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> But if so, where’s the incentive to innovate (given that, with no patent or copyright laws, competitors will just copy your innovation idea)?
Most supporters of a free market rightly recognize that patents and copyright laws are like laws securing property rights in general. They are not what supporters of capitalism mean when by an intervention ie some violation of property rights. There some libertarian types who oppose IP, but their view on IP is mistaken at best.
“Monopoly” - “the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.”
I’m assuming you mean these sorts of things. If you don’t, then please say so. What empirical evidence are you drawing from to justify that those are a concern under an entirely free market?
Yeah, but they aren’t fundamentally the same as a monopoly really, so it’s a different discussion from monopolies. And I’d still ask you the same question as to what empirical evidence you’re using to justify them as a concern.
This is an untestable claim. The state has been always involved in Capitalism. I expect that it cannot exist otherwise, or even if briefly possible, would recreate the state to protect the interests of the owners of capital.
> There some libertarian types who oppose IP, but their view on IP is mistaken at best.
Do you have references/know about research backing that? It's a while since I looked at this, but the last bits of research I remember seeing had approx the following results:
* Limited patent protection is useful, but the current patent protection is so extensive that is economically damaging. (This varies by field; there are certain fields where it useful but overall it is negative.)
* Short copyright is positive, but the current copyright is so long that it is overall negative, based on comparisons of value created by the public domain and how much creation models come out with without copyright.
* I'm not aware of any research on other types of IP (trademarks, trade secret protection, design patents, etc)
I don't hold a strong opinion about this and don't consider myself an expert. It's just that my impression is that the empirical research points to IP protection being too strong, and that the people that believe in IP protection operate purely from ideology. So if you know actual research (even just summaries you remember), bring it on.
> Do you have references/know about research backing that?
You said you had research that backs that there should be IP laws, so I don’t know what you’re asking me for. Research that backs the current regime in America as is?
> the people that believe in IP protection operate purely from ideology.
I don’t think I’ve seen anyone say this who has learned particularly well how to use logical inference from the senses or evidence-based reasoning to form the morality part of their views and motivation for being interested in politics.
>> Do you have references/know about research backing that?
> You said you had research that backs that there should be IP laws, so I don’t know what you’re asking me for. Research that backs the current regime in America as is?
Do you have research that back current IP laws as **being better than nothing**?
The research I read backed that the current IP laws are **worse than nothing**, that optimal laws could exist but the researcher believed they were politically unlikely and identified forces pushing for too strong protections getting to worse than nothing.
So the researcher conclusion was that there shouldn't be patent & copyright laws in practice, because they would be expected to deteriorate to be worse than nothing.
> I don’t think I’ve seen anyone say this who has learned particularly well how to use logical inference from the senses or evidence-based reasoning to form the morality part of their views and motivation for being interested in politics.
Yeah, yeah, preconceptions are "morals" and "using logical inference" while looking at research to see what effects are actually present to modify "logical inference" based on how things work out in practice is "lack of morals".
How the fuck would ever own any intellectual material without copyright laws?? Libertarians are against copyright now?
Why do supposed capitalists keep opposing everything that is integral to capitalism?
Right Libertarians and libertarians have been against IP for decades. Rothbard was against patents. https://www.google.com/search?q=mises+institute+intellectual+property&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-views-intellectual-property-rothbard-tucker-spooner-rand
They oppose it because they are supposed supporters of capitalism, not competent or actual supporters of capitalism.
So you think anyone and everyone should be able to do whatever they want with anyone's intellectual property? And you don't see that as in any way contradictory to the tenets of private property and capitalism?
So if you publish a book, anyone should have the right to take it, sell it, and take credit for it themselves? And you say you support private property?
Lol, what a joke.
Yes and no. Anyone has the right to take it and market it and sell it but not as the verified author via chain of custody. That would be fraud. This shit is not that complicated.
Well I think there is a distinction between owning and controlling ideas and actively lying about facts (in this case, the authorship of media).
So under this conception, the author does not matter in terms of distributing a book but it could still be wrong to claim a work as your original creation if it is not so. Although, there would be far less incentive to do so in a world where such works were freely shared.
The title of author though is about intellectual property, because otherwise, the “author” is just whoever wrote it, so for example yes that would mean that they couldn’t take a copy of harry potter bought from Rowling and then resell it as them being the author…
However it would allow them to just copy and paste the words over themselves and reprint the book and sell it because they are not lying, they did write the book at that point, its not original but they are the author, so what you have said doesn’t stop this.
Another example to highlight it, if you copy the mona lisa perfectly and say you are the artist, you are not lying, you are the artist of that painting, you might not have painted the original mona lisa but that’s irrelevant to whether or not you are the artist and its the same here, you might not have created harry potter but as long as you are the one typing and printing the words, you are the author
Basically just because you are not the original creator does not mean you cannot call yourself the author or artist.
What is it fraud against if the intellectual property is not protected or even owned, as you implied earlier? What does the authorship matter if one doesn't own their intellectual work?
Wow. So you are saying that anyone can take someone else's property and sell it for themselves, without royalties going to the person who wrote it? And you say you respect private property?
I knew libertarians were hypocrites, but this is beyond parody.
It actually isn’t. You’re just locked in to statist thinking. Let me ask you this. Is the formula for Coca Cola or the colonels secret recipe patented? No. It’s a trade secret. Is your concern that if JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter novels that KJ Growling would send her to the poor house? If so, how?
"Is your concern that if JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter novels that KJ Growling would send her to the poor house?"
Of course not anymore, because his (yes, that's intended) enormous wealth has provided him with a private taxation right over other people work (=capital income).
But if no IP protections existed when he released his first book, what would've happened? People would've just copy-pasted all of it's contents and sold it themselves. There'd be legal ten cent e-books with the exact content all over the internet and two dollar copies printed on crappy paper. And hand-engraved books with gilded covers for those willing to spend more for bling. All released by people who have no affiliation with the actual author whatsoever, and all with impossibly thin profit margins.
Why would people buy from the original author in such a system, expect to copy and rerelease it for sale themselves?
A book or music isn't the same as a drink recipe, lol. How can art like a book be a trade secret when it is published and people can see it?
Tell me, how would you genuinely feel if you spent years writing a book and then other people stole it and published and made money from it and you never saw any money from it?
You understand that you can currently go to most open source subjects, fork the code, and start doing whatever you want with it, right?
Why don't you? Why doesn't anyone buy your fork? Why doesn't anyone follow your fork? Why is it that the vast majority of the time, there is only one conical version?
Why are you comparing this to a book? A child can copy and paste a book and its identical in everyway, there is nothing different about both it or the perception of its use.
Clearly if you are using an open source project this doesn’t hold anymore because people wont agree with your direction, your use case, why spend the effort to switch etc. but for the book, its literally identical, word for word and provides the same utility
Take it? No. Copy it? Yes. Take credit for having written it? No. Sell it? Only if there's a willing buyer (someone who can't just as conveniently copy it for themselves).
Legitimate private property doesn't extend to forbidding others from making new copies of the stuff you own, or selling the new copies.
You’ve completely misread me.
> Most supporters of a free market rightly recognize that patents and copyright laws are like laws securing property rights in general.
This means I support IP laws.
Ancaps don't agree, obvs. But I apologise, I misread your initial comment.
