Re: Silent Takeover
. . . suggests you mean eminent (rather than imminent) domain . . . What he wrote first was immanent, which makes more obvious sense than either of the above. ;) -- Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/
Re: Silent Takeover
Kevin Carson wrote: From: Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] First, the roads and airports are already here, so there would not be much of a decentralizing effect of cutting off subsidies and eminent domain now. But because of the effect of subsidies in distorting the market price link between quantity supplied and quantity demanded, the system will always tend to be overwhelmed with demand beyond its capacity. You're conflating subsidies with lack of congestion pricing. They're separate issues. If you take away the sugar tit, and build or expand airports and highways only on land that is willingly sold, with building and maintenance costs obtained entirely from weight-based user fees, the costs of shipping will continue to rise dramatically, and the system will continue to become more congested until it reaches the breaking point. Ongoing maintenance costs are an important issue in their own right, BTW--the highway beds weren't designed to handle the abuse caused by 18-wheelers. I agree that lack of user fees is a problem. But what lack of user fees and concentration have to do with each other remains mysterious. Second, at least part of the subsidies have been to sustain small communities that can't carry their own weight. That was one of the main pro-airline regulation arguments - cross-subsidizing small unviable airports with monopoly pricing in big cities. How small a community are we talking about here? Economists who specialize in issues of economy of scale--Walter Adams and Barry Stein, for example--argue that production in large-scale manufacturing industry takes place at many times peak economy of scale. This is the standard argument of fervent antitrusters, but it does not strike me as remotely convincing. There are all sorts of fixed costs - harder to measure but just as real - that their estimates ignore. And intuitively, why would firms keep expanding well beyond their efficient scale? If you want to blame legal persecution of smaller firms, you would have an internally consistent story, though it is hard to see what this persecution consists in. But there's no inherent barrier to such a diversified local economy that couldn't be solved by intensive education in (the 1970s version of) Karl Hess, Colin Ward, and the *Appropriate Technology Sourcebook*. I'd say they're just crackpots. 1. What Tucker calls the money monopoly in fact leads to a much higher rate of monetary growth than free banking would. But how much *availability*, to what groups, and at what interest cost? Banking, historically weighed down with draconian pro-smallness regulations (branch banking laws) seems like a particularly bad example for you. In any case, what do you think banks are doing now? No bank is big enough to have much effect on depositor or borrower interest rates. They lend to people who can repay at interest rates that adjust for default, etc. Why would small banks be any different? But at least as important is the ongoing restriction of access to land, by enforcing absenee landlord rights over tenants and over unoccupied land. It is by this ongoing restriction of access that occupier and user has to pay a monopoly price to the landlord. How is vacant land different from vacant rental cars? Are we paying a monopoly price for rental cars? Owning stuff you aren't currently using is ubiquitous, and getting rid of it would be a disaster. 3. Tariffs, as I said, are globally deconcentrating. Without them, inefficient national industries would be driven out of business by the world's best. Historically, though, tariffs also first helped to build up concentrated industry on a national scale *within* this country. Fine. That's the way a lot of pro-smallness regulation works. But this is just the flip side of my original point about globalization: Yes, it is increasing concentration in *some sense of the word*, and yes, this increased concentration is a good thing. First Britain, then the U.S., industrialized under the protection of tariffs, and then adopted free trade as an ideology when it was safe to do so. So would U.S. and U.K. have been worse off if they had never had tariffs? Or what? During the 1990's, we were able to see the California military high-tech sector switch significantly into civilian production. The latter may have been less concentrated in some ways, but it is not a clear call either, even in the areas where copyright doesn't matter. Nevertheless, the high tech industry is the collective beneficiary of past state capitalism or military Keynesianism, and its ability to make such strategic changes is heavily influenced by a privileged position resulting from previous state aid to accumulation. Hard to see how previous government contracts improve your ability to make strategy changes. The reality looked quite different - tough years for defense firms. I've heard this whole story many
Re: Silent Takeover
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, ATT 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
Re: Silent Takeover
Kevin Carson wrote: I would argue that the rise of transnational corporations is a bad thing because they are products of state capitalism. Giant corporations, from the late 19th century on, have been statist institutions, and the plutocrats associated with them have been rent-seekers. Do away with state capitalist subsidies, legal privilege, and other forms of intervention in the free market, and the giant corporations would cease to exist, for the most part. 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*
Re: Silent Takeover
Bryan Caplan wrote: A lot of regulations only kick in if you have more than 50 or 100 employees. Some explicitly kick out, though. I dimly remember one concerning visas, that said roughly If the HR department says the firm needs this alien employee, and the firm has N employees, we (the INS) will believe it, but a smaller firm must back it up. Designed presumably to discourage phony enterprises whose principal purpose is to get a visa for the owner's brother-in-law. -- Anton Sherwood, http://www.ogre.nu/
RE: Silent Takeover--IMO??
--- Kevin Carson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The chief failing of the mainstream antiglobalization movement is, IMO, they fail to recognize the extent that the global corporate economy rests on state intervention. What does IMO mean? -jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com
Re: Silent Takeover
I ordered it from Amazon...was then told it was a poor publishers me-too rival to Naomi Klein...would be amused to hear other views...meanwhile I would have thought Stiglitz Globalization and its Discontents should be nearer this list's essence (again a provocation to tell me how wrong I am) chris macrae www.valuetrue.com transparency standards community and www.normanmacrae.com future economics a stiglitz bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4454068,00.html (if you have a better favourite one, love to know) [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Original Message - From: john hull [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 09 July 2002 5:28 AM Subject: Silent Takeover Howdy, Has anybody read The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy by Noreena Hertz? If so, is it any good? Curiously yours, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
RE: Silent Takeover
i read this awhile back; it's kind of thin. the most interesting thing is that Ms. Hertz used to be a go-go globalizer (helped set up a stock exchange in russia, fr'instance) who then turned. but her book is pro-capitalism at bottom and liberal in the classic sense of the word - her main fear of globalization is the creation of non-sovereign global governance ... meddling in national affairs. i guess The Silent Takeover is a subversive book - if you picked it up as a prop for, say, protesting the G-7 you might find yourself nodding in agreement with things you're protesting against. Capitalism, she argues, is clearly the best system for generating wealth, and free trade and open capital markets have brought unprecedented economic growth to most if not all of the world. that's a quote from the book, plucked out of a review of it in Socialism Today http://www.socialismtoday.org/65/hertz.html which neatly illustrates the tension between Hertz's themes and the themes the book appears to be about. books covers and all that. Hertz's other main point is that the rise of global multinational companies has overshadowed the power of politicians. consumers thus empowered too - moreso than voters. but she's not very convincing on why this is necessarily a bad thing, in my opinion. etb -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of chris macrae Sent: Tuesday, July 09, 2002 11:03 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Silent Takeover I ordered it from Amazon...was then told it was a poor publishers me-too rival to Naomi Klein...would be amused to hear other views...meanwhile I would have thought Stiglitz Globalization and its Discontents should be nearer this list's essence (again a provocation to tell me how wrong I am) chris macrae www.valuetrue.com transparency standards community and www.normanmacrae.com future economics a stiglitz bookmark: http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4454068,00.html (if you have a better favourite one, love to know) [EMAIL PROTECTED] - Original Message - From: john hull [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 09 July 2002 5:28 AM Subject: Silent Takeover Howdy, Has anybody read The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy by Noreena Hertz? If so, is it any good? Curiously yours, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
Silent Takeover
Howdy, Has anybody read The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy by Noreena Hertz? If so, is it any good? Curiously yours, jsh __ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com
