From: Francois-Rene Rideau (fare@tunes.org)
Date: Sun Jun 17 2001 - 16:16:41 MDT
On Sun, Jun 17, 2001 at 02:51:31AM -0400, Smigrodzki, Rafal wrote:
[Call for a Leviathan]
> a power monopoly that under the right circumstances can be controlled
> in non-violent ways by all the voters in a democracy (or the draftees in a
> demarchy). [...]
> The guy who
> owns the water mains to your house could make you pay, and could destroy a
> competitor trying to build another line quite easily - just temporarily
> lower prices below profit level until the other guy goes bankrupt.
I call that utter crap.
To prove that this guy has power over people,
you suppose that he is the only one to see things in the long run,
and that people are stupid sheep incapable of seeing the trick,
and avoiding the subsequent price raise, by either choosing the best
amortized provider (ever heard of long-term subscription contracts?),
or by using the money dumped by the monopolist to latter move
to a competitor.
Then, you suppose that the same people, once made "non-violent voters"
(what's that stuff?) magically gain far-sight, responsibility, etc.,
that allows them to control something on which they suddenly have
a much diminished feedback. Actually, you're but displacing responsibility,
lessening the power of people to influence their own life, hence making it
rational for them to be more ignorant of such issues they control less, so
as to focus on issues they can still control, and opening ways for lobbyists
to bribe voters. This is well explained in section 15b, point #5 of
B. Caplan's Anarchism Theory FAQ.
http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/anarfaq.htm
If people can act as responsible voters,
they can act as even more responsible consumers.
If people can but act as irresponsible consumers,
they will be even more irresponsible voters.
Consumership is direct, individual responsibility.
Citizenship is indirect, diluted responsibility.
Suppose some people have good information about amortized costs of some
good or service using one provider or technique rather than another one.
Under your centralized solution, these people would have to lobby
ignorant voters into choosing their solution rather than a worse one;
conservatism and protectionism then makes it unlikely that
any progress happens under such circumstances:
those who hold the de jure monopoly also have the means to lobby,
and the (justified) benefit of doubt.
Under a free market, these people would either publish their result,
and responsible consumers (aka the market) would make a choice, or,
if the market lags, they would form a competing firm that would use
this information for a profit, offering for sale better contracts
(possibly long-term contracts, to account for investment amortization),
in effect getting paid by consumers for making the information available,
and being responsible on their own capital for the accuracy of the
information.
Freedom, as a general decision rule, will provide for the widest possible
feedback and the fastest convergence toward the best solution.
As our friend Robin Hanson once put it [brackets mine]:
Betting markets, and speculative markets more generally,
seem to do very well at aggregating information. To have a say
in a speculative market, you have to "put your money where your
mouth is." Those who know they are not relevant experts shut up,
and those who do not know this eventually lose their money
[to those who actually know], and then shut up. Speculative markets
in essence offer to pay anyone who sees a bias in current market
prices to come and correct that bias.
Your standard socialist advocacy is unsupported both by facts and by logic.
H. Lepage, for instance, in "La Nouvelle Economie Industrielle", 1989,
(a great book that I recommend to any french speaker),
completely demolishes the fallacy of alleged "natural monopolies"
that you invoke later in your message. He shows that historically,
so-called "natural monopolies" were actually quite competitive markets,
with prices dropping and historical "monopolies" shrinking,
until these were given de jure monopoly by governments,
after lobbying by these monopolies to exclude the competition.
There is no evidence whatsoever of such dump followed by price rise
that you say de facto monopolies allow.
[Book not online, but lots of stuff on Lepage's site euro92.org]
I'm amazed how socialists advocate a de jure monopoly
as a way to fight alleged de facto monopoly.
"Oh, a monopoly is bad. There seems to be one here.
To fight its ill effects, let's vote a law that'll make it compulsory
for such a monopoly to exist, 'til the end of times."
> Corporations are legal entities using hired labor in a coordinated fashion.
Corporations do lots of things in a coordinated fashion.
That's the very point of them.
Hired labor is but both a very minor aspect of them,
and an aspect completely unspecific to them,
since non-corporations hire just as much.
Typical socialist myopy.
You see things through your prejudice of "class struggle".
> The little constituent units (salarymen, cubicle dwellers) do not make
> decisions for themselves except when they choose to be hired or fired.
Rubbish. For a better account of the role of salaries, see Bastiat's
chapter on Salaries in his Economic Harmonies, in french or in english:
http://bastiat.org/fr/salaires.html
http://www.econlib.org/library/Bastiat/basHar14.html
> The free market is not arbitrary, just unstable.
Rubbish. The free market has survived and prospered for millenia.
You call that unstability? I call that continued progress.
See, for instance, the absence of any global government
to coordinate international trade.
> At some point a it all too frequently stops being free -
> in medieval cities it was the formation of merchant guilds,
> then it was railway magnates, nowadays it can be a diamond cartel.
What exactly do you know about medieval cities, and the history of guilds?
Guilds were an instrument for merchants to acquire new liberties against
warlords and robbers (same difference) that ruled outside of cities.
How did they grow, in some countries, to become instruments of oppression?
As they were bribed into legal monopolies by kings,
once these had unified countries against competing warlords.
In both cases, the source of liberty was trade,
and the source of oppression was political power.
[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[ TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System | http://tunes.org ]
Our system is defined to prevent majority politicians from overtly oppressing
minorities. However, our system is also overtly defined to let majorities
elect majority politicians and not let minorities wield electoral power.
Kinda funny... one part of our constitution tries to fix a problem which
the other half of the constitution tries to create!
-- Lee Salzman <eihrul@tunes.org>, about the US political system.
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