I am already getting replies to this thread from supposed libertarians arguing against IP laws.
>Most supporters of a free market rightly recognize that patents and copyright laws are like laws securing property rights in general.
No, they aren't. A legitimate property law is defensive, it protects people's freedom to have what they could have had without interference by others. But IP laws are offensive, they infringe on people's freedom to have what they could have had without interference by others.
>their view on IP is mistaken at best.
How do you figure that?
> But IP laws are offensive, they infringe on people's freedom to have what they could have had without interference by others.
Sure, if you assume that violators of IP law aren’t interfering with the IP owner. But if the IP law violator is in fact interfering with the IP owner, then IP laws are defensive.
All libertarians oppose IP. There's only few religious libertarians pretending property can be anything but physical. But they are minority and irrelevant
So much for Spooner
> Since Spooner finds the foundation of property in each individual’s natural right to provide for her own subsistence and happiness, it is perhaps unsurprising that he regards “the right of property in intellectual wealth” as necessary and legitimate.
https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-views-intellectual-property-rothbard-tucker-spooner-rand
I don’t pay much attention to intellectuals who speak about morality and political philosophy who have chosen not to learn how to use reason to identify what’s objectively moral ie their rational self-interest.
Kek. Meaning you don't like reading opposing viewpoints. Only whatever you believe yourself no matter how old that information is. Hence the commies/socialists salivating over marx disproven theories still in 2024
The answer to patents is the proprietary information and trade secrets. Just becasue you know what the end result looks like doesnt mean you can make it. And we they do find out how to make it they still got to make their process and streamline. That gives you time to set a brand and develop the market for it. And to make a good bit of profit. And you can even establish brand loyalty. Take nyquil for example. They make a product, others know how to make it but nyquil still outsells them despite being higher in price. Or hell Johnson and Johnson band-aids.
There is also the issue that you have to keep innovating to prevent from being undercut. If you stagnate and a competitor has time to perfect their process and eventually makes it better for cheaper then you are now out of the market. This is how monopolies will not exist. Even a "natural monopoly " might be in danger because while state name power might be there with the infrastructure, coop power may be able to offer better in a small area at a cheaper price then grow to be a real competitor. They may use underground cables as opposed to above ground thus less maintenance and more reliable.
You cannot undercut a "natural monopoly " in most countries (especially the US) as it is illegal to even attempt. But it is a proposed solution to government run/mandated utilities to provide competition for them. Just one of course.
No, if you have a completely free market, it doesn't follow that you would have perfect competition. Perfect competition is an idealization that cannot happen in reality. There is always a company with a better location, better workers, better strategy, better salesmen, better product, more popularity in their home market, or some other marginal advantage.
In any case, the incentive to innovate is still there in a "perfectly competitive" market because when you have lower costs/higher sale price you have now broken the perfect competition condition and you have a component of pure profit over your operation whilst your competitors adapt. Yes, they eventually will, but in the meantime you can coast on profit whilst everyone else is still at 0 profit. This may happen for quite a while if your industrial secret holds even without IP laws.
No idealist starry-eyed innovator concerned with the good of the community required.
In any case, the claim of commies is that monopolies appear naturally without state intervention regardless of IP protection. We are still waiting for any historical examples or any way in which it is possible, and we will continue to wait for the foreseeable future.
How can this ever be proven to your standards though? State intervention is a factor to some degree in every market that has ever existed. There is no counter factual that we can study.
We see that monopolies and oligopolies exist. I think the burden of proof falls on you who claim that they can only exist with state interventions. However, as I alluded to, this is difficult to prove even if true (which I personally doubt).
classical liberals (the capitalists actually in power) acknowledge the existence of monopolies and the use of govt to ensure a perception of market fairness, be it breaking up monopolies or ensuring monopolies in certain regards (like patents)
it's only ancaps that really have problems with this, but anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron of a term so problems are expected.
> Perhaps the incentive to innovate just comes from human nature and the desire to do things better, to help yourself and your community.
quite frankly pretty much all important breakthroughs in terms of advancement of understanding came from pure desire to know more. many times innovative understandings were thought of/discovered long before we found much use out of them. most capital-apologists are pretty dull tho and don't really understand just how spontaneous our knowledge progression has been throughout history.
Adam Smith describes in Wealth of Nations that the incentive for collusion and cartel behavior is pretty much ever-present.
While it's not exactly the same thing, it does aim in a similar direction
They always blame the government, always. They say if I wasn't because of the government meddling in the free market then monopolies would not form. So the answer for to "what about this fucked up aspect of capitalism?", is always, MORE CAPITALISM!!
In perfect competition, revenue higher than costs is not possible. So Amazon does not operate in a perfectly competitive market. And don’t capitalists espouse perfect competition?
Please define perfectly competitive? I think you are misunderstanding it. I didn't say revenue higher than cost. Just some of the revenue gets reassigned to R&D or marketing etc. It's all cost.
Yeah, I'm also not following what you mean by "perfectly competitive". Are you saying that all economic actors are exactly equal in market share? Does that mean there is exactly one market in which all economic actors participate? If so how do you account for actors that don't compete with other actors, i.e. actors selling bread don't compete with actors selling toothpicks
>Revenue
So the richest company will be the most innovative, won't they? So what do you think the result of that will be? Answer: the rushes will dominate the market.
There is a reason the world is dominated by multinational corporations: competition is an illusion
>So the richest company will be the most innovative, won't they? So what do you think the result of that will be? Answer: the rushes will dominate the market.
No one ever acknowledges this, but smaller companies have some pretty big advantages over big ones. For example smaller companies are far better at adapting to shifts I the market, since far less things need to be adjusted.
>There is a reason the world is dominated by multinational corporations: competition is an illusion
The reason is that consumers benifit massively from having a single company providing many different services. This is just obvious, you couldn't either have Amazon where you can order almost everything or you can have 50 different companies selling their own niece. As a consumer I know what I'd pick. The exact same thing is true for Google, Microsoft etc.
In sectors where having one company do everything isn't as convent you tend to see better competition (car manufacturers, fast food chains etc).
How many things does goggle provide nowadays? Do you think it would be just as convenient
Smaller companies have some minor advantages in the way the operate, but large companies can simply squash small ones. There is no competition between large and small (see the history of Walmart)
Consumers benefit from the initial, market capture phase of certain monopolistic businesses. But what comes after market capture? Maximization of shareholder interest. Consumers are supplied with ever-shittier products for ever-higher prices. To use the Amazon example, Amazon operates by allowing those sellers willing to pay more in advertising fees to be more visible. Those sellers must continuously either raise their prices to compensate for the ever-higher advertising spend, or slash their quality, or exit the marketplace. For the consumer, it is a race to the bottom. Are you sure that lotion you just ordered wasn't counterfeit heavy metal paste? At the end of the day, Amazon has destroyed a market and replaced it with overpriced garbage and bloat, but because you get two day shipping you hardly notice.
Yes I'm aware that monopolies are bad no one disagrees with this. I was just pushing back against a very silly claim.
Also what Amazon are you buying from?
>No one ever acknowledges this, but smaller companies have some pretty big advantages over big ones. For example smaller companies are far better at adapting to shifts I the market, since far less things need to be adjusted.
Not true. Megacompanies with trillions of money can change what they want, when they want.
