Subject:
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Re: Just Teasing, I Have No Intention of Debating Any of This...
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Mon, 24 Mar 2003 21:34:05 GMT
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Viewed:
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1368 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Larry Pieniazek writes:
> > I may be misunderstanding the question, but let me try with a hypothetical
> > stab at it.
> > Suppose you and a group of like-minded individuals locate and claim a
> > previously un-owned but inhabitable island in international waters.
>
> Does such an island exist? As far as I can tell, all land on this planet is
> either claimed by some particular government (and thus ought not to be hived
> off without the acquiescence of that government, or of the landowners or at
> least of somebody!) or has been deemed offlimits (Antarctica) by all the
> existing governments agreeing that it is so.
Alas, that's just the way it goes; do you think that in a government-less
world that wouldn't be the case? I want the free market to cough up a free
place for me to live, but the free market doesn't do that any more than the
current situation does.
Why is it preferable to have things run by a number of huge corporations
rather than a number of governments? It seems undeniable to me that, in a
free-market world of global corporations, every exploitable piece of land
would be grabbed and claimed just as surely as in the world we have.
> > And I'd say collusion
> > is absolutely an element of the free market. When convenient and
> > profitable, two agencies are almost certain to combine their efforts to work
> > against an exploitable third party, especially after the initial two
> > agencies have secured their corner of the market.
> > For clarification, by "free market" you mean a market operating without
> > the intervention of an overarching body, don't you? What's to prevent a
> > number of companies from combining their efforts to squeeze the rest of the
> > market? To me, this seems not just possible but inevitable!
>
> Plowed ground alert: I (and many economists much more talented than I) long
> have held that there are no natural monopolies. Thus it's not only not
> inevitable, it's impossible.
I think there may be a subtlety that I'm missing in the meaning of
"natural monopoly," but it seems to me that such a case is almost certain to
arise in any reasonably finite market structure.
This may be an instance of you and me backing opposing economists, but I
don't know that you and I are qualified to judge which Nobel Laureate is
correct!
Dave!
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