Re: Republican Reversal
Voter attitudes generally reflect a conventional wisdom that is shaped by the corporate media and statist educational system. A whole series of buzzwords comes to mind--ideological hegemony, the sociology of knowledge, reproduction of human capital--but they all boil down to the fact that a fairly centralized cultural apparatus is effective at creating the kinds of public opinion the existing system of power needs to survive. Concerning the real issues involved in our politics, and the contending groups that are actually represented in the state's decision-making, I'd say Thomas Ferguson and William Domhoff were closer to the mark than the interest group pluralists are. From: Fred Foldvary [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Republican Reversal Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 17:31:43 -0700 (PDT) These are all good comments on the Republican reversal. Thus, I take it that the list agrees that democracy works pretty well in reflecting the wishes of the voters. Alex I don't agree. What about the large literature on voter ignorance and rent seeking? Does the typical American agree, for example, that it is good policy to spend billions on farm subsidies, or are they just ignorant and apathetic? Fred Foldvary = [EMAIL PROTECTED] __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com _ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx
take-in/eat out
Is it just me, or does the discount for take-out dining seem way too low? You avoid paying a tip, yes. But you save the restaurant the cost of waiters, tables, space, etc. You might say that space is not really scarce except at peak times, but still, most dining is down during those peak times, no? The same goes for mail order vs. brick-and-mortar stores. The Internet crash makes it seem like mail order can't afford to discount 40% below brick-and-mortar. But why not? It sure seems like a website must be vastly cheaper to run than a physical store, especially when one website can do the work of thousands of local stores. -- 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
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: from whence, belief? Better society comparisons
I think this topic is getting too far afield for armchair. Take it off the list, if you please. :-) -- 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: take-in/eat out
I considered the online book dealers a positive development from the beginning. The mail-order and internet vendors are, in some ways, a throwback to the days of the Sears Roebuck catalog, when the alternative to local mom and pop retailers wasn't the big box store, but rather a network of distribution centers that dealt directly with the customer. The main competitor of Amazon.com, etc., is not the locally-owned bookstore downtown, or the used bookseller who has all the old and unusual stuff you can't find anywhere else. Rather, it's BN, Borders, and their ilk. So if nothing else, the online folks make communities a lot more human-friendly. From: Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED] The same goes for mail order vs. brick-and-mortar stores. The Internet crash makes it seem like mail order can't afford to discount 40% below brick-and-mortar. But why not? It sure seems like a website must be vastly cheaper to run than a physical store, especially when one website can do the work of thousands of local stores. -- 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* _ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com
Re: Republican Reversal
Kevin Carson wrote: Voter attitudes generally reflect a conventional wisdom that is shaped by the corporate media and statist educational system. A whole series of buzzwords comes to mind--ideological hegemony, the sociology of knowledge, reproduction of human capital--but they all boil down to the fact that a fairly centralized cultural apparatus is effective at creating the kinds of public opinion the existing system of power needs to survive. Once again, why do you focus on the centralized cultural apparatus? Would decentralizing things really do much to change people's political views? There used to be many more newspapers in the 1930s, for example. But then you just had thousands of newspapers arguing for intervention instead of ten or twenty. What's the difference? Concerning the real issues involved in our politics, and the contending groups that are actually represented in the state's decision-making, I'd say Thomas Ferguson and William Domhoff were closer to the mark than the interest group pluralists are. I'd say it's closest to the mark to say that most voters genuinely but stupidly want government to do what it actually does. The interest groups just take care of the details. From: Fred Foldvary [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Republican Reversal Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 17:31:43 -0700 (PDT) These are all good comments on the Republican reversal. Thus, I take it that the list agrees that democracy works pretty well in reflecting the wishes of the voters. Alex I don't agree. What about the large literature on voter ignorance and rent seeking? Does the typical American agree, for example, that it is good policy to spend billions on farm subsidies, or are they just ignorant and apathetic? Fred Foldvary = [EMAIL PROTECTED] __ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com _ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx -- 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*
