fagin@ucbvax.ARPA (Barry Steven Fagin) (08/24/85)
>> Me > Charley Wingate > >>These independent companies, no fools they, reliazed that mutual >>cooperation was crucial if any were to survive, and organized a national >>association in 1897 to establish long distance serivce between their >>cities. (Note that this is exactly the sort of thing that supposedly >>can't happen without coercion). > >Isn't the threat of being forceably put out of business coercion? > No, it is not. This question has been raised often on the net; perhaps it's worth another look. Putting someone out of business, if it does not involve acts of violence or fraud, is not coercion. It is simply charging lower prices and/or offering better goods in an attempt to change the economic behavior of third parties. Consider two people who want to sell you widgets. For whatever reasons, you habitually purchase widgets from A. Then, one day, you notice that B is selling better widgets for 10% less than A, or that B's store is air conditioned, or something that makes you change your mind and start buying widgets from A. Has coercion occured? Surely the answer is no. You made a decision as a free human being to control your actions according to your will. Now multiply this scenario by N buyers, and M sellers, then reenact it. Has coercion occured? Most who accept your definition would say yes, at least for certain values of N and M. But how did the coercion creep into things? At what point did it happen? Are there critical numbers of buyers and sellers that make economic activities coercive, below which they are not? Clearly further discussion along this line is absurd. The reason this is so important in political discourse is that twisting "coercion" to include the results of the economic transactions of third parties implies that coercion is in turn justified in influencing these transactions. In my opinion, interventionists reason backward: they want coercion to be justified in influencing economic transactions, so they define coercion to include economic transactions. I believe libertarians, by contrast, are not guilty of the same crime; by accepting their definition of "coercion", one is not forced (:-) to accept self-evidently absurd propositions that follow from it. Later on ... >> [My examples of how the government became involved in the telephone >> industry] > >Bringing us again to the $64 question: what is going to prevent this from >happening in Libertaria? > Now Charley, you're not playing fair. You're original claim was: >>>The historical [record] rather plainly shows that markets tend to drift away >>from perfect >>>competition towards monopolies and oligopolies as a result of natural >>>forces, unless there are restraining forces to oppose this. When I attempt to refute this with examples, you shift gears and assert instead that the *political* forces that lead to monopolies and oligopolies are inevitable, even in Libertaria. This claim is *very* different from your original one. I'll address it in another posting to net.politics.theory. --Barry -- Barry Fagin @ University of California, Berkeley
bob@pedsgd.UUCP (Robert A. Weiler) (08/24/85)
Organization : Perkin-Elmer DSG, Tinton Falls NJ Keywords: In article <10166@ucbvax.ARPA> fagin@ucbvax.UUCP (Barry Steven Fagin) writes: >behavior of third parties. Consider two people who want to sell you >widgets. For whatever reasons, you habitually purchase widgets from >A. Then, one day, you notice that B is selling better widgets for >10% less than A, or that B's store is air conditioned, or something that >makes you change your mind and start buying widgets from A. Has coercion >occured? Surely the answer is no. You made a decision as a free human >being to control your actions according to your will. > >Now multiply this scenario by N buyers, and M sellers, then reenact it. >Has coercion occured? Most who accept your definition would say yes, >at least for certain values of N and M. But how did the coercion >creep into things? At what point did it happen? Are there critical >numbers of buyers and sellers that make economic activities coercive, >below which they are not? > Consider 2 objects with mass, one of them at rest the other moving near the speed of light. You decide, for whatever reason to accelerate them equally. But one day you notice you are acheiving much greater success with accelerating the (formerly) resting body toward the speed of light, so you stop trying to accelerate the other one. Now at what point did it start to become difficult to accelerate the fast moving object? Is there some critical speed at which it becomes difficult to accelerate things? You bet there is, at least as far as we understand physics right now. I realize that this analogy is stretching things some what. The point is that the science of physics was well understood for a couple of hundred years before Einstein came along and gummed everything up. And it explained the movement of objects perfectly, until velocieties got extremely high. In the 1700's had you proposed relativity, somebody probably would have said > > Clearly further discussion along this line >is absurd. > My contention is that economics today is nowhere near as well understood as physics was 300 years ago and it is entirely possibly that theories ( and definitions ) which hold for small models do indeed fall apart when the model gets much larger. The point at which they start to fail may be extremely difficult to find. >--Barry > Bob Weiler.