Ummmm - I’d need to dig out my old reading lists. A really good start for this is E. P. Thomson, The Making of the English Working Class.
Not unless you abolish the ownership of land.
Without even an affectionate “oink!” in farewell? Way harsh.
Indeed. Hence the old British tramping system, where skilled workers would up and leave, and follow a circuit looking for work in the next town, then the next town. The response of the authorities? Vagrancy laws to limit the ability of workers moving from area to area seeking work.
Later responses included the company shop, and company housing, all to prevent workers from having the freedom to simply take their labor elsewhere.
I’m not sure what you mean by “non-government backed” , but I’ll take a shot – Standard Oil, before it was forcibly broken up.
While that’s the economic theory definition of monopoly, its not the definition used in competition law across the world.
That you even mentioned Dell as a potential monopolist (not to mention AMD) shows you have no idea of how the industry works. Intel obviously was able to get Dell to not buy cheaper and equally capable processors - that was the whole point.
Intel’s motivation is not AMD particularly - it is selling more chips. Why does Microsoft change operating systems? Not because Linux is breathing down its neck, but because new product drives sales. Processors today don’t wear out for a long, long time. So, even if AMD didn’t exist, Intel would still be innovating.
All we get is that if AMD doesn’t screw up, and Intel does, Intel might lose a bit of market share. Consider the move to 64 bit processors. Intel invested in Itanic, and decided that because of this they would not make x86 machines 64 bits. As it turned out, the first Itanium was a performance disaster, and AMD got it right, so Intel was forced to go to 64bit x86s, which is what any company actually fearing competitors would have done in the first place. As I mentioned, AMD cannot displace Intel from market leadership period.
Intel of course sets the price for new chips, and AMD comes in just under it. Check out their margins some day if you don’t think they are dominant. It may not last, as ARM occupies the mobile space, where the action is beginning to be. But they will be around for a while.
And of course it is not true that monopolies have 100% of a market - just a dominant enough share to do certain things.
That’s not “free market”. It’s some sort of form of fuedalism. As Voyager pointed out, capitalism and free markets can only exist in an environment where you have strong government protecting property rights and arbitrating disputes. The danger is that government can become corrupted. Either by the necessity to support bussinesses because of their economic impact or by populist pressure to redistribute wealth.
You are not quite as mobile as that. You can’t take your widget prodicing factory and just move it over to the next town where noone knows how to make widgets and where you would have to build another widget factory.
Of course if the town gets too greedy then you’ll take your chances in the next town but history shows that companies that employ half the town generally don’t get poor treatment from that town, in fact the factory owner sometimes run the entire town.
The economy however you structure it should improve socialo utility. If it creates a lot of value for a few and very little value for many then it is less usefull than one that creates a moderate amount of value for all. In today’s economy, free markets have been better at creating value at all levels (more for some than others but its hard to argue that our poorest are not better off than they were a century ago) than any other syustem to date. The problem is that in recent years we have seen the benefits of capitalism not simply concentrated in the wealthy but almost exclusively enjoyed by the wealthy. Real median incomes are stagnant or dropping, the free market as it is structured today only seems to be working well for a few people.
Free market forces are like nuclear fission, they can be used for good or evil, there is nothing inherently good or evil about them.
Sure. The key words there are ‘The response of the authorities’. In the past it was the same type of government intervention and vest interest that created monopolies, and even today you still get the government involving itself and distorting the market (in this case, the labor market).
It didn’t prevent them from taking their labor elsewhere, it simply made it more difficult…and, of course, to optimize the profits of the companies that practiced these types of tactics. There is no doubt that Capitalism, especially as practiced in the past, doesn’t exactly have an unvarnished or untarnished history…far from it. To paraphrase: It’s the worst system in the history of man…except when compared to all the others.
Even today there are company towns, company housing and other similar things in rural mining towns or towns still doing tradition single corporation manufacturing, but the norm TODAY is that if you don’t like where you are working or don’t think that your labor is being fairly compensated for, you can take your labor elsewhere. That’s certainly the case in the UK today, no?
-XT
If you think the interests of the authorities are separate from the interests of the economic elite, then you are mistaken. Hell, if you think the authorities are separate from the economic elite, you are mistaken.
Actually copany housing and company stores did stop people going elsewhere. It made you homeless if you attempted to shift jobs. Workers were also paid a large proportion of their earnings in company currency, usable only at the company store, where prices were inflated. Workers could therefore not save up to leave, not that this was a viable option given wages anyway. If workers just left, they were arrested as vagrants.
Individuals are, currently, legally permitted to seek other work. Whether that is an economically viable solution for many is a different question.