Once upon a time there was this company called Microsoft…
And then there was Google, which gave way to…
Exactly. Which both underlines some of the misconceptions of the OP and answers the basic question. Capitalism doesn’t kill competition. Walmart is simply the latest in a succession of companies that, for a time, dominate their niche. It’s not a zero sum game, and the pie is not fixed. Chicks dig scars, but glory…glory lasts forever…
-XT
I’d argue the best description is the status-quo leaders of both parties, who are neither socialist progressives, nor true free-market-loving conservatives (both of whom would have more or less refused any bailout).
This question is hard to answer with present day examples, because here in the US we don’t have unfettered capitalism. So if a big behemoth tries to buy out all its competition or run them into the ground with unfair business practices they will find themselves in violation of certain anti-trust laws etc. and told to knock it off. However if there were truly no regulations then the rich and powerful would get more rich and powerful until the revolution occurs.
Which is exactly the process that is occurring now. It’s just a matter of time, and not much of it, neither.
The end result of capitalism would be monopoly-except that monopolies are rarely efficient. There is usually a way for a better competitor to enter the market. Take the USA automobile market-by 1958 or so, the big 3 (GM, Ford, Chrysler) had a vitual monopoly-and dictated what their customers would buy. Then cam VW, the Japanese, and their monopoly was broken.
My favorite law and economics quote:
"If you sell for less than your competitor, you are dumping.
If you sell for more than your competitor, you are abusing your dominant position.
If you sell for the same as your competitor, you are in collusion".
The question may be about some theoretically pure capitalism that doesn’t exist anywhere. In theory, corporations in an unregulated marketplace can certainly kill of competition. Ma Bell was a great example. Bell did its best to kill competition for decades, until finally broken up but government orders. The same claims have been made against Microsoft, with perhaps slightly less justification.
And a whole lot of capitalists would argue that anti-monopoly laws, being government interference in an otherwise free marketplace, are decidedly anti-capitalist I personally wouldn’t call laws like this part of the capitalist system, I would call the brakes on the capitalist system imposed from the outside.
If you have a genuine monopoly on a much wanted or needed product or service, it doesn’t matter much whether you are efficient at it or not.
[QUOTE=Boyo Jim]
The question may be about some theoretically pure capitalism that doesn’t exist anywhere. In theory, corporations in an unregulated marketplace can certainly kill of competition. Ma Bell was a great example. Bell did its best to kill competition for decades, until finally broken up but government orders. The same claims have been made against Microsoft, with perhaps slightly less justification.
[/QUOTE]
Except that what allowed the Bell ‘monopoly’ didn’t have anything to do with pure capitalism, and instead had to do with government intervention and regulation. The same government that broke up the Bell conglomerate enabled it to be a monopoly in the first place.
Certainly the same claims have been made against Microsoft, and certainly there is less justification, as there was also less government intervention enabling Microsoft to become a true monopoly. Though the same interventionist spirit certainly took a stab at breaking them up.
Well, most ‘capitalists’ I’ve seen talking about anti-monopoly laws are also pointing out the irony that the same government that protects us from evil monopolies is the one that enables them, historically, in the first place, and that most historical monopolies aren’t caused by capitalism, per se, but by government intervention in the market, and that left to themselves without either the initial intervention OR the crusader spirit of breaking up the monsters they helped build we wouldn’t have monopolies at all.
Me, I take a more middle ground view (big shock I’m sure)…we need government regulation, and the reality is government IS going to stick their noses in to ‘fix’ problems in the market, so we also need anti-monopoly laws on the books to make sure that if the government helps create or enable them, the government can intervene to save us all from their action and break them up again later down the pike. It’s a complex and complicated world, to be sure…if only glory really was forever. sigh
-XT
Uh, Evil Captor, you may want to rethink your position given that the rich have gotten poorer. A lot poorer, in fact.
Um…do you have a cite that the rich have gotten poorer? From everything I’ve read, while the poor have slowly gotten richer, and the middle class has either stagnated or gotten richer even more slowly, the rich have certainly gotten richer faster. I don’t have a particular problem with that for various reasons, but I’ve never heard anyone claim that the rich have gotten poorer, so if you have a cite I’d appreciate it. Besides, you know someone is going to ask. 
-XT
Well, that’s just it. You can more or less prove it any way you like depending on when you start your base period. In the last few years, however, the rich have certainly lost a lot more proportionately than most. Now, that’s because they had more to lose, not surprising. Choose a different base year, and then it looks like they’ve gained oodles over the rest of us. And then pick an even earlier base year, and it looks even stranger, with proportionate wealth flucuating wildly.
Well, how about providing one cite that shows income of the top 5 or ten percent of income earners, for a 5-10 year period of your choosing, over the past 20 years or so.
If you can’t do that, show us something – where did you get this fact?
You seem to assert that Capitalism is equivalent to evolution. Evolved doesn’t mean better (Darwin hated the term because of this) it means more attuned to its environment, creatures however can themselves make their own environment.
Saying Walmart isn’t individually as good at other stores is like saying an ant isn’t as strong as a grasshopper.
Adam Smith and Darwin are in fact compatible, but that bodes ill for ‘weak’ human beings.
That is not the lesson.
Speaking for the Japanese. They have poor coal resources and no iron to speak of. Their industry was destroyed in WWII, no experienced workforce or factories, nor any technological advantage.
What they did have was a plan.
The government decided to corner the market on automobiles and electronics and they created a publically funded structure to do it. They would buy pig iron from the US, pay to ship it to Japan, manufacture it into inferior cars, pay to ship it to the US and sell them at a loss. Then next year they’d do the same thing. In the mean time the companies were kept solvent by tax payers and as years passed the technology and experience caught up and surpassed the US and those industries became a global force.
Renewable should be on the same course, and if we had elected officials with vision it would be possible.
The rich have gotten a LOT richer than the poor and the middle class.
Wealth is being concentrated. We probably already could reasonably be described as living in a capitalist oligarchy. Welcome to the Third World of has-been democracies!
Perhaps SB meant the two through eight percent wealthiest. Or the nine through twelve percent wealthiest – or whatever small sliver of the wealthiest that can be statistically segregated and shown to have lost wealth.
I’m also curious about Mr. Bandit’s source, but he may be right. Remember that even if “The Top 1%” are richer today than some years ago, that doesn’t refute Mr. Bandit’s claim, because they may not be the same people as the earlier Top 1%.
The very rich can be roughly divided into two camps, those who inherited stock from their granddaddy and those still actively [del]defrauding other investors[/del] creating jobs today. The latter group is outperforming the former.
I read somewhere (possibly Krugman or watched it in a Grignon vid) that the top 5% actually have a reduced rate of growth (while the bottom and median 20% have a negligible rate of growth - the middle class is not declining relatively to the median 20% as far as I’m aware). However, the top 0.1% is continuing to expand exponentially. Perhaps the lower 4.9% of that 5% will call for increased regulation and taxation?
Spencer used the term evolved and he was also influential on getting the phrase “survival of the fittest” into the Origin of Species (there was a similar phrase at the end of one of the chapters though, not sure if that was in the first edition). The etymology and the meaning at the time was actually to do with unfolding - a sort of preformationist view and the explicit opposite of the theory of natural selection. At least, that’s the theory Gould posits.
Walmart is a special case according to the documentary on them (The High Cost of Low Prices). It claims that Walmart enters communities with products priced below production costs, then once their competitors inevitably fail, they hike prices up in order to recoup profits. Once a company has access to that much capital, can we really attribute their monopolisation to government intervention or interference? Or can we cede that their powers are comparable to those of small governments?