-- At 05:28 AM 10/2/98 -0500, Brown, R Ken wrote:
Nonsense. Most of those businesses became monopolies - or local monopolies - in the relatively unregulated 1880-1914 period.
Untrue:
In some of them - like rail or oil in the USA - governments introduced regulation to *force* competition.
In the case of the railways, the governments granted and imposed monopolies. In the case of oil, I assume you are referring to "Standard Oil", there was no monopoly, and the government regulation had little apparent effect. Also the Standard Oil issue was about refineries, not oil wells or oil pipelines. There was nothing to prevent any man or his dog from setting up a refinery, and lots of them did.
In UK over the last 30 years government has used a thing called the "Monopolies and Mergers Commission" to investigate & (very occasionally) break up monopolies or cartels.
This is like arguing that the existence of witch burning proves the existence of witches.
Recently government has forcibly broken up gas supply monopolies in this country.
After first forcibly creating gas supply monopolies.
What happens much more often is that one company becomes dominant and then uses money to undersell rivals.
Why don't you argue that they conduct sacrifices to Satan? 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.
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. In some parts of the world rubbish collection is private. In other parts of the world shoe production is public. In one of those nordic countries, I think Finland, the phone system was never made a public enterprise or state regulated monopoly, but most other things were. 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. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG UGkX+1b/yoE+3kHZyOhKZypmXTbwJRhUnQQmuuXZ 4wYCfh8Ku6v+DiuN6q6haMUHpW8UcDrlkVLmN20j8 ----------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. http://www.jim.com/jamesd/ James A. Donald