Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.
—John Maynard Keynes
The dumbest thing that otherwise smart people glorify is the free market. It’s the central ideology of libertarians, the party of people who pride themselves on sounding much smarter than they actually are. That alone should make you question free market rhetoric.
Ben Shapiro is a smart guy, but when he preaches the free market myth, his intellectual faced fades just enough to expose the personal greed in his heart. Adam Carolla is an insightful guy with an interesting rags-to-riches story, but when he starts talking about a free market economy powered by competition, it only shows how out of touch he is with his roots as a construction worker.
In the video below Ben Shapiro interviews Ann Coulter about her book on immigration. She argues that its America’s biggest problem very well. While Ann says that it hurts American workers when companies hire Indian immigrants using H1-B visas, Ben argues that by not allowing that it could hurt free market choice. Ann replies by saying that doesn’t really matter unless it works for Americans.
Ann is patriot and cares about American workers. Ben is greedy and cares about his stocks.
The Lie We Want To Believe
The best book exposing the free market fallacy is The Transformation of American Capitalism by John R. Munkirs. It’s hard to find and can sell for hundreds but if you’re lucky you can find a cheap copy like I did.
In chapter two of the book, Munkirs gives a chronology of this myth starting at the 1860s. After our nation was founded we had a period of expansion. Industries were being established. Urban populations rose. Infrastructure was in perpetual development. Westward expansion lead to what might be the only true free market in any industrialized state—The Wild West.
Once businesses and industries were established, monopolies formed under the name trusts. A trust is an umbrella corporation that controls all the stocks and holdings of the businesses in the trust. In effect, trusts and later holding companies (same thing, different name) acted as monopolies. They were able to use their resources to easily establish dominance over businesses not in the trust.
The free market economy driven by consumer choice quickly became an irrational ideology. The government still believed in it though. In his book The Folklore of Capitalism, Assistant Attorney General of the U.S. during the 1930s Thurman Arnold writes, “…the anti-trust laws enabled men to look at a highly organized and centralized industrial organization and still believe that it was composed of individuals engaged in buying and selling in a free market.”
Here is a picture I took from my copy of the book. It shows how much of an industry was controlled by just a few trusts/holding companies and which families dominated those trusts. Notice that Rockefeller comes up frequently.
The free market at work
The Dog and Pony Show
Eventually there was enough outcry from citizens that the government had to do something. That’s when TrustBuster Teddy Roosevelt stepped in. Long story short, Congress passed a few bills in to law but they were poorly worded, poorly supported, and poorly enforced. Naturally, they were ineffectual.
This cycle of increasing monopolization, public outcry, and ineffectual legislation repeated itself a few times up to the 1970s (the book was published in 1985).
Various economists justified the system in a few ways. They said countervailing powers like unions kept the adverse effects of the market in check. (How strong are our unions today?) They said the government should only intervene to keep unemployment low and wages high. (How well did the government do at the only two things it should do according to idealized economist John Keynes? Yet somehow the government successfully bailed out banks and the automotive industry).
The government at work
2008-2016 Really shows you something
Do We Even Want A Free Market?
Our economy is better described as being dominated by oligopolies (which act more like monopolies than free market competitors). The rest of Munkirs’ book describes how companies in the same industry share many of the same board members (that would make competition pretty hard I imagine). It goes in to great detail describing how the guys who sit on so many of these boards are able to manipulate the market and an industry at their whim.
There are downsides to this type of economy: low wages, long hours, high unemployment, etc., but these are also the only organizations that can give consumers what they want—mass produced goods widely distributed for cheap and the technology to achieve this. How outraged are people about their low wages when they can still walk out of Wal-Mart with bags of cheap crap?
Modern technology has only emphasized how easily subdued we are. How many people should have been outraged by the big bank bail out but were scrolling through Facebook instead?
Like it or not, concentration of wealth in the hands of the few makes social mobility increasingly impossible. The economy we have in America enables this and has been getting better at doing so for 150 years. Cheap goods trick people into believing the free market myth. Social media sedates people in to not caring. Smart phones ensure people never have to look up and see the truth behind the free market myth. And if that wasn’t enough, intellectual fools like Ben Shapiro confirm what blue pill economists want to believe.
Read More: Why Free Market Economics Isn’t Working As Advertised
As an Eastern European , who has lived both in East and West , I have to laugh hard everytime I see an article complaining about the economy in the West. If you are a Westener and in financial difficulties , that’s because you are a lazy fuck. If you are a bum , that’s because you chose to be so. Sure you have other problems , but economy ? No way.
Guts.
There is more to life than cheap shit and good costumer service.
Family, Tradition, love of your race and people, culture, beauty etc. mean much more than getting a package promptly or adding a few zeros to your 401k. Most over here who holler about “much free markets” don’t give a shit about any of the former. They have forsaken what their ancestors built and have discarded any legacy they could have left their descendants all for some $ and dopamine rushes.
For their decadence they will die in a retirement home surrounded by blacks and brown who hate them and their grandchildren will be minorities. But hey, we visited Cabo San Lucas in our sailboat, it’s all gooood.
James,
I’m not sure you quite understand his comment. I would encourage you to re read it and especially between the lines. I find myself in the same predicament as Guts because I have lived in a country where milk and meat rations were only served to a starved populace once a month. Nowadays, blessed be my family’s many sacrifices, I live (((comfortably))) in the west with an okay job. What sickens me is the people who haven’t seen much outside the west and don’t understand how lucky we are (still) to live here.
I understood what he was saying though I may have erred in coming off a little strong but I appreciate your comment. It’s nice to put things in perspective.
The point of my comment is thus, Americans have sacrificed everything for the ecomony and in less than thirty years Whites will be a minority in a nation who’s history was 90% white. By 2045 we will be less than 50%.
A few statistical research companies have predicted much more. By 2075 65% of America will be composed of 1st or 2nd generation immigrants, majority of those being non white.
If your sufficiently red pilled, which I’m sure you are, you know that that is both unsustainable and mill Most likely led to this nation being either a socialist and broke shit hole or full blown communist.
I would rather starve then leave that legacy for my children. My ancestors got off the boat in 1640 an we flushed it down the toilet.
Excuse my grammar towards the end.
I love the way my race delivers packages promptly.
Why do you act as if all of those things are generally mutually exclusive or a trade-off of things? The AR does not do itself any services by attacking Capitalism and pretending some ultra-tribalistic welfare state system is superior because it’s unequivocally isn’t for anyone who has a rudimentary understanding of history.
To add on to this, if anything, the markets are far less free-market oriented and have far more regulation now than they did in previous decades/generations.
You might want to ask yourself, why are old white men thrown into nursing homes and considered lucky at that? You overvalue the amount of virtue that comes in family and children; at the end of the day, you’re just a more sentimentally-attached ATM for them, whose primary existence is so they can accomplish their goals and necessities. The callous point of it all is most people do not want their parents to become dependent on them (even if it is ever so marginally) but rather that they can be as dependent on their parents as much as possible. I don’t give a shit if I’m considered selfish for not having a family, why? Because society has selfishly, since time immemorial, been leeching off of the hard toil and accomplishment of individual men merely for the “common good” and “because it’s the right thing to do”, especially now so where a man has ABSOLUTELY ZERO authority over his family.
