The
idea of having antitrust laws, and using them to abolish monopolies,
is flawed.
In
my opinion, it would be foolish to trust a government monopoly to
abolish a business monopoly, for the simple fact that monopolies
enable each other. Businesses desirous of monopolies lobby the
government for favors, and the same monopolistic state grants the
businesses exclusive and exclusionary titles, properties, privileges,
and licenses.
However,
the goal of abolishing monopolies should not be abandoned solely due
to that fact. It is possible to abolish monopolies without growing
the size and scope of government, and without spending more money,
and even by doing nothing.
To
allow monopolies to be abolished passively rather than
actively, government could simply allow people to go into competition
with whatever monopolies are unnatural and problematic. As soon as
someone becomes free to compete against a monopoly, the monopoly
becomes de facto no longer a monopoly.
This
is because someone else is now trying to sell the same good or
service; whereas the privilege (not the right) to compete
against the monopolist was previously regulated and licensed-out by
government. And the government, by the way, gets away with charging
practically any price it pleases, on the permits and licenses which
it grants, and which it grants itself the exclusive right to create,
and from which, the exclusive right to profit.
In
an absence of monopolistic competition, subsidies and bailouts, and
other taxpayer-funded privileges and protections that benefit
business, the problem of monopoly would be on its way to being solved
by consumers. That's because consumers would retain the absolute
freedom to refuse to transact with firms they dislike; whether
through face-to-face buying and selling, or through being
taxed to support those businesses.
No
society which steals from productive workers, to balance the bills of
those who house and employ them, can be called a society which values
voluntary association (which includes freedom from
association). Additionally, no society is voluntary which does not
recognize that we have innumerable unalienable rights, which are
enshrined in the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, among them
the right to perform and exchange labor in order to survive.
Although
the Ninth Amendment was written on a piece of paper, it strongly
suggests that our rights do not come from a piece of paper. And when
a government can restrict our freedoms to travel, marry, work, trade,
etc. - and demand that we pay them, and identify
ourselves with government-issued identification papers whenever asked
– that government does not respect the Ninth Amendment. It does not
respect the notion that we have so many rights, it would be
impossible to try to write all of them down, lest someone start
suspecting that writing them down means that they are things
that a majority can vote away.
The
way to establish free competition, and allow for easy and peaceful
abolition of monopolies, is to respect our Ninth Amendment rights to
work without a license, and to go into competition with powerful
monopolies without paying the government for a permit. Such licenses
and permits amount to unjustifiable entry fees; barriers to entry
into the markets and into the labor force. These measures suppress
not only competition, but also cooperation, which can be equally
damaging to monopoly (as long as it does not succumb to “cooperation
with authority”).
What
we have now is neither a wholly free-market system, nor capitalism,
nor voluntary association, nor true competition. We have a rigged,
regulated simulation of monopoly, which also attempts to
include features of the free-market system – like enterprise – in
that simulation. But this is neither true monopoly nor true
competition; it is “monopolistic competition”, in which firms
compete for the reward of having all the other players knocked off
the board. Firms may try to compete all they want, but it's
still rigged (so it's not a free market); and nonetheless, they're
not disqualified for trying ( so it's not a full monopoly either).
The
result of the failure of antitrust is the same result as all
government failure; moral hazard. This is the blind faith in
government, and the unproven assumption that government oversight or
intervention is actually making goods safer and more healthy. Think
of it as sort of the “argument from benevolence” about the
existence of God, but applied to the state instead; it's the
assumption that if we can conceive of an all-powerful,
all-knowing, all-benevolent government, then one must exist! But of
course, this is a joke.
The
negative consequences of antitrust failure do not stop at moral
hazard; they continue on, to regulatory capture; the success of
businesses which have the legal and financial resources to avoid
being burdened by new regulations (which has the effect of shutting
their competitors out of business). If these negative consequences
are allowed to continue, the results can include the
overspecialization of tasks, the enforcement of professional
regulations which is favorable to only those jobs and industries
which are already well-established, and the hoarding of skills by
older workers (to prevent new workers from “threatening their
livelihoods” by competing against them for wages in the job
market).
All
of this, of course, means higher prices for us; for any and all types
of goods and services we could possibly want or imagine. The risks of
antitrust should not be taken lightly.
Written and Published on August 9th, 2018
