monopole in free market

[Freya]

Do these construction companies need to be licensed?  
These are state-created barriers to entry. If you live in a city, the cab drivers collude too.

I agree. Many monopoly and cartel forming is due to government regulations. Once the barrier of entry becomes to big, it gets to hard to get into a certain field and competition becomes smaller and smaller. This of course drives prices up and quality down.

A good example would be hospitals. Ever wondered how hard it would be to start your own hospital? Theres so many regulations in place that you have to comply with. Not to mention you need licenses and such to practise medicine.

Sure, some of these regulations and license might stop some malpractise from happening, but if people can no longer afford to go to the hospital and they don't get treated at all its not much different.

Besides, a free market would provide a much more efficient system for regulating and ensuring the quality of medical care to patients. It would probably be a privatezed system where hospitals ask to be audited in order to secure a certification mark. This would tell costumers something about the quality of the hospital.

But this wouldn't be required! You could start your own hospital without getting a degree or any certification mark. If people would trust you to take care of them is another thing, but you have the option. And there are certainly people out there that could provide excellent care, but can't conform with all the government regulations in place, which means we have to miss the services and competition these people could provide.

If the barrier to entry is so low, how could companies ever hold a monopoly for long?

[Alricaus]

Well, I won't say that I completely agree with what you say. However, my topic was to know the theories to explain why they will not have monopolies in free market and I have my anwser.

This is not to say, howerver, that I desagree with you ; I'm just septical.

The one thing I'm sure, however, is that regulations, like the one we see now isn't the right anwser the resolve the economic problems ...

[Seth King]

Well, I won't say that I completely agree with what you say. However, my topic was to know the theories to explain why they will not have monopolies in free market and I have my anwser.

This is not to say, howerver, that I desagree with you ; I'm just septical.

The one thing I'm sure, however, is that regulations, like the one we see now isn't the right anwser the resolve the economic problems ...

There are two things I would like to mention about government regulations. First, it assumes you, or the business, is guilty until you prove yourself innocent. That is to say, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to prove that you WILL do things right. But it is wrong to threaten force against someone who has yet to commit a crime. This is why voluntary regulations are so much better. Your business doesn't HAVE to get a seal of approval to do business, but without it the trust in your product is greatly diminished.

Second, the government has a monopoly on regulations. The problem is that if their regulatory bodies are corrupt, you have nowhere else to go. Whereas in the free-market, if some regulatory agency isn't to your liking, then you find another one that is. It has to do with accountability. There is no accountability in government, and the threat of voting out the politicians every few years is a joke. With the market you have immediate accountability. If you don't like something, you spend your money elsewhere, immediately.

[Alricaus]

Whereas in the free-market, if some regulatory agency isn't to your liking, then you find another one that is. It has to do with accountability.

Well, this is great in THEORY. Though, I doubt that this will be the case (again, I’m not saying that I think this will ou won't be the case, just that I doubt about it).

[Seth King]

Whereas in the free-market, if some regulatory agency isn't to your liking, then you find another one that is. It has to do with accountability.

Well, this is great in THEORY. Though, I doubt that this will be the case (again, I’m not saying that I think this will ou won't be the case, just that I doubt about it).

It's great in theory as well as in practice. 

[Alricaus]

It's great in theory as well as in practice.

Hope you are right since I start to really enjoy lot of libertarian theories and ideas.
I think it’s my unconscious leftish part of me that is sceptical.  

[Freya]

sceptical.

I see where you are comming from. You ALWAYS have to keep challenging your beliefs. Even though I feel like libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism is the way that things must be for the world to be the most peacful and prosperous, I must contantly challenge that thought. I bombard it with worries and questions. So far it has always held up as the best solution in pretty much all situations.When you stop being sceptical, you stop being a human and become a sheep.

That said, you don't have all the answers and sometimes you just need to stick with an idea until you find something better.

[Alricaus]

Ya. In fact, I came from a very leftish family (and left in Canada it’s far more left that in USA!!). In truth I was Marxist. Slowly, I became an Anarcho-communist and than more Anarcho-individualism. In consequence, I always have this cognitive schemes of :
Private = Evil
Public = Good
Of course, if I’m writing here it’s because I started to realise that this isn’t right. But still, a part of ‘me’ still believes it … or, at least, fears the private sector … 

[Seth King]

Ya. In fact, I came from a very leftish family (and left in Canada it’s far more left that in USA!!). In truth I was Marxist. Slowly, I became an Anarcho-communist and than more Anarcho-individualism. In consequence, I always have this cognitive schemes of :
Private = Evil
Public = Good
Of course, if I’m writing here it’s because I started to realise that this isn’t right. But still, a part of ‘me’ still believes it … or, at least, fears the private sector … 

How did you get to this point? What started to convince you to make the conversion? How do you intend to broach the subject to other AnComms?