Don’t blame Capitalism for the cultural problems, especially when we’ve been drifting more and more to an Oligarchy-state as opposed to free-market Capitalism that actually did exist in more traditional times. Ask yourself if you really would want to live (and probably inevitably end up dying due to starvation or disease) in the USSR or post-USSR in the aftermath for the following few years after its fall, because the West is SOOOOOO bad!
Regarding Ben Shapiro,
I stopped listening to him since he cried so hard about what trump said ” there are good people from both sides ” about Charlottesville incident.
I knew he was gonna serve his personal interests ( being Jewish ) and quickly used his feelings instead of reason.
you need to understand that he is NOT a nationalist towards America.
So of course he agrees on a free market as long as it’s not effecting him in person. regardless if it will benefit americans or not.
“Our economy is better described as being dominated by oligopolies ” thanks to crony capitalism and you think that free market is a myth because of this ,then why government should be better at handling it? after all it’s not solving the problem of oligopolies,it’s just transferring the problem from people to another people.
>then why government should be better at handling it?
To be fair, he didn’t say that. Clearly the flaw in the article is that it doesn’t address any alternative to the free market.
That’s no flaw. He’s not obligated to solve ur problems.
if I notice a hole in a ship I can point it out, but it’s not my job to fix it.
Of what use of someone that can only identify a problem without a solution? None. That’s what women do.
Pointing out problems without suggesting a solution is called “whining”.
Nah, I think the argument of this article is for protectionism against foreign interests and interventionism against domestic monopolies. Nice try.
And you think a bunch of rich and disconnected assholes are going to do better? Pfff…one of the biggest problems with governments today is that the rich assholes have taken over them, thanks in part to the stupidity and brainwashing of the populations. Also, a nation based on the belief that bunch of uneducated, selfish individuals will ever accomplish anything over the long run is a fucking joke. You have to have some centralized leadership in a nation to give your country direction, even economically. LOL, even the automobile use to have a patent on it, and if it was for the government trust breaking era than Henry Ford would have never been able to make his Model T. Oh, but we just need to get rid of government patents, right? Pfff.
The answer is not in purity ideologies like communism, libertariansim, Marxism, whatever. The answer is a mixed economy that centers around the overall health of your entire nation, a more nationalistic economy (you know, what america always was up until the last 40 years). The mixture of an economy depends on a few factors: the population density of your nation, the abundance of essential resources (water, iron, agricultural land), how well cultured your people are, how educated your population is, and how nationalistic your people are.
Just because some people grew up in a communist nation and experienced that, doesn’t mean that anarcho-capitalism is the solution. BTW, the west was never an anarcho-capitalist state, and has always been a mixed economy…so for those who say all the Wests power is derived from “muh libertarian” anarcho-capitalism, you are fucking idiot. I love capitalism from just a moral standpoint in that people should be able to pursue things that they enjoy and not necessarily only what the state wants (obviously as long as you don’t hurt anyone else), but to implement some purified form of anarcho-capitalism would just result in a nation of parasites who just randomly consume resources for their own selfish pleasure without the single though of what it will do to the nation as a whole.
Oh, and people who believe in freed trade deals with third world countries are fucking retarded, and they need to go back to Eco-101. Trade is all about trade specialization, and typically that is a good thing, but if your trade specialization revolves around low slave labor from third world nations, and/or things like the lack of environmental regulations, than the only way companies can compete with that in this country is by doing the same, which is bullshit. We have never had more free trade than today and the Wests economy is going to shit. Funny how some people on the right want to depend on Communism to make their cheap shit.
First world nations are hard to make, they don’t just pop out of the ground, and their are a lot of factors that go into making them. You need government, but you need it to work for the people, and the people need to be smart enough to control it. You need the right culture that promotes good behavior and shames bad behavior. You need a nation of nationalistic people who will makes sacrifices for the nation as a whole when the time comes. You also don’t want an overbearing and controlling government that micromanages everything. It is complicated, I wouldn’t blame the rich or the poor, but purity ideologies like “just open the government wallet and nationalize everything” or “destroy all regulations, privatize everything, and get rid of taxes” are just the solutions of simple minded and stupid people, and they typically revolve around their own selfishness. I guarantee you that once a libertarian got sick, got a pre-existing condition, and was kicked of their healthcare plan than they would become a supporter of socialized healthcare; just like when most socialists become rich they typically begin to support low taxes.
Oh, and because this site will have tons of libertarians on it….let me repeat this one more time: WESTERN nations have always been mixed economies. Anarcho-capitalism is horseshit, and libertarians have destroyed the conservative party for sure.
By “conservative party” do mean the Republican Party?
The Conservative Republican Party who fetishizes Ronald Reagan…who TRIPLED the National Debt and legalized millions of illegals?
The problem with a “mixed” economy is that the mixture becomes more diluted as government gets bigger and liberals like Reagan become the new conservatives.
True that.
I was a little confused for a while in the whole: “Should I be a socialist or a free-market capitalist?”, but then I realized that it is not about an ideology, but to calculate the effect of every policy with enfasis on the benefit for the nation.
Those purist ideologies are stupid, because they try to make everything about a single absolute principle, which is wrong.
Purity ideologies are typically based around a magical view of humanity. Communists think that people will be happy getting paid the same for doing different levels of work, or that the humans that run a Communist/Marxist state will be benevolent people. Just like how Libertarians view all humans as magical beings who just need to work work work and then magic happens and everyone is well off…ya, tell that to someone who is paralyzed, dying of cancer, or who has worked at a company for 30 years only to find out that when the company went bankrupt that their pensions are worth nothing, or who found out after 5 years of paying an incredibly high healthcare premium that they have a “pre-existing condition” and the healthcare company won’t pay for their shit, etc etc.
Libertarians also believe that for some reason the supply of resources on earth is endless and that it is impossible to form monopolies that control everything to the benefit of solely the rich. It is kind of that frontier attitude of “well this place sucks and is owned by someone else, I guess I’ll just move west to start over again and get me some free land”. Not really an option these days.
Libertarians also have this idea that there is some magical force that controls the rich and always makes them honest and transparent business people…but but but…the consumer will control them…pfff…the average consumer is an idiot, and most people wouldn’t even care, or even know, if someone else got totally fucked over to make their product for them. Muh libertarains have no idea how much consumer protections have done for them. Hell, if not for government regulations than most people wouldn’t even know who owns a company, or what that company is doing. Hell, if it wasn’t required by law to tell the consumer where a product was made, what it is made of, or how it was made….than the average consumer wouldn’t even know what he was buying (even if he wanted to be patriotic and buy made in america). How would you even fight back against corporations without laws and a justice system that define what a corporation can do or not do?
True conservatives are the only ones that understand that at its core, human nature really doesn’t change. However the free market, like any sport, requires some rule-setting in order to ensure folks don’t cheat. Problem is, those rules today are aimed at fattening and enlarging the government (at all levels), and that is what conservative economists today bristle at.
I like the sentiment of your 7th paragraph. It’s very true. The majority of people are not seeing this and it’s very significant.
Crony capitalism is a result of no regulation which allows a few to monopolize and gain extremely large fortunes. They then buy off politicians and lobby for regulations that benefit them and hamper competitors.
Or wait, do you think the politicians bought off the businesses in order to incetivitize them to monopolize industries so that they in turn could push for regulations which hamper other competitors. Thats some real stupid there.
