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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

#241

Post by branchless »

jgalt212 wrote: post #55
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…

Agreed, I follow Stoller on twitter and I've found him very thought provoking.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#242

Post by derefr »

eropple wrote: post #232
ericHosick wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a deep discussion to have: too deep for a medium like HN. That being said... Your points pre-suppose parties consented to a dispute resolution system: one that is based on arbitrary boundaries and quite monopolistic (1). > I can see why people don't think that the barebones style of "free market" is very free. So, I agree that it is hard for people to understand what consent is when they were never given a ch…

You're given that chance every day you choose not to go elsewhere where the legal situation is more to your liking. The social contract has an opt-out. But that'd be hard , so...

There being no good place to move because every other government also allows these things, is a sort of monopoly problem of its own...

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#243

Post by Spooky23 »

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…

That's why I always eyeroll when people in forums like this talk about the free market.

Many many corners of the economy are little vertical command economies. Fiscal policy, de-toothing of regulators, and allowing large players to form cartels is the antithesis of free market. Markets require a firm regulatory hand to be free.

Medical is a great example. Between strategic sourcing in hospitals that killed all of the little companies making medical supplies, the CVS/Walgreens/RiteAid/ExpressScripts shitshow that eliminated meaningful retail and wholesale drug competition, and now the formation of regional medical cartels is a planned economy more valuable than the Soviet Union was.

In 10 years we'll be back to the Bell System for telecommunications, without the consumer protections and firm controls of tariffs that blunted the impact of the AT&T monopoly.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#244

Post by sanderjd »

tetha wrote: post #38
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...

Similar things are happening in germany. Most people I talk to feel like the 2 major parties have lost their grit, their profile, and they have become mostly the same. However, in germany, this just gives new parties chances to rise. I think that's a sign of a healthy democray - if the old parties stop representing the people, voters will replace them.

That happens in the US too, but instead of new parties, we just end up with the existing parties shifting what they stand for over time. The Republican party may be going through such a shift right now (though it remains to be seen what their platform will be next year), and both parties shifted in fundamental ways in the middle of the 20th century.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#245

Post by ChuckMcM »

yuhong wrote: post #237
ChuckMcM wrote: post #21

I largely agree with the observations in the article although I believe the author misstates the intention of government with "But in the 1980s, folks in power decided bigger was better, and conventional political wisdom followed suit." The issue with the 80's was that the US economy was in a very weird place where we had low growth and very high inflation (called 'stagflation' at the time). The mechanics of the econ…

This was just after US got off the gold standard, and around the time of the savings and loans crisis. More recently, Medicare and drug prices is one of my favorite examples, and the same logic apply to things like the NSA.

A fair point. Missing the connection to the NSA though :-)

And repeating that I agree with the basic premise that single supplier contracts should be made unenforcable however to do that you have to provide a way to penalizing companies that do things to enforce them.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#246

Post by coldtea »

JackFr wrote: post #92
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.

> What you need is a heavily regulated market that prevents exactly this behaviour. That seems like the opposite of a solution. For such a system to work one has to believe that that the regulatory apparatus is staffed with monks who are unaffected by the temptations of wealth, power and vanity that other humans are subject to and that 'regulatory capture' isn't a real thing. Further that the price mechanism as an in…

>For such a system to work one has to believe that that the regulatory apparatus is staffed with monks who are unaffected by the temptations of wealth, power and vanity that other humans are subject to and that 'regulatory capture' isn't a real thing.

That's only if we demand unreasonable effectiveness of such a system.

In practice, it only requires that the people (consumers etc) can influence government and policy more than conglomerates and big private interests can.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#247

Post by yuhong »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #245
yuhong wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was just after US got off the gold standard, and around the time of the savings and loans crisis. More recently, Medicare and drug prices is one of my favorite examples, and the same logic apply to things like the NSA.

A fair point. Missing the connection to the NSA though :-) And repeating that I agree with the basic premise that single supplier contracts should be made unenforcable however to do that you have to provide a way to penalizing companies that do things to enforce them.

The point is that the NSA is funded by government debt, which is their way of printing money. One of the reasons why we got off the gold standard is government spending.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#248

Post by coldtea »

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.

>How would you know? We haven't had anything approaching a free market since the early 20th century

We know exactly because of that. That there's the theoretical free market and the "really existing" one, and the really existing one is exactly what we get in practice if the big players get their way.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#249

Post by jaredklewis »

ericHosick wrote: post #229
jaredklewis wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Difficult indeed. An ordinary American internet user consents to countless pages of legalese in adhesion and other unread contracts (TOSs, privacy policies and so on) everyday day. These days, every website, piece of software, digital service or product comes with pages upon pages of contracts to which the user must consent to even walk in the door. Reading all of them is easily a full time job. So, no one has coerce…

This is a deep discussion to have: too deep for a medium like HN. That being said... Your points pre-suppose parties consented to a dispute resolution system: one that is based on arbitrary boundaries and quite monopolistic (1). > I can see why people don't think that the barebones style of "free market" is very free. So, I agree that it is hard for people to understand what consent is when they were never given a ch…

What you say is true much of the time, but it is also true that consumers often do "choose" their arbiter. The aforementioned adhesion contracts often stipulate a private (non-government) arbiter, which the consumer (probably you, too) consents to of their own free will.

I see your points. But I kind of feel like we were having a rather nuts and bolts discussion about how to improve security in Linux, and then someone chimes in that we should probably rewrite everything in Haskell.

If achieving a free market requires a complete upheaval of all of our governments and laws, then the idea isn't very useful.

Re: Want to rescue rural America? Bust monopolies

#250

Post by coldtea »

valuearb wrote: post #180
arrosenberg wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Walmart. Walmart has destroyed thousands of businesses. Now you can argue the consumer got lower prices, but low prices don't matter when no one has money to afford them. Additionally, those economies of scale produced cheap, disposable, polluting goods that have an engineered lifetime so that customers have to keep buying the same appliance (or whatever) over and over. The question isn't when economies of scale hurt…

Walmart has been a huge boon to the middle class. It's inarguable that consumers got lower prices, substantially lower prices. That's increased their standard of living. You can argue that Walmart hurt the standard of living of the Americans (less than 1% of US employees) who actually work for it. But that ignores the fact that the smaller competitors didn't pay much better, and never had a stock option plan, so the…

>Walmart has been a huge boon to the middle class. It's inarguable that consumers got lower prices, substantially lower prices. That's increased their standard of living.

Only when thinking in first-order effects. How about the city businesses it destroyed, and thus the standard of living associated with the families that owned them and the whole support system? How about the power it affects upon manufacturers -- and thus to the people that work there?

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