If a company begins to gain too large a market share government regulation could prevent the forming of monopolies through things like Anti-Trust, etc. Allowing society to reap the benefits of competition without the downsides of monopolization.
Without directly saying that capitalism is unethical and exploitative (for sake of the argument), what is the Marxist view on a capitalist society with government regulation to prevent monopolies, and would it be a viable economic system if implemented?
This question emerged from a debate, The person I was debating said if the value is added to an economy through competition the wealth of the average person would also increase regardless of the proportion of wealth. He essentially said he does not care about wealth inequality provided that the poorest of society have a minimum amount of wealth which would increase globally through competition.
The anecdote he used: if everyone has mansions but the richest have mega-mansions he doesn't see an issue.
So how can I show that regulated competition would ultimately lead to the same end as unregulated competition?
Natural monopolies are markets where it is not feasible for there to be more than one firm, e.g: regional trains, telecommunications, mail.
If not regulated these natural monopolies will hike up prices and lower the quality of the service.
Common belief among ancaps is that monopolies are not a problem.
If say for a example wants to break into the restaurant industry but they have a problem. Almost all appliance and necessities are manufactured by a sole company that also owns a massive chain of restaurants. In order to protect their monopoly, this company fixes the prices of appliances so it is nearly impossible for anyone to break into into the industry. There are no government regulations to stop them from doing this, there are also no laws to enforce safety standards in this company, and there are no wage laws protect the workers rights to a decent living.
This company can get away with unethical behavior because, being the only manufacture, people are forced to by from them, and the cost of living is so high that people have no choice but to work for them.
What makes this more free then if the government tightly regulated it and provided more opportunities for people who both work and want to break into the industry.
It seems obvious to me that the natural fate of deregulated capitalism is the progression from initial free-market competition to authoritarian market control by large industry conglomerates. It happened during the turn of the 20th century with companies like Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel, and it is happening today with companies like Amazon and Google in the retail and tech industries respectively. This appears to occur due to lack of state intervention. Thus it is clear to me that the maintenance of a truly free market necessitates trust-busting regulation a la Theodore Roosevelt. An-Caps/Libertarians, please refute.
In the Democratic primary for president, there seems to be 2 schools of thought Sanders/Warren Medicare-For-All with no private insurance and everyone else who believes some form of Medicare buy-in should continue to compete with as-is for profit health insurance companies. Currently, health insurance companies have to refund premiums that don't go for services if over 80% and deductible is met, but there are other examples of national universal health care where private insurance companies perform their market service and are kept to much lower profit margins; Germany for example caps their for-profit insurance companies to 4.5% profit not the 20% American health insurance is capped at. So why doesn't Buttigieg, O'Rourke, Harris, or any other candidate that is loyal to having continuation of private insurance companies in the mix simply put out a proposal where the insurance is capped at 3%-4% profits (what are saying that the greatest nation in the planet can't do anything better than the krouts? USA USA USA /s ). That would provide a significant policy difference from the staid Biden who would never introduce anything more than Obamacare with the public option and Medicare-For-All. Why isn't this pushed by the candidates who desperately need to make themselves distinct from the crowded field that would provide retorts to M4A
Potentional debate response: You're right Bernie countries all over have figured it, that's why I'm proposing how Germany, Israel, and Japan have delivered universal health care through private insurance and cut their costs to half what we pay without raising taxes on the middle class (or at least no where near as much I don't have specific numbers but seems likely to be less than M4A) like your plan
Doesn't this seem intuitive and logical to pursue rather than being lost in the crowd of medicare buy-in/public option? It wouldn't be popular with the insurance companies for sure, but the voters aren't that concerned about the insurance companies little feelings, in fact voters in the Democratic primaries would likely to be in favor of taking insurance companies down a couple of pegs.
What am I missing, what's my blindspot?
Change My View: Google is a monopoly and needs to be regulated like a government agency.
Google stifles search results to places that are not Google-owned and promotes links to sites that they do own like YouTube.
If there were five options like Google that had a more or less equal share of the market, this would be completely understandable, but there isn't. You have Google, the number one website on the Internet by far. Then you have Bing and Yahoo much, much, lower below in terms of market share.
The effect of this is that when companies like YouTube ban people, they don't have anywhere to go.
I know they have their own websites, but that's BS, and we all know it. Youtube is where things get seen, shared, and responded too.
Think of it this way, how many times, from how many people, have you heard that it would be a great thing if someone would create an alternative YouTube or an uncensored YouTube or just competition for YouTube? Well, where is it?
In anything even close to a fair market, Google and Youtube would have a ton of competitors. But they don't, things like Twitter and Facebook are competitors, and because of that, they're continually improving themselves.
Even when the big sources try to compete with Google it shuts them down. When Facebook try to integrate a video feature to compete with Youtube, it was struck down.
Think about how well Vine did, and that was limited to seven-second videos. They were never going to leave anything but the comedy sphere. That has to show how much the market is demanding a competitor, and yet there's still nothing.
It's like the issue we had with the railroads in the United States, except in a world where the only people allowed to build new railroads are the people who already own the existing railroads. Any time someone does try to make an alternative, it's bought by the establishment. On the rare occasion where it stays independent, Google renders it effectively nonexistent, Suppressing it so even when people search for it, it only shows up on page 3 or 4 of Google. Alternatively, they promote any negative news about it to show up first. So a potential new user must look through 4 or 5 articles about how it promotes racism or hates women or something before finding a link to the site.
I usually don't like the idea of the government messing with the market like this, but I don't think there is another way. Even if you split Youtube and other parts off of Google it wouldn't help, the remaining por
... keep reading on reddit ➡Facebook owns both Facebook (duhr) as well as Instagram. They are THE defacto standard for social media. This is not healthy for anyone.
Facebook literally reaches Billions of users. By comparison, Reddit has about 330 million, same for Twitter. Apple doesn't even try. Even mighty Google is shutting down their social media offering in April...effectively surrendering the market.
The fact that even Google can't compete against FB clearly illustrates that FB is a monopoly. If these tech giants with unlimited resources can't compete, how could literally anyone else?
No company - regardless of how you feel about Facebook's questionable ethics, and recent revelations about their abuses - should own that much of any market. And no one company of this size should be largely guided by thoughts, feelings, and impulses of one man. That leads to things like this...
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Facebook has an 'expansion at all costs' ethos that is dangerous. Granted, this is sort of the ethos of most companies of this size.
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Their 'break things and fix em later' policy is wreckless for company of their size.
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They have a propensity to not 'stay in their lane' and just help people connect and share photos of their dinners, but also do things like control how people interact with the media that people consume.
The havok that just those behaviors have been bringing is a really good example of exactly why a monopoly is unhealthy.
Now, I'm not sure how FB would be effectively broken up. But that was the challenge of breaking up the phone company many years ago. It was done then, and it can be done again.
Stiff regulation is another option. Facebook's main product, hyper-granular user marketing data is a completely new 'product' that has very little rules outside of privacy laws - ones that Facebook seems a bit cavalier with. A discussion about every American's, and all human's actual right to privacy needs to begin.
Thanks for reading.
No. What's your point? That it's easier for a government to take over a whole economy than to reform that economy in favor of freer competition?
This is definitely a little bit of provincial and a little bit of federal, right? Does anyone know of any campaigns advocating for/against particular legislative frameworks for sales/distribution of marijuana in Canada? Who is making these decisions?
