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It's so funny that we still have to debate these things when Lenin wrote "Imperialism: The Highest Form of Capitalism" over a hundred years ago about a society

It's so funny that we still have to debate these things when Lenin wrote "Imperialism: The Highest Form of Capitalism" over a hundred years ago about a society that was far less concentrated than what we have today. Capitalism trends towards consolidation with the exception of a "new market" environment where it appears more in its Adam Smith sense. This rapidly melts away into oligopoly as weaker firms lose to stronger firms. Eventually, the domestic market is not enough to sustain growth and firms induce politicians to carve up the world for them to divide the world into intentionally underdeveloped areas of cheap production and areas of consumption. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/

AnthonyMouse 2y ago
The trouble with this critique is that it takes as a premise that you have a government which is enforcing at least contracts and property rights, but not antitrust laws. Without the former you can't have a monopoly because people would just take the monopolist's stuff (though of course then you have different problems). With the latter, contracts for anti-competitive mergers are illegal and consolidated markets get broken up. The general problem, which is not limited to capitalism, is that organizations try to consolidate power. So you need something to inhibit that. What this is supposed to look like is a limited government that can enforce antitrust laws against other organizations, but is constrained from itself becoming an organization that consolidates power. This requires strong checks and balances, and they clearly need to be more robust than the ones currently in place. Not least because several of the ones originally in place under the US constitution have been removed through amendments (e.g. 17th) or creative interpretation (e.g. Wickard).

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

The trouble with this critique is that it takes as a premise that you have a government which is enforcing at least contracts and property rights, but not antitrust laws. Without the former you can't have a monopoly because people would just take the monopolist's stuff (though of course then you have different problems). With the latter, contracts for anti-competitive mergers are illegal and consolidated markets get broken up. The general problem, which is not limited to capitalism, is that organizations try to consolidate power. So you need something to inhibit that. What this is supposed to look like is a limited government that can enforce antitrust laws against other organizations, but is constrained from itself becoming an organization that consolidates power. This requires strong checks and balances, and they clearly need to be more robust than the ones currently in place. Not least because several of the ones originally in place under the US constitution have been removed through amendments (e.g. 17th) or creative interpretation (e.g. Wickard).