James A. Donald wrote
[oddly irrelevant stuff about Satan skipped]
A big company has no monetary advantage over a small company.
Suppose Firm A controls 90% of the market and firm B controls 10% of the market. Artificially low prices cost the big firm nine times as much as the small firm. Under capitalism, the small company can duke it out on equal terms with the big firm, and with great regularity, that is exactly what they do.
Sometimes. And sometimes they don't. Sometimes half-a-dozen big boys just gang up on the smallest.
Anyway, your example ignores cross-subsidy whcih is the usal way to do this.
And bigger companies precisely *do* have a financial advantage over small - they can borrow money at lower rates and they have more ways of hedging. When they operate in more than one part of the world a certain amount of hedging is built in. In general economies of scale aren't, but finance is one area where they do work.
There are more forms of competition than a price war Also if it comes to a *legal* slugging match the total amount
Garbage (what we call rubbish over here) collection is different again. It's not at all a nutural monopoly and there is nothing stopping anyone offering to do it as a business. But it is a natural for social ownership,
You mistake the political adventures of your local elite for universal laws.
Just like you Americans do when you drivel on about guns in ways that most other people either don't care about or find repulsive? Anyway, I wasn't talking abou the elite but the majority.
In some parts of the world rubbish collection is private.
Yes, I know that. In some parts of this coutnry also. Anywere genuinly rural for a start. What's that got to do with what I said?
There is no "natural monopoly" that is not somewhere a private industry, and often it is a private industry in a place that is otherwise quite socialist. Public and private ownership reflect the accidents of politics and history more than they reflect the natural characteristics of the industry in dispute.
I agree with this completely, but I don't think it invalidates anything we said. You are confusing 3 quite different questions:
- social ownership versus private ownership - competition versus monopoly - free trade versus protection
Ken Brown