So apparently “no regulation” means buying off local municipalities and using government agencies to supress competition. Oh and we use paper money so they’re can be no real wealth.
Dumbest article I’ve read here in a while. What other form of commerce do you want? Communism? Then you don’t have industry-level oligopolies, you have one monopoly to rule them all.
As an fyi, the wage growth graph you posted to prove your point only looks at effective hourly earnings, however most benefits programs (401k, employee health insurance, etc) became prominent during the late 60s, the demand for which caused prices for those services to grow exponentially. Try looking at graphs comparing productivity growth to total compensation growth, you commie retard.
Austrian economist Peter Klein (met him personally by the way, great guy) makes sense of the free market and income inequality for SJW crybabies here.
The western economic system and the free market (ie. FREEDOM OF CHOICE) allows us to use our resources, however modest they might be, to turn them into something spectacular via stocks and particularly cryptocurrency in this daya nd age. You want Communism and general mediocrity for all? Venezuela awaits.
Hail the west. Hail freedom of choice. Hail the free market. Hail Austrain Economics. It’s the total 180 of Communism and “our” system at ROK.
The article wasn’t about inequality. You’re not addressing the issues and arguments presented.
I do largely agree but free market ideology should not be taken too far, and should be balanced with a more syncretic view, which is linked to rationality and pragmatics more than following a singular idea always and forver. The big questions concern globalism vs. nationalism, and how to deal with oligarchy/plutocracy without letting the state have too much of a say, nor let it grow too much.
Some good literature in regards to sane economics:
William Easterly – The Tyranny of Experts (2014)
Dani Rodrik – The Globalization Paradox (2011)
Dani Rodrik – Straight Talk On Trade (2017)
Alberto Alesina – pretty much everything that he has written, especially about the diversity – economic development nexus.
And if these appear too academic, then one should fill the gap with more straightforward thinkers and writers. Or draw own conclusions.
L M F A O @ “Hail Austrain Economics.”
Austrian Economics is essentially a form of Philosemitism (most Austrian School economists weren’t “Austrian”) and the free market isn’t god, contrary to what you’ve been led to believe.
Capitalism plants the seeds of its own destruction, bases human life on baseless materialism and strives to produce men whose highest ideal is to become “feminized” consumers in lieu of “masculine” producers.
Once a society values money and “freedom of choice” above higher interests (e.g. spiritual, familial and ethnic), the social fabric decays.
“Austrian economics” isn’t real any way. It’s a propaganda construct financed by the wealthy to justify letting them do whatever they want.
Consider that the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises couldn’t get a university job when he migrated to the United States. So instead of looking for honest work in something like the garment trade, like many of his fellow Jews, somehow he hooked up with an American ad man named Lawrence Fertig to help him out. Fertig bribed New York University to give Mises an office and pretend that he held a position as a “visiting scholar,” or words to that effect. And then Fertig paid Mises a salary out of his own pocket so that Mises could crank out the sort of free-market propaganda Fertig wanted to read.
Notice that this resembles how the wealthy industrialist’s son Friedrich Engels supported Karl Marx for many years, so that Marx could write the propaganda for the communist revolution they both believed in.
Yet Mises’s fans don’t see the irony in his situation as a rich man’s “kept economist.” Mises writes about how the market allocates resources in the most efficient way as individuals act upon the price signals that it transmits. Yet the market for academic economists sent the signal to Mises that it didn’t value what he had to offer, so he violated his own explicit beliefs to devise a cheat that gave him an income he arguably didn’t earn.
A economic system with very limited government intervention would prevent the consumerism we have now.
John.
Should the government interven when a corporation who made its empire on American soil decides to ship its operation over seas to make more profit?
How about when a large farm or factory hires all illegals, should they intervene then?
What about Silicon Valley hiring mostly hb1s in order to save money on wages?
Should they stop monopolies?
The “free market” needs to regulated. The “Mises Myth” of Austrian economics is that differences in wealth are due solely to earned interest payments on capital.
The truth is that wealth and income inequality always produce massive disparities in power. At the end of the day, most people aren’t particularly concerned about differences in material wealth, but they do care about freedom, dignity, respect, the ability to raise a prosperous family, and the opportunity to move up in the world.
Our current system does not provide this because markets left unchecked tend naturally toward Oligopoly.
See “Winner Take All: the ergodic hypothesis in economics.” https://ergodicityeconomics.com/2017/03/06/winner-take-all/. “Free markets” don’t equilibrate. Walras was dead wrong.
People these days study economics without studying history and that is a fatal mistake.
Is Technological Improvement a Market Failure?
In Reply to a Mises Myth Regarding Free Markets: https://medium.com/@Santafebound/is-technological-improvement-a-market-failure-ff8940ee1379
It’s always communism versus economic anarchy aka free market.
What’s wrong with protectionism and interventionism.
I remember in college driving Paul Krugman from a speaking event back to his hotel. Just us. The opportunity missed to “lose control” and hit a telephone pole only on the passenger side haunts me still today. Oh what a service I could have provided.
I don’t see what is wrong with monopolies. Your interaction with them is purely voluntary. And they provide you goods that you want cheaply and efficiently. For example, standard oil had gas stations all over the country and had an amazing distribution system that allowed the country to grow rapidly… And just because they are a monopoly does not mean they are invincible. You never know when someone comes up with an invention that the monopoly has no way of competing against… But the bottom line is, when dealing with companies, the interaction is voluntary. When Government gets involved, it becomes involuntary. and when you start giving government more power, the monopolies use their wealth to buy the Government’s favor. Thus you plan to grow government to fight the corporations back fires and both just become even larger. This is where we are today.
Interaction is hardly that voluntary if we’re talking about necessities controlled by a monopoly. Because by definition, you don’t have any other choices, and simply not buying gas, food, etc isn’t much of a choice either.
If monopolies do something that harms their customers, i.e. kills a bunch of them by starvation or lack of energy, then they lose money. So it is in their best interest to keep their customers happy and healthy enough to keep buying. So it wouldn’t make any sense to charge too much or just take your products away.
Yeah, the medicinal companies only squeeze their costumers as much as they can before they just give up and die, no more.
Seriously though, they don’t need to keep their costumers happy and healthy, just in a state where they are only so miserable and sick that they still can and will pay, because they have to and there aren’t anyone else to buy from.
Why do you think rich care so much? They would squeeze every penny out of you if they could. Only competition and the fear of losing money to another competitor is what drives them to make people happy. A monopoly doesn’t have competitors. You also don’t take into account the myriad of other regulations and government actions that make life bearable even if there are some monopolies (like consumer protection, the justice system and the ability to sue, public services like water distribution, public roads, public lands)…IF EVERYTHING was monopolized by the rich, you know, if we privatized all roads and public infrastructure, didn’t tax land so the rich could literally just buy up all the land and keep it for nothing…omg, life would be shit. 95% of people would live as the serfs of the middle ages lived.
Just check Mexico and the richest man alive (at least for some time) Carlos Slim. That guy basically got a deal with the goverment to get all telecommunications infrastructure and made it a monopoly, telecommunications, along with many other industries, were part of the goverment (a la socialist). This guy put enormous prices in cellphone consumption time , and in the XXI century it is not an option to just dont own a cellphone. And if somebody wanted to compete with them like Pegaso? They had to pay him a fee to use his infrastructure.
