On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 11:32 AM Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.net> wrote:
*> I have read a version of this argument first in "The Machinery of > Freedom" by David Friedman, and I found it quite compelling. * > Me too. *> The problem is that rational actors qiuckly find the power of scale effects, thus corporations and corporate mergers.* People greatly exaggerate the evils of corporate monopolies. Take for example the greatest monopoly of them all, Standard Oil. The company existed from 1870 to 1911 when the government forced it to break up; during those 41 years the price of kerosene, its principle product, dropped by 80% and the purity of the kerosene greatly increased. It's interesting that every one of the people who ran crying to the government and later testified that Standard Oil's predatory tactics made competition impossible, nevertheless somehow managed to amass huge fortunes competing with Standard Oil. Take David P Reighard for example, when Standard Oil threatened to lower the price so much that he would lose money on every gallon he sold, Reighard called their bluff, he knew Standard oil sold a lot more gallons of oil than he did, and so would lose a lot more money than he would if they tried to do that. Standard Oil realized that the only way to stop Reighard was to buy him out, which they did, at a huge profit to Reighard. What did he do with all that money? He built an even larger oil refinery of course. Standard felt they had to buy that one too, at an even larger profit to Reighard. Are you starting to see a pattern here? In all Reighard did this 3 times before Standard caught on and gave up, making him one of the riches men in the country. *> Consider the "war on drugs". I think we might agree that it is a > collossal failure,* > Yes! > > *that not only did not stop drug traffic, but it contributed to make > street drugs more dangerous and destroyed countless lives with prison > sentences for victimless crimes.* > Yes! *> And yet, we can't seem to get rid of those laws. Who is lobbying for > such laws to stay in the books? Private prisions, pharmaceutical companies > and police sindicates.* > I've never heard that pharmaceutical companies were pushing for more draconian drug laws but I agree it's not surprising that DEA agents are strongly opposed to legalizing drugs, if it happened they'd be out of a job. > *> Trump is Putin, but with a much lower IQ.* > Yes and that is our one hope, the very stable genius may be too brain dead dumb to be able to fulfill his wish to become dictator, or better yet king. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0doqtrDqWeLPJLWtPCRjCH8_0fZBAUy%2Bw1U8sPPLU0-A%40mail.gmail.com.