>The reason is that consumers benifit massively from having a single company providing many different services. This is just obvious, you couldn't either have Amazon where you can order almost everything or you can have 50 different companies selling their own niece. As a consumer I know what I'd pick. The exact same thing is true for Google, Microsoft etc.
I know. You've just explained the hiw natural monopolies exist. You do realise this proves my argument, right?
>Not true. Megacompanies with trillions of money can change what they want, when they want.
If Megacompanies are so successful why do they only stay on top for about 15 years?
>I know. You've just explained the hiw natural monopolies exist. You do realise this proves my argument, right?
No one ever disagreed that monopolies exist, this is a strawman. The implication in your comment was that Megacompanies exist because they have enough wealth to fund the most R&D.
I'm claiming that they exist because they are incredibly convenient to the consumer. That means if they ever become not convenient to the consumer they stop existing.
Also how is consumer demand a natural monopoly??? What does 'natural monopoly' mean to you?
>If Megacompanies are so successful why do they only stay on top for about 15 years?
They don't, lol.
>The implication in your comment was that Megacompanies exist because they have enough wealth to fund the most R&D.
I didn't say that. Though that is part of it.
>I'm claiming that they exist because they are incredibly convenient to the consumer.
Creating convenience is innovation.
>That means if they ever become not convenient to the consumer they stop existing.
But they can adapt to the market, better than companies with less resources, as I said. So what's your point?
>Also how is consumer demand a natural monopoly???
Consumer demand can create natural monopolies, or near monopolies e.g. Amazon.
>What does 'natural monopoly' mean to you?
What it means to everyone else.
Actually, no.
I work in pharma and Ai. The most innovative companies are actually startups. Look at how fat OpenAi went compared to Google. Most approved new drugs past few years have been from small startups rather than big pharma.
Again, this is the exception to the rule. Multinational corporations rule the world, generally. A lot of start ups are bought up and brought under the umbrella of other companies.
And even if a new business succeeds, that is a victory for a small group of fortunate people, not for the people. Pharma still sets the market price
Monopolies generally do not emerge without government intervention, intentional or not, legal or not. That is to say, monopolies emerge when government makes it difficult for competitors to enter the market through well-intentioned measures like regulation, or because they have been bribed into doing so without any public interest in mind.
When a market is extremely lucrative and a single player is collecting supernormal profits, this is a signal for a competitor to enter and siphon off a share of that profit.
There are a few narrow reasons why competitors may not emerge even in the absence of government intervention, but these are rather uncommon. For example, the customer base for a very niche product may be so narrow, and the margins so low, that the "market" for that product can only feasibly sustain a single player. You can also imagine theoretical projects with startup costs so vast that it is unlikely for more than a single firm to muster them.
But these are edge cases. Mostly when people bullshit about "monopoly" online, they are not talking about monopolies. They are just venting their spleens about not liking large corporations, the vast majority of which compete ruthlessly against many competitors.
A large corporation with huge profit margins is not the same thing as a monopoly.
A monopoly means you are the *sole supplier* for a given product in a given market.
Make you a deal OP. You show me a monopoly that exists to the detriment of their customer base and I’ll show you how the state made this a reality. Regulation, subsidy, largesse, picking winners. Or do you want to litigate the myth of Standard Oil?
The most recent high profile case that comes to mind in this, was the EU's 2022 Google Android ruling, an Art. 102 Abuse of Dominance case, which ruled that:
1. Google had a dominant position in the defined market.
2. Google used their dominance to abuse both upstream providers (mobile phone manufacturers & suppliers) and downstream providers (app markets), both of which were to the detriment of the mobile phone consumer base within the EU.
[**SOURCE**](https://competitionlawblog.kluwercompetitionlaw.com/2022/09/20/google-android-the-general-court-takes-its-position/)
That being said, overall, I'd point out that taking that stance "I've never heard of any case law involving anti-trust, competition, or monopoly" is not a strong rhetorical tactic. Just because YOU might not be familiar with the Case Law on the topic, doesn't mean that the next guy who comes along won't be able to look it up or something.
Ease of entry into the market is the primary issue here. Some markets have high costs of entry (naturally, or sometimes due to state interference, or due to anti-competitive behaviors by already dominant firms) that limit competition. These markets perform poorly and do not allocate resources in a way that is beneficial to society.
Do we agree on those facts?
We do not agree.
If a market happens to have few competing sellers for benign reasons, such as high startup costs or a small customer base, society is not somehow harmed by this fact.
If there are no customers for producers of shit-covered rocks, that's not some kind of moral failing.
> If a market happens to have few competing sellers for **benign** reasons, such as high startup costs or a small customer base, society is not somehow harmed by this fact.
>
>
Disagree. Setting aside the subjective opinion of what's benign and what isn't, it should be pointed out that in competition law, "Dominance" is one thing, and "Abuse of Dominance" is another.
While you are quite right in pointing out that simply having a dominant position does not constitute Abuse of Dominance legally speaking, it cannot be pretended that Abuse of Dominance doesn't occur, or that there's no jurisprudence or case law about it
Please answer me directly: what is subjective about saying that lack of consumer demand for a product is a benign reason for few suppliers?
What is the counterfactual case where this is nefarious?
> Please answer me directly: what is subjective about saying that lack of consumer demand for a product is a benign reason for few suppliers?
"benign".
Generally speaking, as a capitalist, I'd point out that markets do not care about our feelings, and they don't deal in soft-fluffy feelings. So, words like "good & bad", "better" "wrong" "moral""just", "nefarious" just don't have any effect on how markets work.
I will make one exception to that though. The word "harm" is used in competition law (for example in court, by lawyers) to describe exactly HOW damages occur and to whom. (i.e. "theory of harm"), so while it might seem subject, because laypeople use it subjectly in day-to-day speech, in court, it has a specific, non-subjective meaning.
Government interventions, bailouts, government huge contracts - simple as that. Haven't you seen all the rescue operations like General Electric, billion dollar contracts for Google, Amazon where the quality doesn't matter but set up politically contests with the requirements matching the desired subcontractor? The question is also very biased and loaded - all the existing attempts of communism ( I know you will say there was no communism ) have had even bigger problem with monopolies - Sovchoz, Kolchoz organizations, metal steelworks it was all centrally steered by political central committee of the "chosen" party
I mean yeah, monopolies exist because of those reasons. Having copyright laws is necessay for a lot of things, but it still inherently goes against the principles of the free market and will inevitably lead to centralisation in the market.
There are fake name brand commodities coming out of China all the time. Once you put Gucci on a particular handbag, expect fakes. That goes with the territory.
What about life saving heart valve replacements or surgical procedures invented by a doctor? Does he own that & can he keep the cost so high that only the wealthy can afford it? What about a vaccine patent during a ravaging pandemic that the owner doesn't want to share with the world but manufacture himself for profit like the Gates foundation? Can ethics trump profit in these cases?
Proprietary methods generally, patents and copyrights aren’t that limiting or shouldn’t. I think you only need to change 25%(might be less) of the design to avoid most patent infringement. Complete idea patent like the automobile patent on the late 1800’s early 1900’s shouldn’t exist. Those •type• patents set back 3d printers 20 years. The technology was invented in 80’s or 90’s and expired in the 2010’s. The explosion of advancement in 3d printing in the last 10 years would be an argument against your claim patents help innovation.
Edit added •“type”•
Everything is a compromise, including capitalism and socialism.
