131–140 of 166 posts
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> What government policy led to the dominant monopoly of Standard Oil? Where did their mineral rights come from?
They bought them from landowners, sometimes through nefarious means if you remember your early 20th century literature.
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> Try to find a monopoly that has arisen in an open market, free from government 'intervention' (either regulation OR corruption). How about you cite an example of an open market that is free from government intervention?
There are indeed very few in this day and age. However markets free from government intervention do exist; open air markets in 3rd world economies would be an example. All markets follow the same principles.
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I don't see why Capitalists are so often misguided about their Ideology. Capitalism is not a system of capital ownership that encourages competition directly, it is a system of capital ownership that encourages greedy[1] people to greedily control capital in a way that most benefits themselves, and by proxy, their company, and by proxy, the economy. There is no competition inherent in private capital ownership, but i…
Perhaps you meant to respond to a different comment? There is no discernible correlation between the 1.5 relatively simple points I made, and whatever it is you've written here. (Hint: I outlined a short history of Ma Bell, and then had a small throwaway dig about Somalia. That's it.)
So I called your attempt silly, insinuated your understanding of Capitalism was flawed and provided many more examples of Capitalism without regulation running amok, which was his original argument.
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The security implications of requiring users to install Firefox add-ons are not any better than requiring them to install ActiveX plug-ins. (Other than pure vendor politics.) You still have the artificial requirement of some Win32 blob, which is the real issue.
It seems that being forced to use IE on Windows is more limiting than having to install an extension for whichever browser you choose on whichever OS you choose. If the security protocol were published or reverse-engineered, a clean re-implementation outside of Win32 could take place.
Also, I'm not sure why my post was dinged, but Firefox extensions/addons/plugins can call into native code and can do pretty much anything an ActiveX control can do. There is no "sandbox" as someone else implied.
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> So, if an individual socialist person in a capitalist economy is corrupt, that's not as big a problem as a capitalist being corrupt? In GP, "capitalist" -- and I would have thought this was crystal clear from context -- was used in the sense of "member of the class deriving sustenance principally through ownership of capital" (e.g., as would be opposed to "labor") not in the sense of "proponent of the economic syst…
That's the opposite of what I got from the context, sorry. In fact criley2 defined capitalism as a system of capital ownership. Anyway, criley2 seems to be calling all greedy people "capitalists", and using this definition to argue that other economic systems produce less corruption. That argument gets even less coherent, if you're claiming that guarding your capital is somehow more selfish than guarding your labor.
Unless you labor under the delusion that capital is not owned by a very small number of people, I do not know how that definition caused you to think the exact opposite of the definition.
Also, I am not wielding "greedy" as an insult, as I clarified immediately after using it. This is a greed motivated system. It is what it is. It is not an insult, it is a description. I apologize if you disagree but I am not really interested in debating if water is wet.
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Perhaps you meant to respond to a different comment? There is no discernible correlation between the 1.5 relatively simple points I made, and whatever it is you've written here. (Hint: I outlined a short history of Ma Bell, and then had a small throwaway dig about Somalia. That's it.)
You attempted to discredit his post by attacking the arguments he used. So I called your attempt silly, insinuated your understanding of Capitalism was flawed and provided many more examples of Capitalism without regulation running amok, which was his original argument.
Holy crap that's some egg on my face. There must be some Latin name for that particular brand of rhetorical gaffe, "attacking the arguments".
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This is simplistic: there are not always viable alternatives, even in a free market. 1) Rent is too high, where do I go? Do I leave my job to live in the country side without one? 2) Public transportation has to exist to be an alternative to the automobile, and often requires public intervention to be viable. 3) Did someone build the pipelines necessary for gas to reach my house? Does the same company own both coal a…
1) You move where the cost of travelling to your job doesn't outweight the savings from lower rent. 2) There is more than public transit such as van pools, bicycles, motorcycles, and trains. 3) There are several way to produce energy to heat a house (electricity, natural gas, wood burning stove).
2) You must live in a first-world country.
3) I know this first hand living in Beijing, part of the reason we have seriously bad pollution in the winter is because all the farmers in the surrounding Hebei country side burning whatever to stay warm.
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They bought them from landowners, sometimes through nefarious means if you remember your early 20th century literature.
By nefarious means, do you mean illegal? Was it government policy to intervene in those illegal acts or to let it happen?
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> 1) Property. If you have a monopoly on the property in a given area you can charge whatever you want for rent, and no competition will be around to add competition. Then people can move elsewhere. People won't tolerate it forever. This can be seen in the real estate market in the city I live in. Several downtown blocks in prime locations have a single owner. She charged outrageous rents, and now half of these (prim…
> Then people can move elsewhere. People won't tolerate it forever. Are you referring to emigration? Ya, that happens for particularly bad governments, who don't have a monopoly on power in the world. Of course, moving can be tough, you might have to slug it out in a boat to reach Australia. > While this is possible in theory, it hasn't happened in a free market. Of course it has. Pre-sherman anti-trust act it happen…
Most of the sources for this aren't entirely convincing. A small example: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/hammer-ant...
A monopoly by definition must include a condition that there is no competition, not just that the market is dominated by 1 entity. The frequency that this happens due solely to market forces (ie. no coercion, violence, corruption, etc...) is low to nil.
> Your opinions do not match the universal truths of an economist, of which I know many (of different nationalities). Libercrazians like to pretend that they are supported by economists, most of whom (barring the Austrians) think they are whackos.
First, I'm hardly a libertarian (at least not of the American variety), nor do I find the pop-economic theories of 'Austrians' convincing. In fact, in all the economics I've studied (not my major, but took quite a few courses) the 'Austrian' school was hardly mentioned. I've seen it mentioned more on HN than I ever had before... BTW, my views would probably fall more in line with neoclassical economics, though I don't work in the field, I do make a living investing in stock markets.