03-03-2021, 05:17 AM
Supposedly, anti-trust laws got in the way of progress that depended upon elites getting everything that they wanted. Those elites saw themselves as the only people capable of wielding power and wealth competently, so everyone else needed to be broke (ideally heavily in debt), helpless, and scared.
The most ruthless and rapacious elites have always seen themselves as the only ones competent to manage assets and command people. They demand everything and offer survival as a privilege and as a gift instead of something to be assumed as a reward. I am reminded of how slave-owners of the pre-Civil War era saw their relationship to their human chattels: as benefactors to people incapable of making their way in life. The American Civil War was practically inevitable because such collided with the idea that toil had to be rewarded with wages instead of being exacted with the lash.
I'm not convinced that monopoly is efficient. It might guarantee a profit, but it also stifles innovation and all but ensures a harsh order in which a few get everything and the rest get nearly nothing other than promises of pie-in-the-sky. It creates a hierarchical economy that ensures hierarchy in all else.
The most ruthless and rapacious elites have always seen themselves as the only ones competent to manage assets and command people. They demand everything and offer survival as a privilege and as a gift instead of something to be assumed as a reward. I am reminded of how slave-owners of the pre-Civil War era saw their relationship to their human chattels: as benefactors to people incapable of making their way in life. The American Civil War was practically inevitable because such collided with the idea that toil had to be rewarded with wages instead of being exacted with the lash.
I'm not convinced that monopoly is efficient. It might guarantee a profit, but it also stifles innovation and all but ensures a harsh order in which a few get everything and the rest get nearly nothing other than promises of pie-in-the-sky. It creates a hierarchical economy that ensures hierarchy in all else.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.