The recurring theme or idea that monopoly is something that capitalism “needs to address” or must deal with is odd considering the history of monopoly’s.
Most monopoly’s exist through state intervention and state favoritism and always have. There are astonishingly fee examples of monopoly’s arising purely from the market, and when they have, about the time the SEC or somebody before them went to worrying about it, a technological innovation made them obsolete overnight.
The real question is *what do you do about a state monopoly*, like their monopoly on violence, their monopoly on collecting taxes (whether or not you agree with them), what do you do when they bail out Goldman Sachs with your life savings because you ceded that monopoly power *to the “greater good”*.
Lack of market restrictions and competitors. Kinda seems funny that leftists want more restrictions and less competitors, which almost screams oligopolies.
You can’t have a monopoly without regulatory capture. There are prob some natural monopolies working on resource capture or network effects that bend this rule massively but ultimately I think the statement holds.
Perfect competition is a theoretical idea that allows one to remove variables to calculate other economic features. It’s an experimental concept one uses to oversimplify markets to study some aspect of market dynamics.
There is never a perfectly competitive market in real life. Namely for the reason that there is never perfectly symmetrical information.
There are two ways to have a monopoly:
1. Own every possible production site for a natural resource (e.g. owning all of the gold mines in the world)
2. Violence and coercion, either at your own expense or by lobbying the government to do it for you
It is very rare for option 1 to even be possible in the first place because there is almost always going to be somewhere else that has that resource or some other way to obtain it.
Patents and copyright are indeed a form of option 2. It is total nonsense to believe that nobody would innovate ever if intellectual property did not exist. There is historical evidence to suggest that the monopolies granted by patents have stifled innovation (a great example being the steam engine being essentially stagnant until its patent expired) and have cost lives (*\*cough\** insulin *\*cough\**). Many advocates of both the free market and IP do all sorts of mental gymnastics to obscure the reality that IP is a government-granted monopoly (because they don't want to admit that monopolies are sometimes a good thing, in their eyes), but ultimately these arguments come down to the pragmatism of ensuring there is a way of recouping development costs of new technology and publishing media- and an artificial and temporary monopoly is the best they can think of doing so.
There are lots of local monopolies like utility and cable companies. Such companies probably make the argument that it would be impractical to run multiple lines everywhere so that residents can choose their service provider. And sure, that might be true for water, sewer, and maybe electricity, but it absolutely does not make sense for cable or internet.
Almost every other "monopoly" out there is a psuedo-monopoly where the government has erected artificial barriers to entry at the behest of market leaders. You could *technically* still start up a competitor if you had crazy amounts of starting capital to pay all the lawyers and accountants, but for all intents and purpose, the incumbents make up a monopoly or oligopoly. Also within this category are some cases of total market saturation like with Twitter/X and Facebook. Ultimately this comes down to the network effect where such platforms are more valuable the more people use them, so it's just not practical to compete unless you can do a vastly better job or capture a niche.
As for the boogeyman scenario of a few big guys colluding to stop competition... Yeah, that can't really happen without either government being in on it or employing thugs to kill competitors. Some young entrepreneur is always going to come along to make a cheaper product, forcing the big guys to lower their prices.
Monopolies didn't 'emerge'. They're inherent in the scarcity of natural resources. The various artificial monopolies we have (for the most part wrongly) created are grounded in the natural monopolies associated with resource scarcity. Basically we just suck at handling resource scarcity properly and let greedy people mismanage those resources for their own benefit at the expense of everyone else.
This means we can't really *have* a free market, at least not in everything. Market freedom is great, but not always possible. The best we can manage in markets that are unavoidably monopolistic (due to resource scarcity) is to at least respect everyone's freedom to participate in those markets with a share of the underlying natural resources, rather than arbitrarily violating some people's freedom in order to enrich others.
None of this is anti-capitalistic. But it does mean that socialists are wrong, insofar as socialists think injustices in the economy are due to power over labor and/or capital when they are really due to power over land.
>But if so, where’s the incentive to innovate
Getting paid for the work of innovating, presumably.
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Government is the biggest monopoly. I'd say anti-competition laws, incentives, increasing minimum wage will also allow corporations to compete against small local owned businesses easier. Without competition these monopolies can also increase prices whilst not improving quality of service and products by doing g so living costs go up and so does tax revenue it's a win win for Governments and Corporations (especially publicly listed ones) it's corporate-socialism (Fascism)
there is nothing to explain. It is like asking how do you explain that LeBron James is so good at basketball. One company is simply better than all the others and becomes monopolistic. Both sides decided 100 years ago that monopoly was not capitalistic and so they made it illegal. It is not really an issue today.
No I don't think natural monopolies are a good thing and I have no idea why you think I would. I just recognize that they can and do exist. Under capitalism the state should intervene and regulate them heavily so they can't engage in price gouging or otherwise leverage their privileged position to extort their customers. Nothing incentivizes any monopoly, natural or otherwise, to innovate.
Huh??? So capitalism does require state intervention then??? Isn’t that the opposite of capitalist theory? I’m confused and just trying to wrap my head around all this
Of course capitalism requires state intervention. It'd collapse without it. Capitalism doesn't have theory, it's a mode of production not a political philosophy. There are capitalist political philosophies but they don't make up a homogeneous, monolithic mass.
Ok, so let’s say you remove that gov support for monopoly. And therefore you get perfect competition, right? Which by definition means that companies earn just enough profits to stay in business and no more. Then where does innovation come from? (Assuming you need initial investment to create innovation)?
Perfection isn’t attainable. It’s something we strive toward. And people’s wants and needs are constantly changing, so there’s always an edge to be gained by figuring out a way to better satisfy those wants and needs. That’s how innovation occurs.
Does Open Source Software produce innovation? Where does that innovation come from? How is it that OSS, despite being funded at less than 0.1% commercial software is funded, creates more productivity?
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> But if so, where’s the incentive to innovate (given that, with no patent or copyright laws, competitors will just copy your innovation idea)? Most supporters of a free market rightly recognize that patents and copyright laws are like laws securing property rights in general. They are not what supporters of capitalism mean when by an intervention ie some violation of property rights. There some libertarian types who oppose IP, but their view on IP is mistaken at best.
Ok … but how do you prevent monopoly in that case?
“Monopoly” - “the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service.” I’m assuming you mean these sorts of things. If you don’t, then please say so. What empirical evidence are you drawing from to justify that those are a concern under an entirely free market?
Isn’t “natural monopoly” a thing
Yeah, but they aren’t fundamentally the same as a monopoly really, so it’s a different discussion from monopolies. And I’d still ask you the same question as to what empirical evidence you’re using to justify them as a concern.
Sure. When the state is involved. Key factor often disregarded.
This is an untestable claim. The state has been always involved in Capitalism. I expect that it cannot exist otherwise, or even if briefly possible, would recreate the state to protect the interests of the owners of capital.
> There some libertarian types who oppose IP, but their view on IP is mistaken at best. Do you have references/know about research backing that? It's a while since I looked at this, but the last bits of research I remember seeing had approx the following results: * Limited patent protection is useful, but the current patent protection is so extensive that is economically damaging. (This varies by field; there are certain fields where it useful but overall it is negative.) * Short copyright is positive, but the current copyright is so long that it is overall negative, based on comparisons of value created by the public domain and how much creation models come out with without copyright. * I'm not aware of any research on other types of IP (trademarks, trade secret protection, design patents, etc) I don't hold a strong opinion about this and don't consider myself an expert. It's just that my impression is that the empirical research points to IP protection being too strong, and that the people that believe in IP protection operate purely from ideology. So if you know actual research (even just summaries you remember), bring it on.
