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Selling your public goods and resources to monopoly and credulously believing it'll all work out somehow while counting your money is the most American thing th

Selling your public goods and resources to monopoly and credulously believing it'll all work out somehow while counting your money is the most American thing there is, going back to the railroads.

rectang 5y ago
Nah, it's way more murican to pretend that de facto monopolies established through regulatory capture and the legal bribery of campaign contributions are morally superior because although they own the government for all intents and purposes, they're ostensibly "private".
- hedora 5y ago
  Ironically, the Boston Tea Party was less about taxation than it was about the Brits imposing an artificial monopoly on tea imports to the US. Of course, that's not how they teach it in elementary school...
pitaj 5y ago
You mean monopolies created by government intervention, like the railroads?
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  Railroads were very similar to broadband. "Competition" at the national level, but each local area was controlled by the first network to be established. Dont like your railroad/internet, well you're free to move to another city, where the exact same problem exists. The government intervention was mostly to fix that existing problem.
goodpoint 5y ago
...while also refusing to consider coops.
- DubiousPusher 5y ago
  The failure of coops really puts a difficult question to the function of capitalism. Afterall, if capitalism really was about the best good at the lowest cost, you'd expect coops to be unbeatable, expert labor joining together with no rent-seeking middle man. But instead we see that capital is the deciding factor in success. The only thing unique that capital brings is an abilitiy to scale. Scale enables efficiency and monopoly which IMO are not always mutually exclusive. But it should be a more serious question in economics just how much of either is most responsible for the ultimate rewards to capital.
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    > instead we see that capital is the deciding factor in success It's called "capital"-ism for a reason. > Scale enables efficiency Efficiency on which dimension? You can only optimize on one dimension: customer satisfaction? Employee salary? Profit?

Selling your public goods and resources to monopoly and credulously believing it'll all work out somehow while counting your money is the most American thing there is, going back to the railroads.

rectang 5y ago

Nah, it's way more murican to pretend that de facto monopolies established through regulatory capture and the legal bribery of campaign contributions are morally superior because although they own the government for all intents and purposes, they're ostensibly "private".

hedora 5y ago
Ironically, the Boston Tea Party was less about taxation than it was about the Brits imposing an artificial monopoly on tea imports to the US. Of course, that's not how they teach it in elementary school...

pitaj 5y ago

You mean monopolies created by government intervention, like the railroads?

ZeroGravitas 5y ago
Railroads were very similar to broadband. "Competition" at the national level, but each local area was controlled by the first network to be established. Dont like your railroad/internet, well you're free to move to another city, where the exact same problem exists. The government intervention was mostly to fix that existing problem.

goodpoint 5y ago

...while also refusing to consider coops.

DubiousPusher 5y ago
The failure of coops really puts a difficult question to the function of capitalism. Afterall, if capitalism really was about the best good at the lowest cost, you'd expect coops to be unbeatable, expert labor joining together with no rent-seeking middle man. But instead we see that capital is the deciding factor in success. The only thing unique that capital brings is an abilitiy to scale. Scale enables efficiency and monopoly which IMO are not always mutually exclusive. But it should be a more serious question in economics just how much of either is most responsible for the ultimate rewards to capital.
- goodpoint 4y ago
  > instead we see that capital is the deciding factor in success It's called "capital"-ism for a reason. > Scale enables efficiency Efficiency on which dimension? You can only optimize on one dimension: customer satisfaction? Employee salary? Profit?