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I think you're confusing 'monopoly' with 'market' - which is fair enough, because everyone else does too. Essential services are rarely a mature market without state aid - which is possibly a good thing, because if you leave freebooting capitalism to run things it invariably bubbles and implodes. q.v. the number of railway companies which went bust after the UK's booms.

In fact markets only exist as a rhetorical concept, not an economic one. And you typically find idiot economists trying to scale up barter-with-cash and pretending that people making, buying and selling pins are somehow relevant to international politics and finance.

The reality is that 'markets' are an executive feature of a certain kind of political system which uses financial tyranny, debt, and strict rationing of information and political power to control and intimidate its population.

So the idea that markets can somehow be 'regulated' for periods on the order of decades is laughably naive, because the tyrants own the state and 'the markets' will change the rules of both and/or manipulate them as they choose to.

Or if they temporarily fail to have control, they'll work hard to make sure they recover it within a generation or two.

If you're lucky you'll get some token oversight. But you're not going to get much more than that without an outright ban on excessive concentrations of power and money without accompanying oversight and penalties for misbehaviour - not to be confused with the idea that if you set some boundaries around markets you can leave them alone and they'll mostly be a good thing for everyone.

by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Mon Apr 15th, 2013 at 06:41:30 AM EST
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Nothing can be regulated on the order of decades. Your ban on excessive concentrations of power and money will be subverted as well, leading to some other type of tyranny.

Which isn't to say that we don't have to fight the battles we need to fight today, just to say that there will always be battles to be fought: there are no panaceas

by Colman (colman at eurotrib.com) on Mon Apr 15th, 2013 at 07:25:08 AM EST
[ Parent ]
I think you're confusing 'monopoly' with 'market' - which is fair enough, because everyone else does too. Essential services are rarely a mature market without state aid - which is possibly a good thing, because if you leave freebooting capitalism to run things it invariably bubbles and implodes. q.v. the number of railway companies which went bust after the UK's booms.

I thought that's what happened to private mass transit in London over the 19th century. I may have to visit the London Transport Museum again, though.

guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper

by Carrie (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Mon Apr 15th, 2013 at 09:10:49 AM EST
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