Monopoly and Competition

Recorded 10/15/2004 at Radical Scholarship: The Guerrilla Movement for Liberty.

People are right to feel excluded, ignored, and otherwise ill-served by the political system. And yet what do the two parties do about this?

It was capitalism that finally ended the Great Depression, writes Tom DiLorenzo, not FDR's hair-brained cartel, wage-increasing, unionizing, and welfare state expanding policies. 

A basic understanding of the elementary economics of unionism, writes Tom DiLorezno, shows why violence against competitors has always been an inherent feature of unionism.

The "superior bargaining power" argument has always been the most important argument on behalf of unionism and of all the legislative privileges that unions enjoy. Thomas DiLorenzo points to Mises's demolition of the idea.

The next element in human development is that of money and the growth of cities and trade. Why is there division of labor and why is there money? Hoppe covers why people do not remain in self-sufficient isolation even when they could and even if everybody hated everybody else. As long as every person wants to have more rather than less, division of labor occurs.

Competition is a productive aspect of the market economy, writes Ninos Malek, but sometimes businesses urge the government to intervene when their competitors pose a threat. This is the driving force behind antitrust legislation.

The root of the pension problem, writes Carl Horowitz, is the inherent unsoundness of State-granted guarantees to firms (and unions) against market failure.

In the game Monopoly, owners of land and houses and hotels, through acquiring their possessions by luck, are flattered into believing they are masters of the universe, extracting profits from anyone who passes their way. There is no consumer choice and no consumer sovereignty. This is not a small detail.

We have heard all the claims 10,000 times, and here William Anderson deals with the main ones.