piezoe
Registered: Jan 2006
Posts: 4914 |
08-15-12 06:39 PM
I am essentially in agreement with you. "Free market capitalism" is that more or less ideal business climate that many of us, certainly most of us who are not business owners, espouse as being desirable. The public championing of free markets by business leaders, and particularly executives in major corporations, however, belies their decisions and actions. If fact, show me a capitalist who would not take advantage of the opportunity, by any legal means and sometimes illegal, to eliminate competition, and I will show you an incompetent capitalist. In other words, capitalists do not, in practice, like free markets, and free markets are not an essential component of capitalism, but rather a means of keeping capitalists from riding roughshod over consumers. Government's proper role, in this regard, is to preserve free markets, and protect them from capitalists. Crony capitalism is just a reflection of the government's failure to fulfill that role. Free markets are an endangered species in a plutocracy such as the U.S.A. where it is possible for those with the most capital to bend public policy in a direction they deem most favorable.
It gets rather wearisome to see over and over again, particularly here at ET, "free enterprise" being connected to capitalism as though they had something to do with each other, when they don't. It was nice to see that you, at least, recognize that not all capitalism is free market capitalism. In fact, very little of it is.
"Competition is a sin" -- remark attributed to J. D. Rockefeller --American industrialist and founder of Standard Oil.
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