Mexico would be much better if they had some anti trust laws, even the U.S, the archetype for what the free market is supposed to be for the rest of the world, know that there is no such thing as a free market, so they introduced anti trust laws.
Uh, when owns all the agricultural land there is no competing against that. You would also have to do away with patent laws, which would then mean nobody would invest in research and development. You know, patent laws being a strict form of government control on an economy.
The point is, when people own too much it gets to the point where they control the gateways to competition against themselves. Someone is not going to give you a loan to compete against their own interests, they are not going to give you a loan to start a business that is almost guaranteed to fail if it tried to compete against a massive monopoly with enormous resources to destroy you, and I doubt that working slave wages to a monopoly will earn you enough to start your own business. Rockefeller use to do this to other companies and people all the time. Companies back in those days use to even print their own currency to pay their employees in order to force them to buy from COMPANY stores.
“For example, standard oil had gas stations all over the country and had an amazing distribution system that allowed the country to grow rapidly”…NO, actually the country began to grow rapidly because Standard oil was broken up, along with other monopolies, and in the end Rockefeller didn’t lose any money, he actually got richer. It is interesting how everyone came out on top when standard oil was broken up, I guess that is what happens when you do the right thing. It is also funny that libertarians support monopolies since they go against the “decentralization” principle.
Read history Bro, and stop making shit up. Rockefeller used his wealth to coerce other business into shady practices, he used his workers as human cattle, and since he owned everything it was he, not supply and demand, that set the price of oil.
People who believe in Anarcho-Capitalism are pretty much ignorant morons who have no idea how much government in general has done to protect their own quality of life, and what life was like back in the day before all that shit. There is a reason people desperately risk their live to head out west, and fortunately for that era we had a frontier to go to…that is not really the case anymore.
“Read history Bro, and stop making shit up. ” You have to be careful because a lot of historians are Left-wing shills echoing Marxist talking points. Not saying you shouldn’t read history, but take it with a grain of salt, read between the lines, and dig deeper.
Just the mere fact that the oil companies that were created after Standard oil was split up thrived, expanded the oil industry, and dropped prices dramatically, ALL while everyone made more money (even Rockefeller) just shows you that Standard oil was impeding growth, limiting competition, and stagnating the oil market.
There are a lot of fucking retards on the right as well. LOL, have you seen people praise the Bundy’s as of recently? We now have an entire right wing libertarian movement that thinks federal lands like National Parks, Federal Forest, BLM land are unconstitutional and should be given to the states, even though the Department of Interior has existed for the last 170 fucking years. People in this country see they what they want to see, and it goes back to a lot of ideological selfishness and stupidity, like I have mentioned a couple of times before in this comment section.
Mr. Trueheart is just repeating what the government schools told him about Standard Oil.
Here are the facts:
Standard Oil did NOT use the power of government or coercion to gain its peak market share of 88% in the 1880s
The heating oil market was an unstable market full of wild price fluctuations before Standard Oil’s efficiency innovations.
After Standard Oil entered the market, the price of kerosene fell from over 30 cents per gallon in 1869, to 10 cents in 1874, to 8 cents in 1885, and to 5.9 cents in 1897.
When the Feds ordered Standard Oil in 1911 to break up their “monopoly”, their market share had dropped to 64%.
We are not talking about the first years of Standard oils growth…we are talking about the Standard oil that was dissolved in 1911. Standard oil did a lot of shady things back in the day, and so did Morgan Stanley (Morgan was pretty bloodthirsty), and a number other big names, it is just the way it was back then and people got tired of it …look into the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey v. United States. BTW, a big reason Standard Oils share of the market dropped to 64% in 1911 is because they had already been sued multiple times before that and there was already pressure on them to stop their practices. It is also fortunate that we were still pretty much a frontier country back in the day so there were enormous resources for competitors…hell, Geronimo was still running around in the South west in 1885.
They control a sizeable proportion of the economy which then enables them to control politicians and policy, effectively making them your de facto rulers. Are you cool with that?
Yes.
Trees don’t grow to the sky. As is always the case, innovative smart companies rocket forward in growth. But it cant last. It cant be exponential.
As it grows , the lawyers and HR etc settle in inevitably. Growth and innovation slows then stalls. Then new competitors come in and take the market share.
How few companies ..excepting government assisted or defence etc ..remain dominant over time. And they certainly never take over the whole economy.
I don’t what world you live in Jim but here on earth unless the market is new tech there is no new competitors chiming in. 90 percent of all markets are monopolized and these National and global corporations aren’t going anywhere.
You live in fantasy land a la laisse fare Alexander de Tocqueville hypothesis’. 90 percent of our economy is monopolized by big businesses who push leftist Marxist ideology and are so entrenched it will take a world wide cataclysm to displace them. Certainly not some young, smart innovator.
But hey, if your cool with Monarchy where the monarchs only believe in profit and lack the concept of honor, duty, or benevolence towards their subjects that only goes to show the complete vanity of your soul which is dominated by material greed. If we’re doing Monarchy I’ll take the Medeival variety myself, atleast those of highest character and courage ruled, not vermin.
Anyway you, like all of you modern money minded low IQ’s, will probably read this comment and think I’m just unsuccessful at life, as if only that compels a man to think and care lol.
i support the idea as generally little good comes from gov controlled systems ie it just gets terribly organised and anything folks want eg sillicon valley doesn’t happen. i is not evverything and large demographic issues are quite seperate, as is immigration.
Again yes.
The average person in the West lives better than a King a century or so ago. Its your choices, intelligence and effort that still controls much of your destiny.
Btw all successful sustained economies worldwide have high IQ. Japan and Korea dont have much resources but thats not so important now.
Whites will be a minority here in the states in 30 years, Jim. At that point it is all down hill. Low IQs will abound.
Do you care Jim? Are you non white? If not are you okay with your grand kids being a minority in the country their ancestors built or are you just a pacifist boomer who only cares about his stocks and 401k?
“The dumbest thing that otherwise smart people glorify is the free market. It’s the central ideology of libertarians, the party of people who pride themselves on sounding much smarter than they actually are. That alone should make you question free market rhetoric.”
That paragraph alone should make any reasonable person reading this article do so with a pinch of salt.
The free market is NOT the “central ideology” of libertarianism; liberty is. All derived values such as political freedom, voluntary free association, autonomy, self-ownership and others are to uphold liberty, not the free market. Libertarians believe that FMC is simply the most efficient mechanism by which all those values can be upheld.
Most (including myself) are well aware of it’s limitations, especially when discussing very large concentrations of wealth in the hands of a few, which is what any system (including communism, which is economically the diametric opposite of FMC) leads to.
The core problem with the West isn’t economical: it’s spiritual.
“The core problem with the West isn’t economical: it’s spiritual.”
And by that I mean the religion of equality, political correctness, consumerism, tolerance, etc. have replaced any real genuine spiritual values.
Great. I think that we should put a “greater morality” in its place, especially since people are not willing to follow a certain religion or are simply atheists. Like what Evola stressed in Ride the Tiger:
“I have already indicated the principles of a “greater morality” that, being dependent on a kind of interior race, cannot be damaged by nihilistic dissolutions: these include truth, justice, loyalty, inner courage, the authentic, socially unconditioned sentiment of honor and shame, control over oneself.”
