One of my co-workers lived in a 5th-wheel trailer in their front yard for 2 years while the fancy suburban house they had had in the fancy suburban planned-community neighborhood was bulldozed and rebuilt after a hurricane pretty well destroyed their neighborhood. large one-story houses where the ocean had surged up enough the water level was above the ceilings, while the wind peeled off big hunks of roof. Not much useful left behind when the waters receded.
But yes, an unusual situation. If they’d done the same trailer-in-front thing just to remodel their kitchen and somehow hit delay after delay, there’d have been hell to pay to both the HOA and the city.
And the airports themselves. Most European airports are privately owned for profit businesses (hence the earlier comment about them being focused on selling you something). Most US airports are run by some sort of government entity.
Monopoly because of high barriers to entry/startup costs/natural efficiencies of having a single operator – more capitalist.
Monopoly because one company has a special (official or unofficial) relationship with the government – less capitalist.
And…
Market with a lot of choice because government is very laissez-faire and players enter and exit the market frequently – more capitalist.
Market with a lot of choice because government actively manages the market so that no dominant player can emerge even when it most naturally would – less capitalist.
Just looking at the outcome doesn’t tell you the process used to get there.
This is where maybe my head canon differs from actual economic definitions and stuff. Exclude things like sewers where a monopoly is going to be the only practical way to provide the service, I’m talking about normal business sectors where competition would be good for society.
When you have monopolies on things like eye glasses, or online order fulfillment because one company outcompeted or bought out the rest, that is winning capitalism, but then capitalism loses. I think one of the roles of government is to provide regulations to make sure those capitalism failure conditions don’t happen. I agree with what you say; government control is less capitalism, but at the same time (if done right) creates more capitalism.
In summary, winning capitalism is also losing, and less capitalism is also more capitalism. Strange system.
That’s probably a good example. Home owner’s associations are a uniquely American thing AFAIK (particularly HOA for single family homes, rather than shared buildings) and are basically a form of communal shared ownership. If I was being cynical I’d say they were invented by the American capitalist elite to teach Americans that communal shared ownership is evil
HOAs rose in response to the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Anti-Black covenants were outlawed, so neighborhood ruling bodies passed membership restrictions based on property upkeep standards that, back then, were considered beyond the reach of African Americans. Surprise! Back Americans, at least some of them, bucked the odds and made enough money to afford lawn mowers and hedge trimmers. But the HOAs still guaranteed protected property values and so survive, granting their administrators a healthy raking of the proceeds.
I believe there are Residents Associations in Sweden and Denmark, at least there were in the early 2000s.
But in my (short) experience they maintained the common areas of condo communities. Parking, trash bins, central heating plant, snow removal, etc.
I have no experience of them for single family homes. But again, my experience is superficial (I was a resident, but not even a renter, my employer was the renter).
The situation in the UK is similar: there’s a distinction between the “freehold” (covering the land on which a property stands, and common/shared areas and services, mainly in a block of flats) and “leasehold” (covering the flat or house itself). The freehold can be retained by the original owner/developer of the property (subject to the leaseholders having a right, under certain conditions, to force a sale of the freehold to a special purpose company formed by them). Freeholders (whether the original developers or the directors elected by the leaseholders, who often lose interest in the details of property management) can sometimes be as petty and dictatorial as some of the HOA stories I read. As indeed can landlords of rented properties, whether social housing providers or commercial companies.
That said, it isn’t that usual for freehold houses to be sold with those sorts of restrictions attached.
I also get the general sense that European governments are more technocratic about these things. They have goals they want to achieve, and a free market, either natural or engineered by regulation, is a great tool to achieve those goals.
US governments seem to have a semi-religious view of market forces vs government control, comprising a belief that any situation with more of the former and less of the latter will automatically tend towards the best possible outcome.
Only Major League Baseball has this protection. It happened as a result of a lawsuit brought by former owners of teams in the Federal League, a separate major league that lasted only a couple of years before it was driven into bankruptcy by MLB in 1915. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which ruled in 1922 that baseball was exempt from the Sherman Antitrust Act because it wasn’t interstate commerce.
This decision is now seen almost universally as improperly decided, but the Supreme Court has made it clear that they will let the precedent stand for MLB alone, and that Congress has the power to change it through legislation. Every so often Congress holds hearings to consider this, but has not done anything about it.