> Do you have references/know about research backing that? You said you had research that backs that there should be IP laws, so I don’t know what you’re asking me for. Research that backs the current regime in America as is? > the people that believe in IP protection operate purely from ideology. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone say this who has learned particularly well how to use logical inference from the senses or evidence-based reasoning to form the morality part of their views and motivation for being interested in politics.
>> Do you have references/know about research backing that? > You said you had research that backs that there should be IP laws, so I don’t know what you’re asking me for. Research that backs the current regime in America as is? Do you have research that back current IP laws as **being better than nothing**? The research I read backed that the current IP laws are **worse than nothing**, that optimal laws could exist but the researcher believed they were politically unlikely and identified forces pushing for too strong protections getting to worse than nothing. So the researcher conclusion was that there shouldn't be patent & copyright laws in practice, because they would be expected to deteriorate to be worse than nothing. > I don’t think I’ve seen anyone say this who has learned particularly well how to use logical inference from the senses or evidence-based reasoning to form the morality part of their views and motivation for being interested in politics. Yeah, yeah, preconceptions are "morals" and "using logical inference" while looking at research to see what effects are actually present to modify "logical inference" based on how things work out in practice is "lack of morals".
Bullshit. If you want to debate the matter shoot me a time and date. You can’t own ideas. Jesus.
How the fuck would ever own any intellectual material without copyright laws?? Libertarians are against copyright now? Why do supposed capitalists keep opposing everything that is integral to capitalism?
Right Libertarians and libertarians have been against IP for decades. Rothbard was against patents. https://www.google.com/search?q=mises+institute+intellectual+property&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-us&client=safari https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-views-intellectual-property-rothbard-tucker-spooner-rand They oppose it because they are supposed supporters of capitalism, not competent or actual supporters of capitalism.
So you think anyone and everyone should be able to do whatever they want with anyone's intellectual property? And you don't see that as in any way contradictory to the tenets of private property and capitalism?
What the fuck even is “intellectual property”? Words and ideas? Fuck that. You can’t own thoughts my friend.
So if you publish a book, anyone should have the right to take it, sell it, and take credit for it themselves? And you say you support private property? Lol, what a joke.
Yes and no. Anyone has the right to take it and market it and sell it but not as the verified author via chain of custody. That would be fraud. This shit is not that complicated.
Why does the “verified author “ even matter? They cant own the idea or thoughts remember?
Well I think there is a distinction between owning and controlling ideas and actively lying about facts (in this case, the authorship of media). So under this conception, the author does not matter in terms of distributing a book but it could still be wrong to claim a work as your original creation if it is not so. Although, there would be far less incentive to do so in a world where such works were freely shared.
The title of author though is about intellectual property, because otherwise, the “author” is just whoever wrote it, so for example yes that would mean that they couldn’t take a copy of harry potter bought from Rowling and then resell it as them being the author… However it would allow them to just copy and paste the words over themselves and reprint the book and sell it because they are not lying, they did write the book at that point, its not original but they are the author, so what you have said doesn’t stop this. Another example to highlight it, if you copy the mona lisa perfectly and say you are the artist, you are not lying, you are the artist of that painting, you might not have painted the original mona lisa but that’s irrelevant to whether or not you are the artist and its the same here, you might not have created harry potter but as long as you are the one typing and printing the words, you are the author Basically just because you are not the original creator does not mean you cannot call yourself the author or artist.
What is it fraud against if the intellectual property is not protected or even owned, as you implied earlier? What does the authorship matter if one doesn't own their intellectual work?
Wow. So you are saying that anyone can take someone else's property and sell it for themselves, without royalties going to the person who wrote it? And you say you respect private property? I knew libertarians were hypocrites, but this is beyond parody.
It actually isn’t. You’re just locked in to statist thinking. Let me ask you this. Is the formula for Coca Cola or the colonels secret recipe patented? No. It’s a trade secret. Is your concern that if JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter novels that KJ Growling would send her to the poor house? If so, how?
"Is your concern that if JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter novels that KJ Growling would send her to the poor house?" Of course not anymore, because his (yes, that's intended) enormous wealth has provided him with a private taxation right over other people work (=capital income). But if no IP protections existed when he released his first book, what would've happened? People would've just copy-pasted all of it's contents and sold it themselves. There'd be legal ten cent e-books with the exact content all over the internet and two dollar copies printed on crappy paper. And hand-engraved books with gilded covers for those willing to spend more for bling. All released by people who have no affiliation with the actual author whatsoever, and all with impossibly thin profit margins. Why would people buy from the original author in such a system, expect to copy and rerelease it for sale themselves?
A book or music isn't the same as a drink recipe, lol. How can art like a book be a trade secret when it is published and people can see it? Tell me, how would you genuinely feel if you spent years writing a book and then other people stole it and published and made money from it and you never saw any money from it?
You understand that you can currently go to most open source subjects, fork the code, and start doing whatever you want with it, right? Why don't you? Why doesn't anyone buy your fork? Why doesn't anyone follow your fork? Why is it that the vast majority of the time, there is only one conical version?
Why are you comparing this to a book? A child can copy and paste a book and its identical in everyway, there is nothing different about both it or the perception of its use. Clearly if you are using an open source project this doesn’t hold anymore because people wont agree with your direction, your use case, why spend the effort to switch etc. but for the book, its literally identical, word for word and provides the same utility
Take it? No. Copy it? Yes. Take credit for having written it? No. Sell it? Only if there's a willing buyer (someone who can't just as conveniently copy it for themselves). Legitimate private property doesn't extend to forbidding others from making new copies of the stuff you own, or selling the new copies.
Currency today is almost exclusive thoughts and ideas and their symbols.
You’ve completely misread me. > Most supporters of a free market rightly recognize that patents and copyright laws are like laws securing property rights in general. This means I support IP laws.
Well then why are you against copyright laws?
The real question is why you think I’m against copyright law when I’ve said the opposite.
Most libertarians on here are against IP and patent laws
I don’t know that’s true, and I don’t take them as representative of free market supporters.
Ancaps don't agree, obvs. But I apologise, I misread your initial comment. I am already getting replies to this thread from supposed libertarians arguing against IP laws.
> How the fuck would ever own any intellectual material without copyright laws? There are many types of intellectual property, copyright is just one.
>Most supporters of a free market rightly recognize that patents and copyright laws are like laws securing property rights in general. No, they aren't. A legitimate property law is defensive, it protects people's freedom to have what they could have had without interference by others. But IP laws are offensive, they infringe on people's freedom to have what they could have had without interference by others. >their view on IP is mistaken at best. How do you figure that?
> But IP laws are offensive, they infringe on people's freedom to have what they could have had without interference by others. Sure, if you assume that violators of IP law aren’t interfering with the IP owner. But if the IP law violator is in fact interfering with the IP owner, then IP laws are defensive.
