIIII wrote: post #35
bko wrote: post #3

> In 1994, at the height of the AIDS crisis, in which I lost several friends and a beloved employee to the disease, I started a manufacturing company in Little Elm, about 35 miles north of Dallas, to produce the first-ever automatically retracting syringe to eliminate the risk of nurses contracting HIV through accidental needle sticks. The syringe received rave reviews from nurses, hospital executives and public heal…

I can speak for a different market in a different country (but I also lived in the US for a decade): IT freelancing in Germany. I get paid well, but there is something really strange going on: I can't get my contracts directly. I always have to go through a company whose sole business it is to be an intermediate between the (large) company that wants to hire a freelancer and the freelancer. Note that those freelancer…

When large corporations are comfortable in their revenue side (approaching monopoly) they obsess over risk. Every contract poses a risk, including litigation risk. That's probably why. GE is obsessed with outsourcing right now, they even outsourced the mail room. A side effect is this promotes inequality as you can no longer get a job in the mailroom and work your way up to CEO. See the hbr ideacast on this

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#57

Post by wyager »

cs702 wrote: post #4

"I started a manufacturing company in Little Elm, about 35 miles north of Dallas, to produce the first-ever automatically retracting syringe to eliminate the risk of nurses contracting HIV through accidental needle sticks. The syringe received rave reviews from nurses, hospital executives and public health officials, a major grant from the National Institutes of Health and robust private investment. But when my partn…

I agree. Of course, most of the reticence to do anything new in medical care comes from extremely overwrought CYA policies. It's very hard to argue that these policies aren't the result of legislation particular to medicine, whether it's legally necessary (but patient-unfriendly) bureaucratization of medical care or insurance red tape brought on by legally enforced uniformity of insurance concerns.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#58

Post by tetha »

trafficlight wrote: post #29
pyvpx wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is TSI a CLEC?

Nope. We argued that we were providing data services under the FCC definition of utility. The only real person who got in our way was the city attorney. He said that internet didn't qualify as Montana Code (circa 1950) only mentioned telephone and telegraph. So we registered with the PSC as a telegraph provider...

I mean you have telephony via IP, and I'm sure there's an RFC to telegraphy via IP. So it's not wrong to say you're providing telegraphy. You're just choosing a very ... deep and expensive tech stack to do so.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#59

Post by mikeyouse »

wyager wrote: post #45
skummetmaelk wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing though, that is exactly what a late stage "free market" looks like. What you need is a heavily regulated market that prevents exactly this behaviour. People need to stop wishing for the "free" market. The term is abused by orators and manipulators who prey on peoples desire for a market which is free in the spirit of the word, and deliver to them a market which is technically "free" and horrible.

> That's the thing though, that is exactly what a late stage "free market" looks like. How would you know? We haven't had anything approaching a free market since the early 20th century, even if we ignore government-granted monopolies via restricted land grants and patents.

This is exactly the same argument people make in favor of socialism..

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#60

Post by mozumder »

jessaustin wrote: post #37
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you call LGBT rights, women's rights, police consent decrees, environmental issues, and health care, just off the top of my head, meaningless?

Ds talk a better game, but they rarely walk that talk. Take just your first example. W's first year in office, he wanted to standardize "civil unions" that would have entailed all the same rights as "traditional marriages". Of course, lots of "conservatives" were against that, so W reached across the aisle. Crickets. Ds decided they wanted to preserve that issue's political value, so it was more than a decade before…

What's your point in your false equivalency?

Are you implying that the 20 million people that now have medical coverage because of Democrats pushing for Obamacare isn't worth it? Was that all "talk"?

I'm seriously trying to understand your "equivalency" position.

Let me know what the Republicans would have done for health care? Right now it seems that the only thing they've done is to actually limit universal health care, so we have less than 100% coverage.

Are the two parties the same on health care?

Right now I don't trust anybody that says the two parties are the same, since they are clearly very, very different. In fact, it seems the only people that say that are Republicans that don't have a better argument?

Are you a Republican? Or maybe you fall under the auspices of a white-male demographic that bias towards conservatism?

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