On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Paul Hughes <[email protected]> wrote:
Based on my understanding of Kevin Carson and company's writings, this argument seems wrong. How could a company obtain monopoly power without it's ability to use the *state* legal system to enforce its monopoly? Minus onerous (and unenforceable) patents and copyrights, it seems that a genuine free market of highly diverse and decentralized players would all be playing economic games with each other. Without patents or copyrights being enforced through force (by the state or nakedly by wanna-be oligarchs or neofedualists), cooperative peer production would (ironically) out-compete mere "competition". I can see no way that any state, no matter how well intentioned, can't be captured at some point. The result is a modified legal code that favors certain players over others, eventually reaching the end-state of a unified corpocracy.
From what I've seen, the overwhelming bulk of state regulation has been to foster monopoly rather than break it up. Even when fairly liberally pursued, antitrust law has only been used to make sure oligopolies don't turn into monopolies. But the regulatory cartels that make oligopoly itself feasible are fostered by the state. There wouldn't even be national manufacturing companies serving a nationwide market, most likely, if not for the role of the railroad land grants in creating a unified single market. Consider the role of patents -- the pooling and exchange of them -- in cartelizing industries. According to Gabriel Kolko, the primary motivation behind the so-called Progressive Era regulatory state was a desire by the regulated industries themselves to suppress competition. The Clayton Act's "unfair competition" provision actually made oligopoly markets fairly stable and secure for the first time, by outlawing destabilizing price wars that undermined cartels. The FTC's body of rulings through the 1930s actively encouraged price signalling devices like the price-leader system, by classifying below-cost pricing and dumping as unfair trade practices.
-- Kevin Carson Research Associate, Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Super-Empowered Individuals http://desktopregulatorystate.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html