Bob Mottram wrote:
Economic libertarianism would be nice if it were to occur. However,
in practice companies and governments put in place all sorts of
anti-competitive structures to lock people into certain modes of
economic activity. I think economic activity in general is heavily
influenced by cognitive biases of various kinds.
On 06/10/2007, BillK <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 10/6/07, a wrote:
A free market is just a nice intellectual theory that is of no use in
the real world.
No. Not true. Anti-competitive structures and monopolies won't exist in
a true free market society. The free market is self sustaining. It's
government regulation that creates monopolies, because companies
partner-up with the government. See Chicago school of economics and
Austrian school of economics for explanations. Monopolies are much less
likely to exist if there is a smaller government.
As a response to "anti-competitive structures to lock people". Microsoft
is a government-supported monopoly. It got its monopoly from the use of
software patents. Microsoft patented its file formats, APIs, etc., which
resulted in vendor lock-ins. Patent offices, like all bureaucratic
agencies, are poor in quality, so lots of trivial ideas can be patented.
Do not misinterpret me, I am not against software patents. This is out
of topic, but I am in a habit of writing defenses.
References
http://www.mises.org/story/2317
http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv12n2/reg12n2-debow.html
http://www.ruwart.com/Healing/rutoc.html
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