Scammin' Me

MONOPOLY COMMUNISM.
Boy did that trigger a thought.
From E.M. Smith (He has a degree in Economics)
“Evil Socialism” vs “Evil Capitalism”
EXCERPTS (I highly recommend reading the whole comment.)
The bolding is mine… So MANY great ideas and clearifications for non-economists. It is VERY OBVIOUS THAT president Trump is ANTI-FASCIST!!! 😲
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…..Realize that the capitalist urge is not toward a competitive market. It’s the very LAST thing any profit maximizer wants. Even in Adam Smith’s “The Wealth Of Nations” he recognizes that ~’Rairly do men of means gather, even for merryment and {discourse?} but that the conversation turns to ways to {restrict competition and raise prices}’.
What a profit maximizer wants is a monopoly where they can achieve the profit maximizing price point. Not competition. No “market” with many sellers.
So watch what GE does, as an example. It is always on the hunt for a market it can “dominate”. It uses political leverage to get its products mandated and the competition banned. It doesn’t want a market, it wants a ‘company store’.
Internalize that, and a lot of things “fit” better…
Monsanto pushing legislation to ban private traditional seeds and seed sharing, and promoting GMO products. (Why would a seed company want to ‘destroy’ a seed market? So you must come to the company store…)
EPA is used to forbid all sorts of things that can be done easily and cheaply, and where the alternative is very expensive (and available from very few, or one, supplier). So, want to make your own “trash to fuel FT machine”? Well, better check out all the “regulations” on fuel refining and production … if you don’t have a few full time lawyers to fill out the paperwork and a few more to defend against the EPA suing you, it’s a no-go. And who DOES have those lawyers? AND the already established refineries? Oh yeah…
Once corporations figure out that it is cheaper and easier to get the competition banned and them mandated, than to create new products; and that they can make lots of money as the sole provider of a crappy product but not that much making good products in a competitive market; well, lets just say that the campagne contributions flow…
Oddly, you can look at Communism as the “limit case” where there is ONE corporation and it IS the government. At the other extreme is “laissez faire” with huge numbers of competitors. As you move toward Communism you pass through stages of ever more “concentration” of control. Just shy of communism is Classical Socialism with it’s state planning boards and commissions. A bit more toward L.F. you get “Market Socialism” (with some sub-types in between).
The USA until about 1990 was a “Mixed Economy” with some “natural monopolies” under government “control” via “regulation”; and with many competitive markets. We’ve moved to more central planning and more central “regulation” (in some cases as a cover for the “planning” word that has gotten tied to Socialism… so is political to some extent). With the nationalization of GM and the bank “bailout” / “rescue” that was really more of a ‘take-under’ in some ways; we moved to a Lange Type Socialism.
The result of the last 50 years has been more companies in markets with Oligopolies that are essentially guaranteed by the government. Who dominates the Home Mortgage Market? Fanny & Freddy – Gov’t Corporations. Who dominates the Student Loan Market? Sally Mae – a Gov’t Corporation. Who dominates US Autos? GM – a Gov’t Corporation via Nationalization, but now being sold off. (Though Ford is doing well too.) And who “Calls the Tune” for the Banks in America? ALL of them? The Federal Reserve Bank – a Gov’t sponsored corporation. And there are a whole lot more of them. Try taking a train from coast to coast for example…
At the next tier down, we have Gov’t dependent Oligopolies. Say you wanted to make airplanes. First off, you need that dozen lawyers to work the FAA for you. Next up, you need some friends in the Military to feed you contracts. Don’t think so? When Boeing gets a $B contract to ‘study’ or ‘develop’ and you need to design your new tech from scratch on your own money: Who do you think will win? So the government basically decides how many companies it wants, and who they will be, then funds them “to plan” with contracts. (This is NOT a hypothetical… I’ve watched them flat out announce “We’d like Lockheed and Martin to merge” or “we don’t want…” usually when one of them is ‘having issues’ and the topic is raised. Then the gov’t casts the one vote that matters…)
And so it goes…
This is, dare I say it…. basically the same way the Fascist “Third Way” worked. (And it DOES work). FDR and Wilson both had high praise for The Third Way and you can see how they shifted America from a ‘free market’ toward “Third Way” government – corporation “cooperation” … It was this same process / tendency that Ike warned about in the “Military Industrial Complex” speech.
So we’ve moved away from straight up competition (and with good reasons… it is less profitable and more destructive in some ways and it is prone to monopoly practices) and toward that Classical Socialist end of things; with exact placement varying over time. And we called it a “Mixed Economy” at the ‘tepid’ end; as the name “fascist Third Way” got a bit tainted during W.W.II …. that tendency for Mussolini and Hitler to stir in a load of Nationalism and for the Nazi’s a double helping of Racism spoiled the soup for the Third Way “Socialist Lite” folks like FDR.
And the propaganda worked.
We’ve now got a “Progressive” and a “Third Way” government that IS a form of Socialism. (Now being rebranded as “Market Socialism” in the Eastern Block and Euro zones; called “Regulation” in the USA and sometimes poking it’s head up under “Rescue” as well with the most recent bits called “Social Justice”… all the pieces as slices of salami, but no overall Big Picture of it… we like to keep our socialism hidden in tiny bites with different names.) But just don’t ever point out that it’s basically the same “Third Way” process, using what’s properly called “Corporatism”, to achieve the Socialist agenda; that was first innovated by the Fascists… After all, it doesn’t fit the propaganda paradigm “Fascists bad, WORLD Socialists good” put out by Stalin…
And that is the root cause of your pondering. Corporations are very happy under a Socialist Third Way / Progressive / Market Socialism / Fascist / “Government regulated Coopetition” (whatever you name you like to apply to the same beast) system. They are not very happy with wide open competitive markets. See all of Europe for an example of “Managed Markets” (yet another name…) The French are masters of this technique, and the Germans not far behind. The Japanese innovated the Keiretsu as a way to limit competition to manageable chunks with government supervision.
Like I said, it DOES work. What galls me is just that we run around putting 20 different names on the same process and that just hides what’s really going on. All for political reasons. Very “un-tidy”… You’d think these folks had something to hide…