[Freya]

How did you get to this point? What started to convince you to make the conversion? How do you intend to broach the subject to other AnComms?

Comming from a leftist point of view myself (I was leaning towards ancom for a long time) I can give you my experience. I personally think I never really was an ancom. I hold two things very dear: liberty and solidarity. The solidarity part always pushed me toward a leftist view.

This never changed. The thing that changed was that I realised the truth, that forcing people to share their wealth and assist others was immoral. That solidarity and community was something that has to come about voluntarily. With Ancomm I could never both get the liberty and the solidarity. To this day I do not know how Ancomms would force their ideals on others, as they claim to oppose coercion and respect the individual.

I think they claim this would happen naturally, that as soon as people are free of government they would suddenly become these super altruistic beings that share and care with everyone (exagerating a bit here). I've always found that point naive and impractical.

The practicallity of Ancap is what drew me away from leftist anarchy. Ancap is much more realistic about human nature. It takes into account that all humans are self-centered to an extent, that some people are just outright bastards and that resources are finite. It has an extremly simple concept at its core: The NAP. Something that most people can agree is moral.

How would I broach the subject to Ancomms? I would not. I consider it a waste of time. It's impossible to convince them once they are full converts. Like us Ancaps they are stubborn. And they seem to refuse reality and instead prefer to hold on to their dream world where all resources and human compassion are infinite. I would much rather debate statists then Ancomms.

But if you want to try I would avoid using the terms, 'capitalism', 'private property', 'wage labour' and possibly even 'free-market'. Or any other such term that they hate with a passion. You can't let them know you are a capitalist or they immediatly shut themselves to you. Your going to have to describe things conceptually of how you think it should be and hope they don't figure out you are describing capitalism to them.

P.S. I do get the impression that Alricaus was far more Ancomm then I ever was. Which might explain why he has a hard time accepting the free-market and private ownership.

[JustSayNoToStatism]

Alricaus:

You will eventually change how you think of what private and public means. Private means people internalize the costs and benefits of their decisions. If something can be privatized, it will be used in a more effective way. You choosing to come to this site is privatization of your use of free time. The private sector is awesome. Imagine if we took majority vote to decide how you used your free time. Eventually you'll let go of the "evil greedy top-hat wearing capitalist exploiters" mentality, and recognize privatization just means freedom. I converted someone from the far left who was very skeptical of the private institutions and was too worried that people would starve...and all the other propaganda the state had been preaching.

Compare foreign relations in the private and public sector. Governments make aggressive treaties (US and Australia in the news recently) as a way of trying to gear up for a world war against China. Now go on a site like Alibaba and try to order something from a chinese company. They'll greet you and treat you like a king, because they want to do business with you. Mutual cooperation as opposed to mutual fear and threats...it all has to do with internalization. Governments don't bear the costs of their actions, where private actors do. That's why anything that can be privatized should be (assuming you want resources to be used as efficiently as possible).

[Seth King]

How did you get to this point? What started to convince you to make the conversion? How do you intend to broach the subject to other AnComms?

Comming from a leftist point of view myself (I was leaning towards ancom for a long time) I can give you my experience. I personally think I never really was an ancom. I hold two things very dear: liberty and solidarity. The solidarity part always pushed me toward a leftist view.

This never changed. The thing that changed was that I realised the truth, that forcing people to share their wealth and assist others was immoral. That solidarity and community was something that has to come about voluntarily. With Ancomm I could never both get the liberty and the solidarity. To this day I do not know how Ancomms would force their ideals on others, as they claim to oppose coercion and respect the individual.

I think they claim this would happen naturally, that as soon as people are free of government they would suddenly become these super altruistic beings that share and care with everyone (exagerating a bit here). I've always found that point naive and impractical.

The practicallity of Ancap is what drew me away from leftist anarchy. Ancap is much more realistic about human nature. It takes into account that all humans are self-centered to an extent, that some people are just outright bastards and that resources are finite. It has an extremly simple concept at its core: The NAP. Something that most people can agree is moral.

How would I broach the subject to Ancomms? I would not. I consider it a waste of time. It's impossible to convince them once they are full converts. Like us Ancaps they are stubborn. And they seem to refuse reality and instead prefer to hold on to their dream world where all resources and human compassion are infinite. I would much rather debate statists then Ancomms.

