[P2P-F] Ordoliberalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Michel Bauwens]

the economy has always been political, it has always been planned or
steered either by public or private actors (and in reaction to popular
demands) ... in a very long historical era where 'big' meant 'stronger',
there was always a strong political bias to create conditions for large
actors to emerge ...only very recently have we reached peak hierarchy where
it now makes sense to have political economies geared towards flexible
distribution but still towards a bias towards 'scope' instead of scale

the state can be captured,and has been repeatedly, BUT, it also reflects
the social balance of forces and does change as a result of popular
pressure and demand

On Sat, Dec 10, 2011 at 4:57 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Paul Hughes <psidoc at gmail.com> 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
>
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