On 6/20/11, Apostolis Xekoukoulotakis <[email protected]> wrote:
I think by self-regulated he means that the government doesnt regulate the markets. He goes on to show that self-regulation is in fact regulation by few corporations, thus the free market is only a myth. He then goes to explain why free market proponents have promoted the idea that the state job is only that of 'punishing' those who do not abide by the rules, and have withheld the true nature of the economy. That is what i understood by reading the synopsis.
The government still does regulate them, in a very real sense. The few large corporations wouldn't exist at all if it weren't for taxpayer subsidies, government-enforced regulatory cartels, and artificial property rights like IP. There are two kinds of government intervention: primary and secondary. Primary intervention is the basic structural privileges which maintain corporate power. Secondary intervention consists of ameliorative regulations which limit the abuse and mitigate the bad effects of the primary regulations What the right-wing variant of "free marketer" means by deregulation, in reality, is simply eliminating the secondary interventions while leaving the primary interventions intact. As Patrick suggests downthread, the state is the executive committee and the ruling class and corporations act through the state to regulate the economy. -- Kevin Carson Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism http://mutualist.blogspot.com The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html