All libertarians oppose IP. There's only few religious libertarians pretending property can be anything but physical. But they are minority and irrelevant
So much for Spooner > Since Spooner finds the foundation of property in each individual’s natural right to provide for her own subsistence and happiness, it is perhaps unsurprising that he regards “the right of property in intellectual wealth” as necessary and legitimate. https://www.libertarianism.org/columns/libertarian-views-intellectual-property-rothbard-tucker-spooner-rand
Now read Kinsella, Stephan
I don’t pay much attention to intellectuals who speak about morality and political philosophy who have chosen not to learn how to use reason to identify what’s objectively moral ie their rational self-interest.
Kek. Meaning you don't like reading opposing viewpoints. Only whatever you believe yourself no matter how old that information is. Hence the commies/socialists salivating over marx disproven theories still in 2024
The answer to patents is the proprietary information and trade secrets. Just becasue you know what the end result looks like doesnt mean you can make it. And we they do find out how to make it they still got to make their process and streamline. That gives you time to set a brand and develop the market for it. And to make a good bit of profit. And you can even establish brand loyalty. Take nyquil for example. They make a product, others know how to make it but nyquil still outsells them despite being higher in price. Or hell Johnson and Johnson band-aids. There is also the issue that you have to keep innovating to prevent from being undercut. If you stagnate and a competitor has time to perfect their process and eventually makes it better for cheaper then you are now out of the market. This is how monopolies will not exist. Even a "natural monopoly " might be in danger because while state name power might be there with the infrastructure, coop power may be able to offer better in a small area at a cheaper price then grow to be a real competitor. They may use underground cables as opposed to above ground thus less maintenance and more reliable.
So coops are the answer to undercutting natural monopoly?
You cannot undercut a "natural monopoly " in most countries (especially the US) as it is illegal to even attempt. But it is a proposed solution to government run/mandated utilities to provide competition for them. Just one of course.
No, if you have a completely free market, it doesn't follow that you would have perfect competition. Perfect competition is an idealization that cannot happen in reality. There is always a company with a better location, better workers, better strategy, better salesmen, better product, more popularity in their home market, or some other marginal advantage. In any case, the incentive to innovate is still there in a "perfectly competitive" market because when you have lower costs/higher sale price you have now broken the perfect competition condition and you have a component of pure profit over your operation whilst your competitors adapt. Yes, they eventually will, but in the meantime you can coast on profit whilst everyone else is still at 0 profit. This may happen for quite a while if your industrial secret holds even without IP laws. No idealist starry-eyed innovator concerned with the good of the community required. In any case, the claim of commies is that monopolies appear naturally without state intervention regardless of IP protection. We are still waiting for any historical examples or any way in which it is possible, and we will continue to wait for the foreseeable future.
How can this ever be proven to your standards though? State intervention is a factor to some degree in every market that has ever existed. There is no counter factual that we can study. We see that monopolies and oligopolies exist. I think the burden of proof falls on you who claim that they can only exist with state interventions. However, as I alluded to, this is difficult to prove even if true (which I personally doubt).
[Against Intellectual Monopoly - Prof. Boldrin](https://www.youtube.com/live/ew2sOHgljf8?si=3NYz4UPq94F8_qJt)
classical liberals (the capitalists actually in power) acknowledge the existence of monopolies and the use of govt to ensure a perception of market fairness, be it breaking up monopolies or ensuring monopolies in certain regards (like patents) it's only ancaps that really have problems with this, but anarcho-capitalism is an oxymoron of a term so problems are expected. > Perhaps the incentive to innovate just comes from human nature and the desire to do things better, to help yourself and your community. quite frankly pretty much all important breakthroughs in terms of advancement of understanding came from pure desire to know more. many times innovative understandings were thought of/discovered long before we found much use out of them. most capital-apologists are pretty dull tho and don't really understand just how spontaneous our knowledge progression has been throughout history.
The incentive structure incentivizes for monopolization.
Adam Smith describes in Wealth of Nations that the incentive for collusion and cartel behavior is pretty much ever-present. While it's not exactly the same thing, it does aim in a similar direction
They always blame the government, always. They say if I wasn't because of the government meddling in the free market then monopolies would not form. So the answer for to "what about this fucked up aspect of capitalism?", is always, MORE CAPITALISM!!
Over regulations and regulatory capture
Ok, but how does innovation emerge in perfect competition?
Companies have to innovate to gain market share.
Where do they get the money needed to innovate, in a perfectly competitive market where profits are zero?
Revenue. Amazon, for most of its existence, put most of its revenue into R&D. So do lots of companies instead of giving dividends to shareholders.
In perfect competition, revenue higher than costs is not possible. So Amazon does not operate in a perfectly competitive market. And don’t capitalists espouse perfect competition?
Please define perfectly competitive? I think you are misunderstanding it. I didn't say revenue higher than cost. Just some of the revenue gets reassigned to R&D or marketing etc. It's all cost.
don't be stupid ! there is never perfect competition.
Yeah, I'm also not following what you mean by "perfectly competitive". Are you saying that all economic actors are exactly equal in market share? Does that mean there is exactly one market in which all economic actors participate? If so how do you account for actors that don't compete with other actors, i.e. actors selling bread don't compete with actors selling toothpicks
>Revenue So the richest company will be the most innovative, won't they? So what do you think the result of that will be? Answer: the rushes will dominate the market. There is a reason the world is dominated by multinational corporations: competition is an illusion
>So the richest company will be the most innovative, won't they? So what do you think the result of that will be? Answer: the rushes will dominate the market. No one ever acknowledges this, but smaller companies have some pretty big advantages over big ones. For example smaller companies are far better at adapting to shifts I the market, since far less things need to be adjusted. >There is a reason the world is dominated by multinational corporations: competition is an illusion The reason is that consumers benifit massively from having a single company providing many different services. This is just obvious, you couldn't either have Amazon where you can order almost everything or you can have 50 different companies selling their own niece. As a consumer I know what I'd pick. The exact same thing is true for Google, Microsoft etc. In sectors where having one company do everything isn't as convent you tend to see better competition (car manufacturers, fast food chains etc). How many things does goggle provide nowadays? Do you think it would be just as convenient
Smaller companies have some minor advantages in the way the operate, but large companies can simply squash small ones. There is no competition between large and small (see the history of Walmart) Consumers benefit from the initial, market capture phase of certain monopolistic businesses. But what comes after market capture? Maximization of shareholder interest. Consumers are supplied with ever-shittier products for ever-higher prices. To use the Amazon example, Amazon operates by allowing those sellers willing to pay more in advertising fees to be more visible. Those sellers must continuously either raise their prices to compensate for the ever-higher advertising spend, or slash their quality, or exit the marketplace. For the consumer, it is a race to the bottom. Are you sure that lotion you just ordered wasn't counterfeit heavy metal paste? At the end of the day, Amazon has destroyed a market and replaced it with overpriced garbage and bloat, but because you get two day shipping you hardly notice.
Yes I'm aware that monopolies are bad no one disagrees with this. I was just pushing back against a very silly claim. Also what Amazon are you buying from?
>No one ever acknowledges this, but smaller companies have some pretty big advantages over big ones. For example smaller companies are far better at adapting to shifts I the market, since far less things need to be adjusted. Not true. Megacompanies with trillions of money can change what they want, when they want. >The reason is that consumers benifit massively from having a single company providing many different services. This is just obvious, you couldn't either have Amazon where you can order almost everything or you can have 50 different companies selling their own niece. As a consumer I know what I'd pick. The exact same thing is true for Google, Microsoft etc. I know. You've just explained the hiw natural monopolies exist. You do realise this proves my argument, right?