“I think that we should put a greater morality in its place, especially since people are not willing to follow a certain religion or are simply atheists.”
Simple. Economic activity should ALWAYS be conducive to human life (e.g. spiritual life, family life, etc), as well as civil society. Currently, we have it backwards.
Shoehorning human activity into economic dogma established by “Austrians” and “Marxists” hasn’t worked thus far and I doubt it ever will.
What happened in the 70’s is that we came off the gold standard and went entirely to a fiat currency. More specifically we stopped backing dollars with gold and started backing them with oil, thus the petro-dollar.
No, the U.S. Government backs the dollar by requiring us to collect dollars and use them to pay our Federal taxes. The government also punishes individuals who steal dollars. In effect when the government spends a dollar, it introduces a tax credit into the U.S. economy.
The people who fantasize about a “dollar collapse” have to assume that the IRS will one day refuse U.S. dollars as payment for taxes. Yet I have yet to hear a scenario for how this could happen that makes any sense.
” In effect when the government spends a dollar, it introduces a tax credit into the U.S. economy.”
Who is the beneficiary of this “effective tax credit”?
The answer: no one because the dollar is not wealth…it is debt.
When fiat dollars are ‘printed’ they become a debt to taxpayers and future generations.
See: Greece.
True that, even when they changed the currency from cruzeiros to Reais in Brazil, nobody lost anything, and there was no hurry to replace the money.
The government didn’t just abandoned the old currency, it supported even a couple of years after it was replaced (after reais have being released).
Ya. We started importing the third world is mass around that time too.
In*
This. Plus the mass influx of women into the workforce created immense downward pressure on wages; increase the supply of labor by 75% and the cost of labor falls dramatically.
who the fuck is deleting my comments !
I thought freedom of speech is acceptable in ROK !
i think the system is just shit and some randomly don’t post. thats my theory anyway.
I’m the one deleting your comments. There is no freedom for your speech.
Roosh, I love you man, but this shit’ s gotta stop. I thought ROK hit a low with the article suggesting men to start a separate gender state and fuck sexbots. Now we got this.
While I didn’t live in a former communist state, I am one generation removed from a third world hellhole. I guaran-damn-tee you that even the corrupted version of capitalism we have is immensely preferable to the various alternatives.
It is ok to read different opinions bro. You can think for yourself can’t you?
I wonder if this article is a clever ploy to increase the interaction with the page to increase ad revenues…
If so, bravo!
Hopefully, it works.
Unless you think it’s the best of all possible economic systems, that can in no way be improved upon, then there’s hardly anything wrong with pointing out the flaws in the system.
Ya, lets let rich assholes and the immoral own the entire economy under the guise of “muh capitalisim, muh, individualism” and you can be just another of the human cattle whose entire life is spent working their ass off to uphold the excessive quality of life of the rich and their spoiled children who didn’t even earn the money. Yes, lets be masculine and let the likes of Paris Hilton dictate the direction our country goes….uber masculine. Lets let the rich import millions of third world people to undercut wages in this country and destroy our demographic. Lets let the rich own all means of production. BTW, libertarians are destroying the conservative party. I also guarantee you that most third world countries problems lie in the dumbass “individuals” of that country, you know, like people who have more kids than they can afford, and people who vote for essentially the same party or same people every year. Also, many third worlds suffer because the rich elite have control of their government. Just because Marxism and Communism sucks ass, doesn’t mean a purified for of anarcho-capitalism is awesome.
A Mixed economy based on nationalistic principles is where it is at, and then all that matters is how smart and cultured your people are, and how well they control the government. That is it. There is a reason there are not many first world nations out there, it is very difficult to create them. America and the west are mixed economies, and they have always been mixed economies that fit the times in which they lived. For instance, we didn’t have government help for healthcare 200 years ago because there was NO reason for it, healthcare back then was pretty much just a doctor with a medical bag who bandaged you up, gave you a mercury pill or some cocaine, and said some prayers, which is quite different these days, hence, why we live twice as long. We also didn’t need that many environmental regulations 200 years ago, why, because we didn’t have massive industries and large populations producing billions of tons of waste back in those days. Welcome to reality people.
The reason third world nations are what they are is because of their population.
Brazil is often called socialist country, but in truth, it is not any more socialist than many other european countries, even the USA.
The reason we suck is because our people are less inteligent, pure and simple. Not education or any other thing, its just innately dumbness.
Yep, there are a lot of things that go into making a great nation, and it is no wonder that great nations only formed around highly cultured and highly homogeneous states (it is not a guarantee, like in Africa, but it is typically the way it works).
Dokun- I thought African’s won in innate dumbness. America’s people are less intelligent because that’s how the elites want it. Our education system is a joke. Created deliberately to dumb down the population, so it would vote for socialism, or welfare statism. Getting the government out of education is the only way to improve any society, but the rich won’t allow it. Children are the future, yes, but elites prefer zombies.
Pussies settle. This article is about asking the question as to what is better than we have now. What we have is crony capitalism we’re almost every market is monopolized don’t be a puss. It’s not only communism vs anarchy, that’s for simple minded people.
Real libertarians should oppose the existence of corporations. Just because a few politicians decided imaginary people should own everything and employ everyone doesn’t make it right.
Any man whether libertarian, conservative, fascist, should be against big corporations. Oddly, this entire comment section seems to be one big shill for corporations. I don’t get it.
Regarding his chart productivity vs real wages: gold convertibility ended August 15th, 1971. This allowed the Federal Reserve to print fiat currency endlessly, thus ensuring the flow of wealth (savings) from the poor to the wealthy & well-connected in the form of debasement of the currency, ie. inflation. Why do you think they outlawed the private ownership of gold….
Pure capitalism or pure communism will never work, because they’re too extreme.
On the one hand there must be a central institution, like a government, to regulate and control what happens. Otherwise you get a complete shithole because of all the greedy and evil fuckers who will do everything to get rich.
But on the other hand there must be freedom to create, pioneer and stimulate new innovations. I think Western countries are fairly balanced when it comes to regulation vs freedom.
Good comment. That type of logic is not popular with all these fags here who shill for Walmart.
What has happened to ROK? A post attacking the free market? Why?
Maybe because a handful of rich pricks (Zuckerberg, Gates, Musk, etc.) shouldn’t control 95% of the wealth of a nation and use their resources to push Leftist policies.
Why not? The free market should hardly be above criticism, however much we consider it the best available solution. Do you want an echo chamber? If you consider something a good idea, then criticize it from every angle, and see if it still seems like such a good idea. Like the scientific method.
A free exchange of ideas and considerations might lead to learning something.
The dumbest thing I ever read on this site.
This article is written as if America is under a state of complete liberty and capitalism. This is not the case. We have “crony capitalism,” which is a misnomer for minor socialism. If the government were less powerful and we respected the Constitutuion, these problems would be much less severe, and many would not exist.
Horseshit. If muh anarcho-capitalism was so great than there wouldn’t be a need for socialism, and people wouldn’t push for it. America and the West HAVE ALWAYS been mixed economies, only a simple minded dumbass who believes in this romantic view of the frontier life thinks otherwise. Why does crony capitalism exist, oh that’s right, it exists because rich assholes who care so much about the people created and lobbied for it. Stop worshiping the rich dude, seriously. I am all for capitalism as the basis for an economy, but you do need regulations and you do need the government.
