You do if you’re a shareholder and can get enough shareholders to agree with you. 
Well, yeah, but that solution is even more difficult for the average person being screwed by a coercive entity than voting out their government representatives is.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Kimstu *
Well, there can also be collusion without monopoly.**This would be illegal in the US because of anti-trust laws. Cases of explicit illegal price fixing are quite rare. The most common sorts of “price collusion” have been when prices were regulated by the government.
One does see “price leadership,” with prices moving up and down more or less together, but the magnitudes of price changes in the market wouldn’t be the kind of massive increase that would change people’s lives.
What I see in practice is that when prices have become deregulated, competition forced prices down, sometimes by huge amounts. E.g. when California Workers’ Compensation was de-regulated a few years ago, the average price dropped by almost 50%. We saw similar price reductions for airlines and for long-haul trucking.
Frankly, your continued equating of government vs business is completely irrelevant and wrong.
We do not, and never have, treated restrictions on your desires due to the market as being the same as the restrictions on your desires due to government decree. You don’t have a right to a new television set, but you have the right to work towards buying one if someone is willing to sell it to you, and if someone is willing to hire you.
Similarly, we recognize that the government does not have a right to restrict your speech, yet we do not extend that to mean that you have a right to demand that a private newspaper publish your ideas.
Somewhere along the way we seem to have lost the crucial distinction between free people trading amongst themselves, and government using the threat of force to coerce your behaviour. They are NOT the same thing.
Sam Stone: *Frankly, your continued equating of government vs business is completely irrelevant and wrong. *
I’m not equating them. I’m just pointing out that they can both exert powerful forms of coercion that severely limit the practical exercise of one’s freedoms.
Somewhere along the way we seem to have lost the crucial distinction between free people trading amongst themselves, and government using the threat of force to coerce your behaviour. They are NOT the same thing.
Yeah, one of them is a rosy picture and the other is a gloomy picture. “Free people trading amongst themselves”: ah, the happy butcher and baker cheerfully providing us with high-quality, competitively-priced dinners for the sake of their own interest! “Government using the threat of force to coerce your behavior”: ooh, jackbooted thugs looming menacingly on our doorsteps. Obviously, one of these is good and the other is bad!
Reality check time again. In reality, the market does not come anywhere close to reliably operating in accordance with the simple model postulated by the law of supply and demand. Most markets have some combination of barriers to free entry and exit, suboptimally-informed consumers, outright monopolies/oligopolies or more subtle constraints on competition, externalities, and many other departures from the “pure market” structure. When this happens, you no longer have the nice utopian setup of “free people trading amongst themselves”; instead, you have lots of opportunities for unfair economic coercion and serious restrictions on liberty.
Astoundingly enough, your gloomy picture is somewhat one-sided too: sometimes government actions are actually carrying out what most people want done, rather than merely compelling them to comply with the tyrannical whim of a legislator. But I don’t insist on that point. I don’t care so much about getting you “market worshippers” (using jshore’s phrase) to recognize that governments can sometimes do things right. I’ll be happy if I can just get you to bear in mind that markets can sometimes do things wrong, and that therefore, like it or not, we will always need some kind of extra-market structure to limit the inevitable dangers of “free people trading amongst themselves”.
december: What I see in practice is that when prices have become deregulated, competition forced prices down, sometimes by huge amounts. […] We saw similar price reductions for airlines and for long-haul trucking.
Hmmm, I don’t know much about long-haul trucking, but I’m not sure that air travel is the best example to use in arguing that less regulation is better. Deregulation operates on the assumption that competition will control markets better than legislation will. But for that to work, there has to be actual competition. Some air travel routes have several competing carriers and therefore their prices are low. Some routes have monopoly or near-monopoly situations, with the correspondingly high prices. Moreover, price gouging on fares for flights not booked far in advance is a hugely profitable form of rent-seeking, and competition does little to reduce it. (This is a form of “price leading” that, contrary to your statement above, really can have significant impact on people’s lives when there are hundreds or thousands of dollars involved.) I’ll leave the comments on quality of service and consumer satisfaction up to the people who fly more than I do. You can look at a summary of a 1999 National Academy of Sciences report on airline deregulation, which makes clear some of the serious market failures in the case of air travel.
Hmmm, I can’t get that link to work, but the report is “Entry and Competition in the U.S. Airline Industry: Issues and Opportunities”.
Model things unfairly much?
This example requires as a predicate that there are no coercive entities in government which would act to remove your political rights as surely as a coercive corporation in a market economy will act to remove your economic rights.
Given coercive entities in government and the market, which then do you suppose does more damage?
why did I use predicate? What I meant to imply was that it assumed… sigh need…more…sleep…
If it’s a given that the Evil Dark Lord Big Corporations are bad, then of course Big Gubb’mint is bad as well.
Right??