But if you want to try I would avoid using the terms, 'capitalism', 'private property', 'wage labour' and possibly even 'free-market'. Or any other such term that they hate with a passion. You can't let them know you are a capitalist or they immediatly shut themselves to you. Your going to have to describe things conceptually of how you think it should be and hope they don't figure out you are describing capitalism to them.

Thank you very much for this testimony! Very interesting indeed.

[Freya]

You just have to change how you think of what private and public means. Private means people internalize the costs and benefits of their decisions. If something can be privatized, it will be used in a more effective way. You choosing to come to this site is privatization of your use of free time. The private sector is awesome. Imagine if we took majority vote to decide how you used your free time. Eventually you'll let go of the "evil greedy top-hat wearing capitalist exploiters" mentality, and recognize privatization just means freedom. I converted someone from the far left who was very skeptical of the private institutions and was too worried that people would starve...and all the other propaganda the state had been preaching.

I always like to think that when property is private, the people that own it care more about the property. I remember a walter block interview that illustrates this very well:

Link to full interview

[Alricaus]

Well, I started changing my political position some time ago when I came to realize that people (including me) believe in X Y Z because they are conservative, communist, anarchist etc, rather than being conservative, communist, anarchist etc, because they believe in X Y Z. In consequence, a lot of people decides what they are and then try to catch facts that show that one is right, and are blind to elements that contradict their believes (I like to call this a top-down reasoning), rather then take the facts and make an idea of it (a position a lot more harder that I like to call a bottom-up reasoning.)
When I try the bottom-up reasoning I understood that Marxism wasn’t for me because of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In fact, Marx told us that after capitalism, we have to get trough the dictatorship and than the abolition of the state. However, historically, this never happened. Where Marxist blame capitalism for this, I blame the human … I mean that every human who have the power will try to protect it. So, I tried to find a philosophy that doesn’t want the dictatorship of the proletariat but that was collectivism. I discovered Anarcho-communism.  However, I quickly found several critics of that philosophy

1-   Like EddyK told it :

that forcing people to share their wealth and assist others was immoral. That solidarity and community was something that has to come about voluntarily. With Ancomm I could never both get the liberty and the solidarity. To this day I do not know how Ancomms would force their ideals on others, as they claim to oppose coercion and respect the individual.

In fact, a communistic society can work if and only if all the community is OK with that system.

2-   

I think they claim this would happen naturally, that as soon as people are free of government they would suddenly become these super altruistic beings that share and care with everyone (exagerating a bit here). I've always found that point naive and impractical.

Exactly !!!! Marx believed that his theory was scientist. Like Popper (a science philosopher – among other thing) point it, Marxism isn’t scientist since it is irrefutable. So, the claim that this would happen naturally is based on nothing …

3-   I realized that I was more individualist that I thought !!

So, I switched to Anarcho-individualism. It’s not clear for me why I stated reading about anarcho-capitalism. It was more to know the theory behind it. By the same time, I observed some examples where capitalism wasn’t bad at all. Furthermore, I stated to question myself about why economic shouldn’t receive the same liberty than other domains (homosexuality, prostitution, drugs uses and so one – domains that I believed should be legal) and I did not find any reasons … So, I tried to immerse myself in the libertarian world (speaking with people) and the first thing that captured my attention was the fact that libertarian doesn’t want to exploited others!! It can seems strange for you, but when you are born in a milieu where capitalism is evil and capitalist are just worst that capitalism, it’s a big change in your conception of the world.

You will eventually change how you think of what private and public means. Private means people internalize the costs and benefits of their decisions. If something can be privatized, it will be used in a more effective way. You choosing to come to this site is privatization of your use of free time. The private sector is awesome. Imagine if we took majority vote to decide how you used your free time. Eventually you'll let go of the "evil greedy top-hat wearing capitalist exploiters" mentality, and recognize privatization just means freedom. I converted someone from the far left who was very skeptical of the private institutions and was too worried that people would starve...and all the other propaganda the state had been preaching.

I already see some advantage of capitalism, but it's hard to integrate in my conception of the world.

[Tim]

This is a really informative posting. I currently just got into a little argument with my socialist professor about the free market. He was saying how price fixing or cartels between businesses would create monopolies. I said that a monopoly created by the state would be far worse but I didn't realy have much besides that. I think that JustSayNoToStatism talked a little about it but could someone help explain price fixing to me from a free market standpoint in more detail? If a few companies got together and fixed prices they would still collectively need to lower prices to combat the other companies trying to enter the market right? I think he is not taking into account the lack of government regulations. He also tried to use the monopolies of the early 1900s when there was less govermnet regulation or what not as an example of why free-er markets is bad. Free-er does quite cut it.