On Thu, Jun 29, 2006 at 12:11:45PM +0100, Ashish Gulhati wrote: > It's not about _a_ private company running the railway. A free market > would see many private companies offering competing services, > not just railways but everything. If company A is overfilling trains,
A free market all too frequently results in monopolies, price fixing, and similiar shenanigans. To prevent this is government's job. What is not the government's job is to break markets by subsidies, which result in more costs for the same service, or inferior service. > that creates an opportunity for company B to win customers over > to itself by offering better service. Your problem is always that you're citing theory. Reality unfortunately doesn't follow textbooks, and idealized how-things-should-actually-work scenarios. > Additionally, as I've said a number of times, the free market is a much > wider concept than just "private companies". Private companies in > a non-free economy can't be used as an example of the dynamics > of a free market, because they are in fact _not_ in a free market. How convenient, you don't have actually ever to prove your claims. Whenever markets fail to deliver, you can always handwave that away, because "they're not really free markets, you see". No, you don't get off the hook as easy as that. > Private companies in mixed economies enjoy coercive government > protection at many levels, from protectionist tariffs keeping foreign > competition out, to licensing requirements and other coercive entry > barriers that keep potential local competitors (especially the smaller > and more innovative ones) out of the market. Exactly. Corporations are opportunists, and while use anything to their advantage. Ditto government bureaucracies. Your problem is that you're a sheep who choose to trust a wolf instead of a bear. I trust neither. > How soon and how easily do people forget the many blessings they receive > from the market! Um, you kinda did say your piece. We know where you come from. No further need to belabor the obvious. We get you just fine, it's just that we choose to disagree (not speaking for other libertarians in the round, obviously). -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
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