08-31-2016, 07:08 AM
(08-30-2016, 09:40 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote:(08-30-2016, 07:24 PM)Mikebert Wrote:(08-28-2016, 08:47 PM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Robber Barons have a tendency to get in the way of business which requires them to be removed.
How so? Robber barons run and/or own the most successful businesses, and for all practical political purposes ARE "Business".
Monopolies aren't very good for business.
Monopolies are bad business. They are lucrative for the monopolist, but bad for everyone else, including businesses that may be part of their captive markets. Customers face artificial scarcities that raise the price of the monopolzed good or service. For the end-user tht can result in genuine hardships. Of course any for-profit entity can make the claim that real economic progress depends upon the acceptance of mass hardship in the name of economic growth, as was the excuse for Gilded-Age entrepreneurs exacting exhausting toil for near-starvation pay. So what is wrong with monopoly that enhances profits and generates capital?
Monopoly might be good for getting quick investment and rapid development, but one can ask whether such is so good in itself. After the initial investment one will get very high prices and an eternal shortage because shortages elevate prices. The monopolist has an incentive to under-invest in capital improvement that might enhance productivity. Lower production implies that the monopolist will not hire as many people as will a company operating under competitive circumstances. Monopolists are not as responsive to customer desires as competitive businesses; the monopolist forces customers to adapt to the practices of the monopolist instead of seeking ways to make things better for the customer. Monopoly slows innovation by compelling people to fit the ways that the monopolist standardizes. Monopoly profits become in effect a private tax to firms that must compete in places in which the monopoly does not exist. So if Germany has a steel monopoly and Britain doesn't, then British firms that supply iron and steel objects get an advantage over analogous firms in Germany -- and British manufacturers of iron objects from stepladders to machinery get an advantage over German firms in the French market. German workers pay in underemployment.
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.