I think you're underestimating the massive effects of state capitalist intervention not only individuallly, but the synergy between them. Regarding transportation subsidies alone, Tibor Machan wrote a good article for The Freeman (August 99, I think) against not only transportation subsidies, but against the use of immanent domain for highways and airports, as well. He admitted that this would almost certainly involve a massive decentralization of the economy, but responded by questioning whether that was necessarily a bad thing. As for patents, can we seriously doubt that the pattern of control over productive technology would be a lot different without them?
By no means are these the only forms of state intervention--I just stuck to them for reasons of length in my original post. Tucker's big four--besides patents, the money, landlord and tariff monopolies--are at the foundation of the legal structure corporate power depends on. Then there's the subsidy of primitive accumulation--enclosures, expropriation of copyholders, slavery, colonial conquest, etc.--without which the concentration of ownership and economic power would almost certainly be much less. Transnational agribusiness certainly wouldn't exist on anything like its present pattern, without something like an enclosure movement occuring in the Third World this century. The military-industrial complex has a lot to do with what the high tech industry looks like now. It is also probably responsible for the very existence of the jumbo jet industry--without government demand for heavy bombers, the demand for jumbo jets alone wouldn't have paid for the specialized machine tools. And while we're at it, the value of plant and equipment in the U.S. almost doubled during World War II, mostly at taxpayer expense. In the specific case of antitrust laws, which you mentioned, the main cases that come to mind are Standard Oil, AT&T and Microsoft--in all three cases, centrally important resources or infrastructures on which the whole corporate economy depended, where price-gouging could hurt corporate interests in general. It reminds me of Engels' prediction of the "mixed economy" in Anti-Duhring. When corporate capitalism reaches a certain level of complexity, capitalists will act through their state to plan and stabilize the corporate economy--which will entail, among other things, nationalizing infrastructures of central importance to the entire economy. In this country, it was done through antitrust instead. Most of the "progressive" and New Deal regulatory state were part of the same phenomenon--what Kolko called political capitalism, Weinstein called corporate liberalism, and the Frankfurt school people called planned capitalism. Gabriel Kolko argued that oligopoly markets wouldn't even exist without federal regulation. Most of the trusts at the turn of the century were over-leveraged and losing market share to smaller, more efficient competitors. The Clayton Act's "unfair competition" provisions, however, made price war much less likely and in effect created a state-sponsored trade association for each industry. From this time on, market share largely stabilized, and the world was finally safe for oligopoly. The liberal goo-goos in the "public" school system sell all these statist measures as populist-motivated "countervailing power" against big business. But bleeding hearts like Upton Sinclair were just useful idiots to help sell the measures to the public--they were really rent-seeking measures on behalf of corporate power. >From: Bryan Caplan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >Frankly, this strikes me as quite unlikely. There are lots of big >government policies that encourage firms to be smaller than they would >be in a free market. Double taxation of corporate income is the most >obvious. Antitrust laws tend to be used against large market leaders. >A lot of regulations only kick in if you have more than 50 or 100 >employees. > >And once you are talking multinational corporations, there are other >government policies discouraging cross-national integration. >Protectionism, most obviously, tends to preserve the firms in each >nation that aren't efficient enough to compete with the world's market >leaders. > >You're right that there are some government policies pushing in the >other way (any time regulations impose a fixed cost, firms' minimum >efficient scale mathematically shifts to the right), but on balance I >think you're wrong. Under laissez-faire, big corporations would be >bigger than they are now. But to quote Seinfeld, "Not that there's >anything wrong with that." >-- > Prof. Bryan Caplan > Department of Economics George Mason University > http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > "He wrote a letter, but did not post it because he felt that no one > would have understood what he wanted to say, and besides it was not > necessary that anyone but himself should understand it." > Leo Tolstoy, *The Cossacks* _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
