Had an interesting conversation last night with someone on Economics.
They were claiming capitalism was bad and was proposing central planning of the economy in one manner. Their propose reason that capitalism is so bad is because monopolies form. I pointed out that monopolies are almost always a result of the government interfering with the market, so you're replacing one form of central planning with another form of central planning.
They talked about railways....that were granted a monopoly by special government action... Or telephones... That were granted a monopoly by special government action. Really, even much of the current tech boom is caused by government distortion in the market including messing with debt markets so there's an extreme excess of capital searching for somewhere to grow. There's a lot of zombie businesses that aren't competitive but for their massive size and access to near free capital for massive businesses caused by the government alone.
Apparently I'm ANCAP for pointing this out.
Frankly, pointing out the dangers of thinking every problem requires the government to solve and ignoring that the problems we're trying to solve were caused by previous central planners not being as smart as they thought they were and haviglng more central planning in response means no rules just capitalism and anarchism is nonsense. Its a death spiral at that point.
They were claiming capitalism was bad and was proposing central planning of the economy in one manner. Their propose reason that capitalism is so bad is because monopolies form. I pointed out that monopolies are almost always a result of the government interfering with the market, so you're replacing one form of central planning with another form of central planning.
They talked about railways....that were granted a monopoly by special government action... Or telephones... That were granted a monopoly by special government action. Really, even much of the current tech boom is caused by government distortion in the market including messing with debt markets so there's an extreme excess of capital searching for somewhere to grow. There's a lot of zombie businesses that aren't competitive but for their massive size and access to near free capital for massive businesses caused by the government alone.
Apparently I'm ANCAP for pointing this out.
Frankly, pointing out the dangers of thinking every problem requires the government to solve and ignoring that the problems we're trying to solve were caused by previous central planners not being as smart as they thought they were and haviglng more central planning in response means no rules just capitalism and anarchism is nonsense. Its a death spiral at that point.
- replies
- 0
- announces
- 2
- likes
- 3