Oh ya, I am sure the rich would care about our environment if we got rid of environmental regulations. I am sure the rich would gladly lose profits by hiring Americans instead of importing third world workers, right? Oh, I am sure companies would never try to shortcut and screw their employees, and even their customers, out of money if they knew they could get away with it. Oh, I am sure healthcare companies would never try to sell healthcare to someone only to cut them from their insurance when they found a convenient “pre-existing condition” after years of taking those peoples money. Oh, and I am sure whenever a company screws someone over than the masses of sheeple obsessed with their own selfish lives will be there for them, right? Oh, I am sure the uneducated masses would easily put them rich people in their place, or take the time to regulate it them themselves. Ya, I am sure the average person would test their water and air quality everyday to make sure that them capitalists aren’t screwin them over, right? LOL, how would you even fight against corporations who have done you wrong without the the judicial system, consumer protections, and the transparency that the government forces on corporations? Hell, how would you even know who was responsible or who owns all these corporations if not for the government. Hey, if you want to be ruled by an unregulated aristocracy than that’s great, it is your opinion, but most people are smarter than that and they don’t want to be.
These fucking fags just do not get it. I don’t how, but they don’t.
Crony Capitalism exists because the government has the ability to use deficit spending and unconstitutional taxes to prop up corrupt corporations that hurt the middle class and the poor. You never mentioned a word about central banking or fiat currency, which is the real reason lobbying is able to exist.
I am also in favor of regulations where they are necessary, but many regulations are misguided and have unintended consequences that harm the poor and middle class while making the rich richer.
Because people like the boomers push for it since they want more.
Wait you’re questions by the fact that people want FREE shit?
If the government and corporations were less powerful.
I fixed it for you.
You are correct. But the only reason corporations have the power they have is because of government policies, namely the Federal Reserve, that allow cronyism to exist. The government is the primary culprit.
I think it’s a 33 percent split between the fed(and all banks), corporations, and government.
The’re all on team fuck everybody over.
Exactly, no one is asking for ‘Anarcho’ anything, sensible regulation, lower taxes and smaller govt and boy we will see the economy take off.
Isn’t John Maynard Keynes a defunct economist?
No, he is just an economist. He came up with Keynesian economics, which is just a mathematical relationship. It is a good theory and it is good math, it is just that socialists use it as an excuse to ALWAYS spend more government money, and typically when Keynesian economics is put into place, like with a stimulus, the people who put into place are dumb as fuck and spend money on their own ideological agenda…you know, like Obama spent billions of dollars of the stimulus funding pointless feminists groups and jobs for women, when it was men who got fucked over by the recession.
It is just like how people on the right always abuse Reagan’s Laffur curve when it comes to economics as well. The Laffur curve implies that too much government taxation actually hinders tax revenue, but the laffur curve also states that too little government taxation obviously decreases government regulation as well. The Laffur curve pretty much pointed out that there is typically an optimal tax rate that the government needs to shoot for in order to maximize its revenues without destroying the economy that produces the wealth to begin with. But like all other economic models out there, there is a lot that can go wrong…how well does your government spend money, what exactly is that tax rate, do you have a progressive tax rate or a flat rate, how much government does you economy need, how do you balance local and federal taxes in that equation?…etc etc.
Unfortunately, with the Laffur curve, the right-wings seems to think that Always lowering taxes will immediate increase government revenue to pay for things like infrastructure, the judicial system, embassies, regulations, the military, etc….but it DOESN’T. This is where Republicans get into trouble, there is an optimal tax rate for a particular economy, you go below that you run into trouble, you go above it you run into trouble.
Economists like Keyens and Laffur are typically just scientists who study trends and create mathematical relationships that try to explain them, that is it. How people interpret that data and apply it is a different story.
Sorry for the grammar mistakes, I really need to re-read what I type, lol. First paragraph ^ “The Laffer curve implies that too much government taxation actually hinders tax revenue, but the Laffer curve also states that too little government taxation obviously decreases government REVENUE as well.”
Yes!
This guys isnt the smartest guy. Probably shouldnt write again.
This comment isn’t the richest in arguments.
Political ideology is spin.
“Free Market Capitalism” could also be called a “Global Marketplace” by the left. There’s always an ideology to back up an action you probably don’t want. Political decisions should always be made 100% in reality.
What kind of a euro trash article is this….lost me when you decided to quote keynes. Go home and read some Mises.
Strange how those with the least are the most ardent defenders of capitalism. People without a pot to piss in defending the “right” of people like Zuckerberg to amass tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.
What do you want, equality?
Not to be ruled by ruthless pieces of shit who push Marxist ideology on our people.
Zuckerturd’s wealth is on paper. If you don’t like him, then stop supporting fucking Facebook! I hate that scum bag, so I don’t have an account. He hasn’t amassed any wealth do to me. It’s not hard, people! You don’t need a gubmint person to help you!
@Semi-employed White Guy…I don’t care that Zuck-in-sucker is rich, I care about the level of power he has over our culture, media, and government. I care about the riches ability to manipulate our system to make themselves even richer. Google is also another perfect example, and so is our corporate media. I also care about the ability of the rich to use their wealth in ways that fuck the country over, you know, the country that made them rich in the first place….a perfect example would be undercutting american workers by hiring thousands of foreigners, which lower our wages, destroys our demographic, and destroys our culture.
Your a shill for your masters. The same billionaires you defend, cannot wait to implement communism upon your children. Fucking fool.
Maybe he isn’t defending this billionaires?
Maybe because free market capitalism is more beneficial to the poor or middleclass guy than to mr.facebook or mr.google?
Maybe because regulations, laws, commercial codes (who limits competition and put a big burden on the newcomer in a set market) are written by politicans by profession who listen to lobbies thet runs on money spent by billionaires to run an agenda and to limit co.petion in their business area?
Who is defending the status quo? (Or who could influence it more?)
The newcomer little guy that wants less taxes, more freedom and some beer or the craphead billionaire that think this month issue should be posttransexual discrimination or some other crap?
(And by the way if we should redistibute/socialize/regulate money (via taxation regulation or whatewer you want) should we redistibute/socialize/regulate pussy too?)
If people are dumb enough to buy Facebook stock (or use Windows computers, etc), that is their problem.
These “people without a pot to piss in” are not victims of Zuckerberg.
Zuckerberg does not take their money…government does.
Perfect point. Don’t like a non-essential product? Don’t fund it by using it. Don’t want to pay taxes? See you in prison.
What about all the giant corporations like Facebook who literally OWN the government. Use your brain.
The problem is there is no differentiation between natural resources such as land and thing which are made by labor. If you’re a Landlord in a city with a housing shortage, the problem is a land shortage, not a shortage of construction workers. So the rich get richer while not doing any work or risking any money by hiring anyone. If we had a true free market, should everyone start out with an equal amount of land?
Libertarians say they are for Liberty, yet they support land ownership. Isn’t putting up a no trespassing sign a restriction on other people’s liberty? Yet they all seem to support a system of the rich restricting natural resource use for their exclusive use in the name of liberty.
Housing shortages are caused by conditions in which people don’t have liberty to satisfy a demand for housing.