>Not true. Megacompanies with trillions of money can change what they want, when they want. If Megacompanies are so successful why do they only stay on top for about 15 years? >I know. You've just explained the hiw natural monopolies exist. You do realise this proves my argument, right? No one ever disagreed that monopolies exist, this is a strawman. The implication in your comment was that Megacompanies exist because they have enough wealth to fund the most R&D. I'm claiming that they exist because they are incredibly convenient to the consumer. That means if they ever become not convenient to the consumer they stop existing. Also how is consumer demand a natural monopoly??? What does 'natural monopoly' mean to you?
>If Megacompanies are so successful why do they only stay on top for about 15 years? They don't, lol. >The implication in your comment was that Megacompanies exist because they have enough wealth to fund the most R&D. I didn't say that. Though that is part of it. >I'm claiming that they exist because they are incredibly convenient to the consumer. Creating convenience is innovation. >That means if they ever become not convenient to the consumer they stop existing. But they can adapt to the market, better than companies with less resources, as I said. So what's your point? >Also how is consumer demand a natural monopoly??? Consumer demand can create natural monopolies, or near monopolies e.g. Amazon. >What does 'natural monopoly' mean to you? What it means to everyone else.
Actually, no. I work in pharma and Ai. The most innovative companies are actually startups. Look at how fat OpenAi went compared to Google. Most approved new drugs past few years have been from small startups rather than big pharma.
Again, this is the exception to the rule. Multinational corporations rule the world, generally. A lot of start ups are bought up and brought under the umbrella of other companies. And even if a new business succeeds, that is a victory for a small group of fortunate people, not for the people. Pharma still sets the market price
Are you seriously using OpenAI as an example of a small business? They are basically Microsoft's pet.
One word. Revenue. Next?
Monopolies generally do not emerge without government intervention, intentional or not, legal or not. That is to say, monopolies emerge when government makes it difficult for competitors to enter the market through well-intentioned measures like regulation, or because they have been bribed into doing so without any public interest in mind. When a market is extremely lucrative and a single player is collecting supernormal profits, this is a signal for a competitor to enter and siphon off a share of that profit. There are a few narrow reasons why competitors may not emerge even in the absence of government intervention, but these are rather uncommon. For example, the customer base for a very niche product may be so narrow, and the margins so low, that the "market" for that product can only feasibly sustain a single player. You can also imagine theoretical projects with startup costs so vast that it is unlikely for more than a single firm to muster them. But these are edge cases. Mostly when people bullshit about "monopoly" online, they are not talking about monopolies. They are just venting their spleens about not liking large corporations, the vast majority of which compete ruthlessly against many competitors.
Ok so you’re saying that large corporations with huge profits only exist because of gov intervention?
A large corporation with huge profit margins is not the same thing as a monopoly. A monopoly means you are the *sole supplier* for a given product in a given market.
Make you a deal OP. You show me a monopoly that exists to the detriment of their customer base and I’ll show you how the state made this a reality. Regulation, subsidy, largesse, picking winners. Or do you want to litigate the myth of Standard Oil?
The most recent high profile case that comes to mind in this, was the EU's 2022 Google Android ruling, an Art. 102 Abuse of Dominance case, which ruled that: 1. Google had a dominant position in the defined market. 2. Google used their dominance to abuse both upstream providers (mobile phone manufacturers & suppliers) and downstream providers (app markets), both of which were to the detriment of the mobile phone consumer base within the EU. [**SOURCE**](https://competitionlawblog.kluwercompetitionlaw.com/2022/09/20/google-android-the-general-court-takes-its-position/) That being said, overall, I'd point out that taking that stance "I've never heard of any case law involving anti-trust, competition, or monopoly" is not a strong rhetorical tactic. Just because YOU might not be familiar with the Case Law on the topic, doesn't mean that the next guy who comes along won't be able to look it up or something.
You see, according to this brilliant minds, big corporations = communism...
This might be confusing, but a large corporation with huge profit is not the same as a monopoly...
Ease of entry into the market is the primary issue here. Some markets have high costs of entry (naturally, or sometimes due to state interference, or due to anti-competitive behaviors by already dominant firms) that limit competition. These markets perform poorly and do not allocate resources in a way that is beneficial to society. Do we agree on those facts?
We do not agree. If a market happens to have few competing sellers for benign reasons, such as high startup costs or a small customer base, society is not somehow harmed by this fact. If there are no customers for producers of shit-covered rocks, that's not some kind of moral failing.
> If a market happens to have few competing sellers for **benign** reasons, such as high startup costs or a small customer base, society is not somehow harmed by this fact. > > Disagree. Setting aside the subjective opinion of what's benign and what isn't, it should be pointed out that in competition law, "Dominance" is one thing, and "Abuse of Dominance" is another. While you are quite right in pointing out that simply having a dominant position does not constitute Abuse of Dominance legally speaking, it cannot be pretended that Abuse of Dominance doesn't occur, or that there's no jurisprudence or case law about it
Please answer me directly: what is subjective about saying that lack of consumer demand for a product is a benign reason for few suppliers? What is the counterfactual case where this is nefarious?
> Please answer me directly: what is subjective about saying that lack of consumer demand for a product is a benign reason for few suppliers? "benign". Generally speaking, as a capitalist, I'd point out that markets do not care about our feelings, and they don't deal in soft-fluffy feelings. So, words like "good & bad", "better" "wrong" "moral""just", "nefarious" just don't have any effect on how markets work. I will make one exception to that though. The word "harm" is used in competition law (for example in court, by lawyers) to describe exactly HOW damages occur and to whom. (i.e. "theory of harm"), so while it might seem subject, because laypeople use it subjectly in day-to-day speech, in court, it has a specific, non-subjective meaning.
Government interventions, bailouts, government huge contracts - simple as that. Haven't you seen all the rescue operations like General Electric, billion dollar contracts for Google, Amazon where the quality doesn't matter but set up politically contests with the requirements matching the desired subcontractor? The question is also very biased and loaded - all the existing attempts of communism ( I know you will say there was no communism ) have had even bigger problem with monopolies - Sovchoz, Kolchoz organizations, metal steelworks it was all centrally steered by political central committee of the "chosen" party
I mean yeah, monopolies exist because of those reasons. Having copyright laws is necessay for a lot of things, but it still inherently goes against the principles of the free market and will inevitably lead to centralisation in the market.
There are fake name brand commodities coming out of China all the time. Once you put Gucci on a particular handbag, expect fakes. That goes with the territory. What about life saving heart valve replacements or surgical procedures invented by a doctor? Does he own that & can he keep the cost so high that only the wealthy can afford it? What about a vaccine patent during a ravaging pandemic that the owner doesn't want to share with the world but manufacture himself for profit like the Gates foundation? Can ethics trump profit in these cases?
