Uh, you sure that’s the example you want to use? Microsoft pretty much kept on with the bad behavior, and it wasn’t long before they lost their monopoly anyway.
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This is derivative. Justin Green did a panel strip in the eighties in which he depicted Reagan as eating a rat in public in a similar manner.
But, who cares really. Just memories of an old goat.
They just deny that monopolies exist.
In your example, if there is more than one agricultural-product company in the world, then it’s not a monopoly. Problem solved.
So we have to bring up the subject again in a more complicated way, and regular people’s eyes glaze over, and meanwhile His Unfitness says something outrageous every 10 minutes.
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I’ve never understood why a monopoly has ever been considered good, in a country where “the market rules” and “competition!”
Natural monopolies (roads, water works, legal system, prisons, navies, wildlife refuges, etc.) are sovereign functions which respond badly to privatization. Private monopolies under-supply and over-price as a profit-maximizing imperative.
The thing is, a small number of competitors (an oligopoly) have a similar dynamic to monopoly, but on a curve. Between 2 and 10 competitors produce noticably abusive effects on quality, supply, service, and price. It isn’t always explicit collusion, but the market power and competition produce a competition to abuse a market as much as possible. Consolidation and reduction of n results.
n = 1 is ideal for maximum theft from a market, but politically, significant economic profit with n ~= 6 can be sucked out of a market to shareholders. Look at any consumer market. If n suppliers breaks 10 in any market but labor supply… start looking for the franchise fees.
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Hmm…And then we should add in the way that the increasing economic mingling of the economies of the West have led to increasing links in the politics of the West. Multinational companies pursue multinational policy interests. I think that I have been looking at US politics through too limited a lens, without accounting for the international influence on domestic policies both here and abroad.
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Wow, worse than I thought. Can you give a reference for this? Always good to learn more.
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Really? Wasn’t the AT&T antitrust case started and settled under Republican administrations? And the Sherman Anti Trust act, that was under Republicans as well. The American Tobacco Co. case was under the Republicans and the same with the Standard Oil Co and Northern Securities Co cases. Wasn’t Teddy Roosevelt the “Trust Buster” and a Republican?
I’m not a partisan myself so I’m not here to support or bash either party. I just wonder where the idea that the Democratic party is or ever was the anti-monopoly party, especially if you go back as far as 100 years.
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Big Dereg began under Carter, but you tell yourself what you want, I guess.
It’s true that Trump won thanks in large part to disheartened Middle Americans who got the same promises from both parties over the last four decades—better jobs, better education, sensible healthcare, etc—and received nil to palpable, hateful degradation in all three realms… and it didn’t matter which candidate they backed. That’s true at the local and state levels for the swing voters that won Trump his presidency, and on the national level, well… there’s never been more prole-screwing neoliberalism in history, and again, doesn’t matter which party they were from.
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Well deregulation worked pretty well for customers* when they did it in the airline business. That was the poster child for deregulation under the Carter administration. Partly because they deregulated prices and routes by getting rid of the CAB but left the FAA regulating safety alone.
*Flights are much cheaper, but planes and airports are much more crowded. Flying has become much more common for the middle class, but because that market is more price-sensitive, they really pack people in these days.
Fair enough. I’m not familiar enough with airline deregulation to posit robust counterfactuals. Could the CAB not have been successfully repurposed into something useful? My understanding of the history of neoliberal deregulation is that it goes back at least to the Nixon-era Antiturst Division wanting to stop price collusion in regulated transport industries. That the current private airline landscape is so thoroughy oligopolistic (especially wrt the big hub-to-hub groups) seems… the opposite of what was intended.
I’ve always found that complaining about the airline deregulation comes across like complaining that fewer people are starving to death but only at the expense of the quality of the food. How anyone can see that not as a win is beyond me.
Quiet. Didn’t you know that the lack of bargaining power makes life better for people who matter?
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Margins that razor-thin aren’t good for anybody. Passengers are harried and uncomfortable and nickel-&-dimed, there’s heavy downward pressure on wages and maintenance costs, entire airlines go out of business because it’s so tricky to eke out a profit. Not to mention we’re all at the mercy of what the most price-sensitive cheapskates are willing to put up with. There’s a huge gulf between coach and business (never mind first) and aside from the extra crumbs you get with “economy plus” (ooh, one extra inch of legroom! Boarding 20 seconds earlier!) there’s no option for those of us who want something right in between, even though we’re willing to pay it.
Not being able to or willing to afford to fly is in no way “starving to death.” Being an airline employee otoh…
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The cheapest way of traveling between point A to point B is ALWAYS crowded, uncomfortable, and inconvenient. Whether it’s steerage on the old trans-Atlantic ships or “immigrant trains” taking settlers out West. This is because the people paying the least are the most price conscious, and prices are, to a great degree set at the margins. Arguably, the deregulation of the CAB FOLLOWED the technological revolution brought on by jets (and jet turbines) which require much less maintenance and cheaper (albeit much more) fuel than piston engines. It became possible for prices to fall, but the CAB had become an impediment to that fall.
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