Rum wrote:I don't understand or agree with your term 'government's ONLY legitimate function'. This is a political value judgment - and one I don't agree with of course.
What other legitimate function can government have except to police the markets for illegal activity? Anything else is the government trying to pick winners and losers in the marketplace, and that ALWAYS ends badly because, as Hayek shows us, government central planning never works and cannot work, it can only make inferior allocation decisions because no bureaucrat or legion of bureaucrats can possibly make accurate decisions about what the markets (consumers) want or need because the needs/wants are simply too varied and complex for any bureaucracy to manage. Free markets properly allocate resources using BILLIONS of data points EVERY SINGLE DAY. These data points are the consumer's buying preferences that are influenced only by the needs and desires of the consumer, and the markets use this information to instigate new production, limit production or cease production entirely depending on what the public tells the market it needs and wants. This complexity is simply beyond the ability of any government bureau to deal with, much less accurately predict future allocations.
..and I didn't say 'government supported' monopoly - the large corporations in question have monopoly or near monopoly market share because the government DOESN'T intervene.
I know what you said, and you're simply wrong and you're misunderstanding. The ONLY TIME a monopoly occurs is when and if the government selects a particular vendor in the marketplace, decides that it is to be the mandatory supplier, and creates laws and regulations that prohibit ANYONE ELSE from competing with that favored vendor. That's a monopoly.
In the normal course of business, the market determines winners and losers as I state above. When one or more "large corporations" seize the dominant market share, it's because (initially) they provide a superior product at a better price than anyone else. That was the case with Standard Oil, for example, back before the Progressives decided to meddle. Standard Oil had a dominant (but NOT EXCLUSIVE) market share because it invested huge sums of money doing research on how to use crude oil for products other than gasoline and diesel. They invented "petroleum jelly" and many, many other petroleum-based products by investing a lot of money in research. They also spent a lot of time and money engineering extraction (drilling), transportation and processing improvements that allowed them to drill, extract, refine and ship their products more efficiently and at a lower cost than other oil producers. In part they did this by negotiating exclusive contracts with rail carriers to give them preference and lower rates on their products in return for guarantees of income to the railroads based on bulk capacity and delivery.
What happened was that the "little guys" (like Texaco) complained to the Progressives that they couldn't compete with Standard Oil's low price for its basic products: gasoline and diesel. These smaller companies didn't have the technology or infrastructure to get the oil to market as cheaply as Standard Oil
because they had not invested a fraction of the money that Standard Oil did in developing marketing innovations to lower costs! But they bitched to the Progressives anyway, and Progressives, being as Progressives are (mostly Marxist useful idiots) decided it wasn't "fair" for Standard Oil to hold the dominant market share, so they passed various anti-trust and anti-monopoly acts and forced Standard Oil (and many other large companies) to "break up" into smaller, separate companies so as to "give the little guys a chance" to compete.
They didn't do it because it protected consumers because Standard Oil wasn't "raping" consumers as the result of monopolizing the market, in fact, gasoline and diesel
were never and never have been cheaper on an inflation-adjusted basis in all of human history. Standard Oil sold gasoline at such low prices it actually stimulated the development and sales of automobiles in the US. Gas was incredibly cheap, on the order of what today would be less than $0.50 per gallon in today's dollars, that people could afford to buy cars and drive everywhere, which stimulated the economy to an incredible extent. And the minute Standard Oil was broken up, fuel prices more than doubled and we've seen the results ever since.
But the Progressives didn't care, they wanted to be "fair" to the little guy, or so they said. What they actually wanted was an excuse to stick their god-damned noses into the marketplace and build a legal history of market manipulation by government to choose POLITICAL winners and losers in the marketplace. And that's exactly what happened and has been going on ever since. You don't think Obama actually has any constitutional power to eliminate coal as a fuel do you? No, he does not, nor does the EPA. It was the Progressive Supreme Court of FDR's New Deal that eviscerated the Constitution and gave Congress essentially plenary power over "commerce" with the incredibly destructive "Wickard v. Filburn" case, in which the Court ruled that FDR could forbid a farmer from growing wheat on his own land, to be fed to his own livestock and turned into his own bread, which was never to even enter commerce of any kind because by so doing he would "affect" interstate commerce and frustrate the Agricultural Adjustment Act's blatant and deliberate policy of keeping wheat (and other crops) production artificially low in order to POLITICALLY create artificial shortages that had very real people going hungry simply in order to keep the price of wheat high...during a time when there were no shortages at all of wheat, and in fact were tremendous surpluses that were left to rot, forbidden from being sold or processed.
So, the upshot is that the government NEVER makes anything better by meddling in the markets, it just makes things worse, more expensive, and less available, usually deliberately, and always to profit or benefit someone particular as a POLITICAL gimme, usually in return for slush-fund campaign corruption and political support.
The nature of freewheeling capitalism is that the biggest grow bigger and the smallest get crowed out.
Nope, the nature of capitalism and the free market is that the best product at the best price ALWAYS WINS IN THE END. Whenever a corporation displeases the consumer by overcharging or being arrogant or simply by providing bad service or inferior products...or no products that the public wants,
someone else will quickly come along and seek to fill any market niche that is unserved or inadequately served by the "big corporations."
Only government can (and sadly does) prevent that from happening, and it does so by political meddling and monopoly tactics...like, oh, General Electric for example, which is a "favored" leftist corporation that has a very cozy relationship with government and therefore gets all the lucrative government contracts for everything from washing machines to jet engines.
So, quite simply, you're just plain wrong.
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"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
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