jsgoddess, unfortunately, the pharmacy where I get my medicine (the closest one available) is 15 miles away, and I am unable to meet the qualifications by which the government creates a monopoly on automobile usage. Since the government has artificially limited the number of drivers, those it licences should be required to meet the needs of the public. If you have a drivers licence, you (as my neighbor) should be required to drive me to the pharmacy whenever I need to fill my perscription. I don’t care if you don’t want to because I smell bad and have an obnoxious personality and you wanted to visit your sister in Chicago that day. If you can’t keep your personal feelings seperate from your driving, you shouldn’t have applied for a licence.
If the government isn’t going to force you to serve my needs, then it should mind its own business and let me drive, even though I’m an uninsured drunken epileptic and my brakes are shot.
(The alternative to this position, of course, is that the government can, in fact, regulate and even licence various activities for the sake of public health and saftey without necessarily mandating arbitrary standards of public service from the licencees. But you’ve rejected this position. Pick me up at nine; I need to do some shopping, too.)
Then virtually nothing is truly a free market. Virtually all industries are subject to anti-trust restrictions, they are prohibited from predatory pricing practices, from price gouging, from collusion. Does that mean that no one anywhere can pursue alternative sources of goods and services, since there’s no genuine free market in the U.S.?
Regarding licensed/registered suppliers, we could include on that list barbers and street food vendors and some customer service representatives answering the phone for financial services firms. Does a barber have to provide mohawk haircuts? After all, he’s licensed. And do all such instances amount to the government establishing a monopoly? I don’t think the word means what you think it does. Establishing a hurdle for entry into a field, a hurdle that anyone may attempt, does not amount to a monopoly. And nothing you have offered changes the fact that someone can go to another pharmacist, assuming one is available.
There is no substantial difference in this regard between pharmacies and hot dog carts. If you only want to eat kosher hot dogs, and my hot dog cart doesn’t offer them, you have to look elsewhere–my vendor license notwithstanding.
It means that blithely waving our hands and saying that the market will sort it out is rather silly. When the market is being hamstrung, it’s going to have a tough time reacting in any ideal way.
If the government were to say that hot dog cart vendors have to get licenses and, essentially, as a reward for getting said license no one anywhere will ever be able to buy a hot dog from any other place but a hot dog cart vendor, you wouldn’t regard that as a government established monopoly?
Only if the government said, “jsgoddess, you are now hereby authorized to be America’s only legal hot dog vendor and we place no requirements on you as to where and how you do business.” It would be an oligopoly if they said, “jsgoddess, you are now hereby authorized to be one of America’s 200 (or 500, or 5,000) hot dog vendors, and we place no requirements on you as to where and how you do business.” But what they are saying is, “jsgoddess, you have proven yourself to have the knowledge required to meet minimum public standards for a pharmacist. You are now free to be a pharmacist, if you wish. You are like any business, and may open your own pharmacy, selling whatever products you wish, to whichever market you like. Keep in mind, that if you don’t give good customer service, people might not buy from you. But they might. If they do, I guess you made a good business decision about where to locate. But keep in mind that your trade area is not protected, and that the number of potential competitors is effectively infinite, and someone might see you doing a crappy job, and decide that they can take your customers away from you by giving better service, offering more products, or what-have-you.” Then that’d be a free market system.
There’s also been a good deal of talk about “what if you live in a small town” and such. Where is it written that those living in rural (as opposed to metropolitan) areas have rights to the same kinds of business and the same kind of choices in comsuming? It seems to me that we make choices about where we want to live, based upon how we wish to live. I know people who choose to live in Buttcrack, Saskatchewan (not a real place) because they like the small-town atmosphere, cleaner air, lack of noise, lower crime rates, etc. They are also well aware that they might have to drive three hours to get to the nearest Wal-Mart. They also might not have a pharmacy in town. If they do, there’s probably only one, and that drug store may not sell that customer’s preferred kind of bandages, or shampoo, or one of the pharmacists may choose not to dispense scrips for RU-486. Even though the customer can’t get it anywhere else without having to drive for an hour!!
That’s what we call lifestyle choice. You can live in a metropolitan area, and have multiple 24-hour pharmacys to choose from, along with all-night gyms, and up to 12,500 Starbucks from which to choose, all the while putting up with the inconveniences a large city can have. Or, you can live in a small town, and have peace and quiet, know all your neighbours, and have the choice of two kinds of coffee (today’s pot / yesterday’s pot) at the local gas station/diner/Greyhound stop/phone booth, all the while putting up with the inconveniences a small town can have. Like no place to get RU-486.
You’re losing me. How is the market being hamstrung so as to restrict the sale of morning after pills? When the licensing process requires the licensee to swear not sell them, then you’ll have a point. Then there will be an institutional restriction.
No, I wouldn’t. A monopoly by definition is when a market has a single supplier. So, if DrugCo is the only supplier of pharmaceuticals in the entire market–and all others are prevented from entering the market–and DrugCo refuses to sell something, you’re out of luck. But that ain’t the case. This is no more a monopoly than doctors collectively are: they’re licensed but operating separately.
When the streets are festooned with hot dog carts, and there is nothing preventing others from entering the market, then, no, you don’t have a monopoly. That’s not what a monopoly is. You just have individual vendors selling what they choose to sell. I don’t see how this is substantially differently than a market with unlicensed suppliers.