I’m not disputing your info, but that leaves me wondering how e.g. NFL gets away with also locking out wannabe competitors. Unless they have some sort of fig leaf process for wannabes to join their club but somehow nobody ever applies, nudge nudge wink wink.
Even if something is done nothing will be done. I love baseball. I probably watch over 100 games a year and go to several in person despite the cost and hassle. I don’t want more. You already have baseball from April to November. Who wants another league? If I want a cheaper alternative I go to my local minor league team. There is so much baseball already there isn’t room for more. The current teams don’t need the protection, they have the money to keep the good players.
I’m not sure what you mean by that. There have been multiple competing leagues. The original USFL was even able to lure away top new talent like Herschel Walker and Steve Young with big contracts. The other leagues didn’t work because they couldn’t find an audience to compete.
And, eventually, the USFL’s business model became “win an anti-trust suit against the NFL for a ton of money” and “force the NFL to merge with us.” They won the lawsuit (a lot of the anti-trust allegations were around access to TV contracts and stadiums), but…
It may be the case that I don’t have enough context to ask an intelligent question or have an intelligent opinion.
Here’s what I think is the case and I welcome all corrections from all comers. …
My belief / assumption is that the MLB’s anti-trust immunity means the 32 (or however many) teams can legally collude on their prices, salaries, etc., to prevent another wildcat team from appearing and playing games against the existing MLB teams. Each team is a separate corporation legally speaking with separate ownership and management. But the group of 32(?) teams / corporations collectively form a cartel where they will only interact with each other and no others. That right to internal inclusiveness and external exclusivity is what (I think) SCOTUS enshrined for them.
I may be way wrong, but I do not think that the legal status of MLB is that no competing league of professional baseball teams can be independently created and play amongst themselves but in competition for the MLB’s audience. The many non-MLB “bush leagues” attest to that at least in spirit if not in scale as measured in dollars.
Whether those putative alternative baseball leagues would succeed as business ventures isn’t the point. The point is that AFAIK there’s no legal obstacle to them starting up and perhaps even succeeding.
So how is that different from NFL, NBA, etc., where the separately owned and managed teams / corporations collude to play only against each other, to coordinate media buys, player salaries, etc.? And where various “bush league” alternate leagues exist, or can exist, each attempting to cadge some of the big leagues’ audiences. But where NFL, NBA, etc., do not have whatever magic immunity SCOTUS conferred on MLB a century (!) ago.
My bottom line:
What is the special SCOTUS-granted superpower that MLB has that e.g. NFL does not? And asked slightly differently, absent that SCOTUS-granted superpower, what protects e.g. NFL from being attacked by the FTC on restraint of trade or monopoly grounds?
So one thing that is definitely more regulated in the US (though that isn’t necessarily “less capitalist”) is “the outdoors”. This is one of my big bugbears with US life
As there is a culture of experiencing “the outdoors” via a park (national, regional, or state), and the default way of getting there is by car (you drive to a park, park your car, do your outdoorsy activity of choice, then get back in your car and drive home). While this obviously originates in American capitalist ideals about car ownership and property rights, it actually means the outdoors tends to be far more regulated than in Europe. You will find curfews (wtf, a curfew!? Are we at war? Why does the outside close at sunset? You are saying the government says I can’t go on this public beach at night time?), restrictions on public access, and generally more regulations enforced by far more armed government agents (rangers, park police, etc) than anywhere else in the world.
A sports league is a set of franchises that agree to play against each other for a championship. The teams in the league have contracts with each other and with the players about things like rules, salaries, playing schedules, etc. No league, regardless of whether they have an antitrust exemption, plays games against teams outside of the league.
MLB’s antitrust exemption means the league can engage in restraint of trade against competing leagues. For instance, they could force ESPN into a deal where they could not broadcast games of the competing league. No other league could get away with this, but because of the 1922 Supreme Court decision, MLB is not restrained by the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Whether or not, we have pay-to-enter congestion and emissions zones in major cities, and all sorts of schemes to discourage car use in favour of bikes and public transport.
And to hear some right-wing headbangers, you’d think the concept of the “15 minute city” (so organising urban planning that residents can reach work and essential services with 15 minutes of home - and preferably not by car) was some sort of enforced ghetto-isation.
