4 ms·
I don't think the myth of a theoretical "free" market holds any water and can be applied sensibly to any real world scenario. In the actual free market a giant
by nukeop 9y ago
I don't think the myth of a theoretical "free" market holds any water and can be applied sensibly to any real world scenario. In the actual free market a giant megacorp would swoop all promising hires and suppress all competition by selling at a loss until nobody else dares to enter the field.
- mamon 9y agoIn actual free market selling at loss is a very short-sighted strategy: you may cause the bankruptcy of your current competitors, but bariers to entry are low, so once you raise your prices back to profitable levels the new competition arises. You would have to sell at loss most of the time which would eventually bankrupt your megacorp. That’s why monopolies can only exist in regulated markets.
- soVeryTired 9y agoEver heard of natural monopolies? Railways?
- ekianjo 9y agoHow do you swoop all promising new hires if you have a free market? its not like all of them want to work in the same place and the same culture. Even right now we have tons of startups despite the existence of Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
- nukeop 9y agoBy nipping competition in the bud and starting company towns. When you're an unregulated monopoly with no danger of anti-trust, lots of things are possible.
- ekianjo 9y ago> unregulated monopoly with no danger of anti-trust, lots of things are possible. It's far from being proven yet. Even with anti-trust laws, breaking out companies in smaller entities does not challenge their market position that much, and anti-trust laws have a nasty effect: they encourage companies which are close to monopoly to let a weak competitor survive just to say "hey, at least there is one competitor left so we are not a monopoly". It's just not working well.