Crooked timer’s Ingrid Robeyns has had some very informative posts on this

BTW – Attaturk: like the posts and the icon – but you do know that your eponym made that particular piece of headgear illegal, don’t you? It’s a significant date in modern Turkish history, believe it or not.

Thanks for all your work — although I know there’s still a lot ahead.

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What the hell, I’ll post away here in the EPU zone anyhow.

In ref. to perris: very much agreed.

I’ve written about this before, sorry if it’s a duplication for some of you. I’m a business major, finished at a private school that was very big into free market economics. (Now I understand why they were so big on courting international students.)

One prof in economics, when discussing supply and demand, grabbed a brand new piece of white paper, crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash can to punctuate his remarks. He said that if we were worried about trees, that we should just use paper since the market would resolve the problem by growing more of them.

I damned near levitated out of my chair. I pointed out that the piece of white paper he’d just tossed required bleach, which in turn when made creates dioxins, the most toxic substance on earth. And we were sitting in a class room only a mile from a river with one of the largest concentrations of dioxins in the world. He could not tell me how the market was going to clean the dioxin generated by chemical production out of the river — he simply had blind faith that the market would eventually solve it.

That was 10 years ago. And the river is still highly toxic, made national news.

I have been toying with the idea of writing that moronic prof a note and asking him how the market is progressing on that dioxin removal.

In re: SanderO at 63 — this is the crazy part. That same private business school required a course in business ethics, which was likely the best class I took while there. A local judge taught the course, using a text book that was written and published in the UK. The text said that good business ethics were decisions made for long-term value, with reasonable decency and distributive justice.

Good gravy, there’s virtually nothing that American corporations do that is ethical, by this standard, starting with decisions made for long-term value. And shareholders as drivers of decision-making? Jeebus, right there is the biggest single problem. We do not act on behalf of the public or the common good when we act for the benefit of shareholders, who are typically the monied class, in control of most of this country’s capital but not its labor. (And I say this as a member of the shareholder class.)

We should be making decisions for stakeholders’ long-term value, not shareholders’. And definitely not for the short-term — quarter-to-quarter, minute-to-minute.

God, I think I could write a thesis on this…

Capitalism is an engine to make the few rich and nothing more than fuedalism – the new fuedalism.

The major problem here is that capitalism is as amiercan as apple pie and is position as the not communism and not socialism all which are framed as oppressive systems. Whatever their flaws, they are meant to serve the people not the owners. There’s no cream and rising to the top and that somehow means you can win at communism or socialism and winning is what America is about. Capitalism wins by default and discussing it seems off the table.

Who will really take on capitalism as a flawed economic system in this country except some crazy professors and DFHs?

Unfettered capitalism is the elephant in the room that no one wants to go near and so politics is almost awlays framed in terms of other issues, like immigration, guns, abortion and so forth.

Unless and and until we address capitalism’s flaws we will march forward into a global monopolist hell.

Competition among businesses can only be effective is there is a level playing field and the smaller ones have the abilities to compete with the larger ones. This is rarely the case because size often includes economies of scale and this often mitigates against competition.

and there is never a free market where government services or “commons” are involved

when a service is required it is almost impossible to have competition since businesses price according to demand not according to cost

there is no such thing as “supply and demand” when it comes to a “commons”, the price is set and the consumer is forced into the purchase or the use

however competition CAN exist AGAINST the commons, wherefore private industry could TRY to compete with the governemt service

for instance, private school is a perfect example, private industry tries to get people to use their service rather then the commons however this system would fail miserably if the public school system didn’t exist to compete against

I think the change should have been announced in advance with appropriate advisories. Why all the suspense and chaos which could have been so easily avoided? What was gained by being so dodgey on Friday?

The unfettered free market always tends toward monopolism and then there is no possibility of competition. Today we see large corporations choose to merge rather than compete. This lowers their own individual costs and allows them to control the market, pricing and maximize their profits. Competition is expensive. Faux competition is so much more profitable.

Further you can’t have corporations which are losing in the battle for market control. If a corporation loses its value drops and it will disappear. In an attempt to remain afloat it begins to cannibalize itself, selling off assets, outsourcing labor to cheaper environments, moving its domicile to avoid burdens of regulation, taxes and so forth.

Monopolists, believe rightly so that once their product or service becomes a necessity, the consumer will blindly go wherever they are led.

There is no competition. There is a appearance of competition in name only. Winning is everything and it matters not how you do it. It matters THAT you do it. And that my friends is the republican view of life.