It was through liberty that creators invented skyscrapers to satisfy the need for more housing in cities.
Of course, Libertarians believe in private property.
How can there be liberty if the neighborhood can vote you out of your house?
Liberty does not mean I should have the right to go into your house, eat your food, and climb into bed with your wife.
No system of human interaction will be perfect.
However, liberty is the best one of all and causes the least amount of problems in society.
It is impossible to have a world where everyone starts out with an equal amount of land. (or charisma, good lucks, health, etc.)
However, with more liberty, many more people will have the opportunity to live the life they want.
Don’t be jealous of “the rich” or anyone else. Be grateful for what you have and get more if you want it.
Life requires access to the earth’s natural resources. Without life one can not have liberty, without liberty one can not pursue one’s happiness. So one can not be pro-liberty for all if one can support a system that allows the rich to get richer by monopolizing the earth.
Economic freedom should mean one can enjoy the fruits of their labor and investment. Taking advantage of the limited size of the earth’s resources is not liberty, it’s raping the earth. If one is into land rights, they should support returning all of the Americas to native tribes.
People forget just how much the quality of goods has gone down. For example you can find vacuums or power tools built 50, 60 years ago that still work perfectly. You buy a vacuum or power drill now and your lucky if it lasts 5 years.
Prices has gone down to:
Practical example:
Buy a good quality sewing machine 50 years ago:
Cost: 1 to 3 month of a factory worker pay
Duration: 30/50 years
Functions: basics by modern standards
Buy a good quality sewing machine today:
Cost: 1/3 month of a factory worker pay
Duration 10/20 years
Functions: medium end by to today standards
Buy low end:
Cost: 1 or 2 days of pay
Duration: a couple of years
Functions: basic by modern and oldtime standars
We have lower quality (or less overengeneered) tools today but we also have lower prices.. It’s a trade off no lithium battery in the fifties if you want to drill on the roof bring a long cable
K1KK0- Yes. But try getting rid of used up cheap goods. You have to pay to throw it away, and it ain’t cheap. In the end, quality does last, but you pay more than ever.
All the result of market research, by the way. Most of which is focused on females, the country’s main consumers. Women have the power.
There’s other reasons for that too, though. Even if it would last a life time, people want the newer things. I have an old cord drill from the 1980s that works great, but it pales in comparison to the Dewalt with the lithium batteries and no stupid chuck key to lose.
I don’t know what to do with that old fashioned drill, even though it is well made.
How can we take this seriously when you have the same low level of economics knowledge as those you critique? America’s problems stem from crony capitalism, broken markets, and poorly planned regulations that do more harm than good. The free market is always the best solution. The real problem is that not every good and service lends itself to a properly functioning market. This is Econ 101 level stuff. A lot of people don’t understand it. Policy-makers ignore the rules because they’re incovenient. You seem to fall into the former category.
I hope Roosh gave you very little Litecoin for this one.
On monopolies…they only exist for one of two reasons. either a business is so excellent at delivering a product that it completely dominates a sector, OR, business has lobbied the government to grant it privileges. Through force.
Monopolies can only exist through government intervention. A free market would only allow for a monopoly in the sense that the monopoly was beneficial to the market.
Dude needs to go back and read more.
Even a “beneficial” monopoly is not truly beneficial if you think about it deeply. Well…I guess if all you care about is money and don’t consider family, health, culture, tradition. Then yes you may be correct.
A good book to read on this subject is John Medaille’s “Toward a Truly Free Market.”
Because a corporation or similar artificial person is something that can only exist by virtue of the state, it is reasonably subject to the dictates of said state — unlike a natural person.
This book proposes many things, but among them are a maximum size for corporate entities, motivations for employee stock ownership, a tax on fallow commercial real estate instead of income, etc.
There is no question that America’s economy IS among the best in the world, as evidenced by the fact even our welfare recipients are in the top 2% of global income.
But it could also do much better — and one way to do this is by limiting the size of corporations. Size does NOT lead always to better service. When’s the last time you called a big company and got a truly fluent English speaker who was actually fully empowered to solve your problem on the phone?
Economies of scale only promote efficiency up to a certain point. Beyond that, they actually hurt efficiency — but that doesn’t hurt the corporation because in many cases it is actually protected from competition by complex regulatory fabric that it co-evolved with.
Anyway, the book is worth a read.
There’s no such thing as a free market. Without a big government commanding the economy capitalism would fail.
Summary: I’m an unmitigated failure so free market capitalism sucks!
My response: Man up, faggot! Only homos and women hate competition.
Only boomer pacifist pussies think as you do.
(((Ben Shapiro))) would want more immigration, naturally.
The free market is just supply and demand with prices increasing or decreasing accordingly. Problems arise when the government and banking shysters step in. This article brings up valid points, but 75% of economic problems are man made, the other 25% attributed to the boom/bust cycle and acts of God.
If you find a better place to ply your craft and profit…let me know…..
An individual can start a business and make themselves truly successful by doing what they are good at and letting their product/craft speak for them.
If you are not working for yourself, you will never acquire wealth. Period.
You may have monetary wealth working for a large industry or writing code, but you have a 20 year professional shelf life. If you are not in “management” or schemed your way into a leadership position, you are toast, and the person you were when you were 20 will come in and take your job.
That’s just how it is.
If you work for yourself and build a skill or craft with real value and become a subject matter expert, you will remain in demand, and it won’t matter if your insurance premiums exceed your company’s limits, since you work for yourself, you decide what your limits are and can contract yourself out to the companies that laid off all the people that knew anything and are now trying to train up their noobs.
Bitch about the economy?
No game? Then complain?? That’s for losers.
And socialism is not a racket? Just ask any socialist ….the system is perfect ….for everyone else…
If you ask any socialist , it would be a perfect system….as long as they were running it.
Hell, no other country has allowed their citizens to become as well off as this one. China is giving us a run for our money by copying us and any technology that we don’t stupidly give or sell them.
The cures for stagnation are planning and action.
What a weak article this is. It’s a poor deconstruction of the free market while offering nothing else as an alternative. “Capitalism: The worst economic system, except for all the others”.
Worst article ever featured on ROK. The author even quoted John Keynes, I sworn marxist socialist and advocate for a socialist new world order.
Roosh come on
huh. libcuck writing for rok now?
well that’s not good.
What we DO need is a free market.
What we do NOT need is a goverment.
Take away all the rules and regulations.
Take away social security, taxes, 99% of laws – the 10 from g0d should do.
Take all those goverment programs and all thoses state and federal office drones and put them to productive work, and the west will no longer need to import cheap stuff from china.
Feminism, gay pride, gender mainstreaming, divorce rape, me-too bullshit, political correctness and endless wars will all be gone within 1 year.
These decadent things have all one common ground – they need big goverment to pay for it.
If there is no big goverment and just free markets, the values of the founders will return – because they represent freedom of choice.
PS: If there absolutly must be any form of goverment, the holy roman emperor was the best form we ever had.