Proprietary methods generally, patents and copyrights aren’t that limiting or shouldn’t. I think you only need to change 25%(might be less) of the design to avoid most patent infringement. Complete idea patent like the automobile patent on the late 1800’s early 1900’s shouldn’t exist. Those •type• patents set back 3d printers 20 years. The technology was invented in 80’s or 90’s and expired in the 2010’s. The explosion of advancement in 3d printing in the last 10 years would be an argument against your claim patents help innovation. Edit added •“type”•
Everything is a compromise, including capitalism and socialism. The recurring theme or idea that monopoly is something that capitalism “needs to address” or must deal with is odd considering the history of monopoly’s. Most monopoly’s exist through state intervention and state favoritism and always have. There are astonishingly fee examples of monopoly’s arising purely from the market, and when they have, about the time the SEC or somebody before them went to worrying about it, a technological innovation made them obsolete overnight. The real question is *what do you do about a state monopoly*, like their monopoly on violence, their monopoly on collecting taxes (whether or not you agree with them), what do you do when they bail out Goldman Sachs with your life savings because you ceded that monopoly power *to the “greater good”*.
Lack of market restrictions and competitors. Kinda seems funny that leftists want more restrictions and less competitors, which almost screams oligopolies.
natural monopolies, search costs, network effects, and good luck. basic econ.
You can’t have a monopoly without regulatory capture. There are prob some natural monopolies working on resource capture or network effects that bend this rule massively but ultimately I think the statement holds. Perfect competition is a theoretical idea that allows one to remove variables to calculate other economic features. It’s an experimental concept one uses to oversimplify markets to study some aspect of market dynamics. There is never a perfectly competitive market in real life. Namely for the reason that there is never perfectly symmetrical information.
It starts by owning all 4 railroads and then putting up hotels on both Boardwalk and Park Place
There are two ways to have a monopoly: 1. Own every possible production site for a natural resource (e.g. owning all of the gold mines in the world) 2. Violence and coercion, either at your own expense or by lobbying the government to do it for you It is very rare for option 1 to even be possible in the first place because there is almost always going to be somewhere else that has that resource or some other way to obtain it. Patents and copyright are indeed a form of option 2. It is total nonsense to believe that nobody would innovate ever if intellectual property did not exist. There is historical evidence to suggest that the monopolies granted by patents have stifled innovation (a great example being the steam engine being essentially stagnant until its patent expired) and have cost lives (*\*cough\** insulin *\*cough\**). Many advocates of both the free market and IP do all sorts of mental gymnastics to obscure the reality that IP is a government-granted monopoly (because they don't want to admit that monopolies are sometimes a good thing, in their eyes), but ultimately these arguments come down to the pragmatism of ensuring there is a way of recouping development costs of new technology and publishing media- and an artificial and temporary monopoly is the best they can think of doing so. There are lots of local monopolies like utility and cable companies. Such companies probably make the argument that it would be impractical to run multiple lines everywhere so that residents can choose their service provider. And sure, that might be true for water, sewer, and maybe electricity, but it absolutely does not make sense for cable or internet. Almost every other "monopoly" out there is a psuedo-monopoly where the government has erected artificial barriers to entry at the behest of market leaders. You could *technically* still start up a competitor if you had crazy amounts of starting capital to pay all the lawyers and accountants, but for all intents and purpose, the incumbents make up a monopoly or oligopoly. Also within this category are some cases of total market saturation like with Twitter/X and Facebook. Ultimately this comes down to the network effect where such platforms are more valuable the more people use them, so it's just not practical to compete unless you can do a vastly better job or capture a niche. As for the boogeyman scenario of a few big guys colluding to stop competition... Yeah, that can't really happen without either government being in on it or employing thugs to kill competitors. Some young entrepreneur is always going to come along to make a cheaper product, forcing the big guys to lower their prices.
Can someone explain to me how zero state intervention would result in perfect competition?
Monopolies didn't 'emerge'. They're inherent in the scarcity of natural resources. The various artificial monopolies we have (for the most part wrongly) created are grounded in the natural monopolies associated with resource scarcity. Basically we just suck at handling resource scarcity properly and let greedy people mismanage those resources for their own benefit at the expense of everyone else. This means we can't really *have* a free market, at least not in everything. Market freedom is great, but not always possible. The best we can manage in markets that are unavoidably monopolistic (due to resource scarcity) is to at least respect everyone's freedom to participate in those markets with a share of the underlying natural resources, rather than arbitrarily violating some people's freedom in order to enrich others. None of this is anti-capitalistic. But it does mean that socialists are wrong, insofar as socialists think injustices in the economy are due to power over labor and/or capital when they are really due to power over land. >But if so, where’s the incentive to innovate Getting paid for the work of innovating, presumably.
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Government is the biggest monopoly. I'd say anti-competition laws, incentives, increasing minimum wage will also allow corporations to compete against small local owned businesses easier. Without competition these monopolies can also increase prices whilst not improving quality of service and products by doing g so living costs go up and so does tax revenue it's a win win for Governments and Corporations (especially publicly listed ones) it's corporate-socialism (Fascism)
there is nothing to explain. It is like asking how do you explain that LeBron James is so good at basketball. One company is simply better than all the others and becomes monopolistic. Both sides decided 100 years ago that monopoly was not capitalistic and so they made it illegal. It is not really an issue today.
monopolies have been illegal for 100 years and both sides agree so it is not an issue
They exist all over the place. Legally. But only with the assistance of government. Get out of here.
ancaps and denying monopolies form naturally, name a more iconic duo 🤣🤣🤣
If they exist all over the place why are you so afraid to give us your single best example? What do you learn from your fear?
They don't, they just pretend it doesn't exist
A relative low number of important innovations are patented. https://c4sif.org/2013/11/study-most-important-innovations-are-not-patented/
c4sif... Why is it that 100% of the links linked by libertarians are shitty propaganda outlets that call themselves "think tanks"?
Stephan Kinsella is a retired IP lawyer that made a fortune on IP laws, not a think tank. He referenced a peer-reviewed paper.
Nobody can maintain a monopoly in a capitalist country without government support.
Yes they can. Natural monopolies are a thing, hostile takeovers and corporate mergers are a thing, etc.
And natural monopolies are a good thing in your view? No state intervention required? What incentivises those natural monopolies to innovate?
No I don't think natural monopolies are a good thing and I have no idea why you think I would. I just recognize that they can and do exist. Under capitalism the state should intervene and regulate them heavily so they can't engage in price gouging or otherwise leverage their privileged position to extort their customers. Nothing incentivizes any monopoly, natural or otherwise, to innovate.
Huh??? So capitalism does require state intervention then??? Isn’t that the opposite of capitalist theory? I’m confused and just trying to wrap my head around all this
Of course capitalism requires state intervention. It'd collapse without it. Capitalism doesn't have theory, it's a mode of production not a political philosophy. There are capitalist political philosophies but they don't make up a homogeneous, monolithic mass.
Ok, so let’s say you remove that gov support for monopoly. And therefore you get perfect competition, right? Which by definition means that companies earn just enough profits to stay in business and no more. Then where does innovation come from? (Assuming you need initial investment to create innovation)?
Perfection isn’t attainable. It’s something we strive toward. And people’s wants and needs are constantly changing, so there’s always an edge to be gained by figuring out a way to better satisfy those wants and needs. That’s how innovation occurs.
Does Open Source Software produce innovation? Where does that innovation come from? How is it that OSS, despite being funded at less than 0.1% commercial software is funded, creates more productivity?
They don't. They bitch about "muh government spending" and run away crying
don't be stupid. The incentive to innovate comes from making more money than the competition which does not innovate. 1+1 = 2