Tedster: *If it’s a given that the Evil Dark Lord Big Corporations are bad, then of course Big Gubb’mint is bad as well. *
Hey, the concept is slowly emerging! Actually, I don’t think that EDLBC’s are automatically bad, I don’t hate the market, I don’t think that Big Business is out to get us, I do see the values of market transactions and the economic growth they provide. But yes, my point is exactly that large and powerful institutions, in the public or the private sector, can exert tyrannical influences over other people’s freedoms, and we must not lose sight of that disadvantage in one kind of institution while complaining about it in the other kind.
Kimtsu: But I see it all the time-- people who reflexively ‘hate’ big corporations seem to think paradoxically that the government is the answer to our problems. I don’t believe them.
One thing I do find interesting is that people who advocate a completely free market want government intervention when one company has so successfully destroyed its competition that it becomes a monopoly.
Has that Company not won fair and square? Shouldn’t the people advocating non government interference in the market applaud this result?
Here is where government must act in the interest of the people to break the monopoly so the consumer is given fairer prices. This is a case where government is not protecting rights, but actually working against private industry so that the citizens can have cheaper goods.
Kimstu, sorry I could not reply sooner, and I don’t have much time now. But to put it briefly: let’s say I am someone making chocolate bars, and trading half of them for other goods and enjoying the other half with friends, family, and sweethart, while giving G 1 out of 20 to keep the thieves away. One day G said I need 3 out of twenty, because the next county wants a new well and we’re all chipping in. I say, OK, I still have enought for a few friends, family and sweethart. Next day G says I need 5 out of twenty. Well, I can’t give any more to friends, but family and swewethart are still in, fine. Next day G wants 9 - I don’t have enough chocolate for my sweethart, I say skrew u Big G, I no longer make chocolates, instead I’m going over to the next county, and just sit around all day and drink the water from their well.
That’s about it Kimstu, if I work all day and still can’t give chocolate to my sweethart, I quit!
I’ve been around this before with some people here, but one of the fundamental differences between govenment action in response to a drive and market action in response to a drive is that the market has the ability for a very quick turnaround. The government requires the messy legislative process, which is even messier, I think, to remove a law than to make one in the first place.
Given situations that both the market and the government can solve, I think the market is always the preferable course.
Tedster: *But I see it all the time-- people who reflexively ‘hate’ big corporations seem to think paradoxically that the government is the answer to our problems. I don’t believe them. *
Neither do I. Fortunately, there don’t seem to be any of those people around on this thread.
sili: *But to put it briefly: let’s say I am someone making chocolate bars, and trading half of them for other goods and enjoying the other half with friends, family, and sweethart, while giving G 1 out of 20 to keep the thieves away. One day G said I need 3 out of twenty, […] Next day G wants 9 - I don’t have enough chocolate for my sweethart, I say skrew u Big G, I no longer make chocolates, instead I’m going over to the next county, and just sit around all day and drink the water from their well.
That’s about it Kimstu, if I work all day and still can’t give chocolate to my sweethart, I quit! *
Okay fine, that’s your decision. But if that’s intended as an explanation of why you feel that a top tax rate nearing 40% is “outrageous” or “wrong on the face of it”, I’m afraid I still don’t get it. Are you claiming that everybody taxed at such a rate can no longer afford to do what’s most important to them and therefore will abandon their productive activities? Obviously that isn’t true, because we have plenty of wealthy people continuing to be productive at that kind of tax level.
erislover: *I’ve been around this before with some people here, but one of the fundamental differences between govenment action in response to a drive and market action in response to a drive is that the market has the ability for a very quick turnaround. The government requires the messy legislative process, which is even messier, I think, to remove a law than to make one in the first place. *
Often very true, but not always: the profit motive often encourages “messy” situations too, on the “divide and conquer” strategy. For example, it’s often more profitable for different companies to make slightly different but fundamentally incompatible products, in order to increase their own market share by locking consumers into their systems, than it is to work out efficient compatibility standards which would be a much better option for the consumer. The messy legislative process does decrease the government’s efficiency in solving many problems, but the messy profit motive often decreases efficiency of problem-solving in the private sector too.
I like to pit them against each other – big corporations trying to do whatever they can to make a buck, versus big government trying to do whatever they can to make things boring.
All other things being equal, though, I’m slightly more inclined to side with the government, if only because any abuses can be rectified at the next election.
Kimstu, your argument compares actual results against perfection, although regulated airline prices were a disaster.
Yes, there are some routes with less competition that have higher prices per mile. But, when airline rates were regulated, all routes were priced extremely high. Based on actual past results, even though competitive pricing isn’t perfect, regulated pricing would be worse.
Regulation is good for creating equality of misery. 
december: *Based on actual past results, even though competitive pricing isn’t perfect, regulated pricing would be worse. *
What that says to me is that we need to choose our regulation carefully. Completely centralized price setting for air travel on the part of government was not very efficient. However, partial monopolies and price gouging in a deregulated system are also not very efficient. What the NAS report I cited above recommends is that therefore, airline regulation should concentrate on antitrust measures to make the system more truly competitive, rather than trying to return to centralized price setting. That doesn’t mean that the system would work even better with no regulation of any kind at all.
And on the whole “deregulation isn’t always perfect” trend, has anyone else heard this story yet?