I don’t think the author understands Conservative free market theory very well or the debates within it. He willfully ignores the fact that almost all Conservative economic thinkers acknowledge the tendency of industries to consolidate and believe in monopoly controls (trust busting) and government ability to review and accept or reject corporate mergers (mergers are regularly rejected under Conservative administrations or companies have to sell off pieces to prevent monopoly control of secotrs). He also conflates domestic free labor markets with globalist borderless labor markets. This is obviously a debate that people have as you show between Coulter and Shapiro, many populist Conservatives/Libertarians who would call themselves believers in the free market are opposed to skewing the domestic labor market with third world imports. Are you also talking about free trade? We have many checks on free trade which are in place to prevent distorted government subsidized industries overseas from putting our own out of business. Many free market proponents argue against free trade deals with countries that do not have similar labor laws/standards and thus our free trade deals would be grossly skewed towards one side. Is the author arguing for a top down planned economy, the type of market that we know results in shortages, misery, and government control of people’s economic destinies? This article could have been written by a University Freshman after taking their Marxist professor’s econ 101 class, it is juvenile garbage.
Yeah because North Korea and Cuba have such great economies…
Terrible. The author displays a very poor understanding of economic and legal theory.
Corporations exist only by grant of a government. The defining property of a corporation is limited liability; the assets of the shareholders are not assailable by creditors of the corporation. And this is only because some government says it is so. Take away this government created protection and the massive concentrations of wealth evaporate, as the risk of holding such assets increases substantially. Governments created corporations for the primary purpose of ENCOURAGING concentrations of wealth; it is an incentive to create a corporation as opposed to a partnership which leaves the owners subject to personal liability. Incidentally corporations also provide an increase in government tax revenue as income from corporate activity is essentially taxed twice.
Attacking corporations as a product of the ‘free market’ is misguided at best. And the massive trusts which are simply corporations that own other corporations would not exist either without the government legislating them into existence. And now we have banks, again created by government dictate, that control our very currency and threaten to plunge the entire world into a debt fueled depression. Individuals don’t have the ability to do what corporations and banks do, because those entities are created by and given powers by the government.
The author wants to lay the blame for the current dismal state of affairs at the feet of individual freedom rather than the concentration of power in the state. Whether his ridiculous screed is due to idiocy or dishonesty remains to be seen.
We haven’t had a “free market economy” since before WWII. The article makes mention of the control the Rockefeller’s had, back 100+ years ago. That happened as a result of JD’s lobbying congress. For instance, in the oil industry, he started out with a near monopoly, but over a single 10 year period, he lost 90% of the market share. So he lobbied Congress to put his competitors out of business via regulations (Money quote: Competition is a sin), and they did, allowing him to recover his near monopoly.
Monopolies can only exist with the connivance of government. Anyone with any knowledge about economics and/or history understands this. The author of this article appears ignorant of this fact. The more government interferes in the market, the less free it is. And since kids can’t open a lemonade stand, or a person can’t braid hair, without a license, we can’t really be said to have a free market.
The real title of the book is “The Transformation of American Capitalism: From Competitive Market Structures to Centralized Private Sector Planning”
There is nothing wrong with a free market and capitalism. We currently have a shame corrupt version running. The stock and commodites markets are scamming the little guy. The big guys pay a small fine and skate.
Illegal aliens and outsourcing damage the wage side of the economy. And then there are the taxes. We pay taxes and the cretins in DC don’t even read it or understand it because they are bribed to vote.
Ayn Rand debunks the concept of Anti-Trust in her book, Capitalism: The Unknown. She cites examples of corrupt Trusts that were cited as abuses of the free-market when in reality they benefited enormously from government subsidies and regulations which created barriers of entry. She also cites Trusts that abused their power, but didn’t benefit from government intervention; hence, they were undercut by new competitors.
That being said, I think a free-market case can be made for some protectionism against countries with unfree markets (this includes centrally planned societies as well as anarchist societies). The free market requires that all participants be acting voluntarily. When two free-market economies trade with one another, any inbalances will eventually reach an equilibrium. When dealing with an unfree-market, however, you’re dealing with permanent underclasses that will perpetually undercut the prices and wages of free-market economies.
Some comments:
– What do you (the author) suggest as an alternative?
– I do not believe we are living in a true free market system (we have large ‘islands of socialism’ leeching off the wealth of the free market) so pinning the failures of our current crony capitalism on true free markets is erroneous.
– Socialism breeds monopolies. Large corps lobby for greater, more expensive regulation which pushes smaller players that are unable to comply out of the game, often loopholes are written into regulations. A smaller govt cannot wield this power and a wider variety of market players can exist (lower regulatory burden).
– I am not (nor are many other serious free market economists in favor of ‘anarcho capitalism’, nor are we anti poor.
– Private property was essential in the establishment and progression of civilization. Hayek argues this very clearly, socialism of course hates private property.
Free Market, as an absolute, is only valid under a system of real money and no welfare state. Thus, libertarians shit the bed when they propose what we have as valid. Libertarians are social nerds with coke bottle glasses.
I sense a lot of boomers commenting in this threads
and they won’t die either.
They will hop on their plane to New Zealand
Ben Shapiro confuses the current state of corporatism for free market capitalism. No American family has the choices he talks about when their dad loses his IT job to an underpriced H1B brought in by greedy fuckers in the board room looking to increase the share price and cash in on their stock options.
I’m pretty sure cheap labor visas wasn’t what Ayn Rand had in mind when she wrote about libertarianism. Current fans of her operate as if they are in a vacuum. The reality is that the libtardian ideal of wide open borders will destroy the US as we know it, economically and culturally. Hopefully Ann got through to him, but I wonder.
The Monopolist “Robber Barons” lowered prices in every industry they monopolized.
This isn’t an argument against free markets so much as it is an argument that corporations overwhelm free markets.
Corporations make no sense; they’re built on the idea that a group collectively owns a “business” (which is itself a complex group of things, contracts, copyrights, patents, etc). The corporation is an imaginary person (like “Coca-cola”) controlled by a bunch of different people on a board, and owned by a bunch of shareholders. This imaginary person has legal rights like you and I (and thus, you can sue or be sued by a “legal person” named “Coca-cola,” and “Coca-cola” can own things.)
Well, none of that makes sense. Individual human beings are the only honestly legal persons. They’re the only ones who can have legal rights (including rights to property).
And here’s the rub: they can only do so much, manage so much, live for so long, and gain so much confidence from investors. Without imaginary corporate persons, an individual’s wealth and influence is limited to his own personal trustworthiness, ability, and lifespan. Beyond that, his stuff is naturally broken up when people don’t trust him enough to invest in him, when he can’t do everything at once, and when he dies.
Free markets provide the best stuff at the lowest cost, and while there will be inequalities and problems with a totally free market, it’s clearly a better option than the slave-state centralized market alternative.
Stupid Article. No principles whatsoever. Just amateur psychologizing and a million times refuted arguments about “robber barons”. This is public school level propaganda.
This was a lazy article. Yes, free market capitalism emphasizes profit over people. That is the nature of economics. Economics is ammoral. If you want ethics, then priortize that over profits. You can still make money and be ethical at the same time. No issues there. Thankfully, capitalism is amendable, pliable, and flexible. It can work around extreme regulations, or be completely laissez faire. I prefer the latter, of course.
And while capitalism has its problems, what are the alternatives? Are they any better? I’ve read 2 articles from you complaining about capitalism basically, and yet you offer no alternative.
Is that because you recognize the only alternative are systems much less effecient, that are generally failures? You quote Keynes, but did you know he ended up admitting Hayek was right all along?
So what’s your solution, complainer man?