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| Thread: Should the EU be dissolved? |  This thread is pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 · «PREV |
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markkur
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posted October 10, 2013 07:08 PM |
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xerox said:
The idea of a market monopoly is a fallacy.
By definition that's true but in reality it is the free-market that's a fallacy when monopolies are allowed to exist.
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xerox
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posted October 10, 2013 10:14 PM |
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Difference is it possible for there to be a free market. It is not possible for there to be a "market monopoly". A "market monopoly" is either a monopoly which means it uses coercion to prevent competition or a very dominant enterprise.
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mvassilev
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posted October 10, 2013 11:05 PM |
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Monopolies can be non-coercive. For example, if you live in a village that can only be accessed via a mountain pass, and I buy all the land in that pass, I have a monopoly on transportation into the village, without any coercion involved.
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markkur
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posted October 10, 2013 11:22 PM |
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Good point.
Another aspect applies and that's "initial cost for the new service". It's common here for a company (say cable) to have a monopoly on cable service to a given area because of the initial outlay of capital that the one company had to make to do business there. That sort of stuff is understandable.
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JollyJoker
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posted October 11, 2013 12:10 AM |
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You people miss the point, and you miss it completely.
Say there is this mountain pass and I own the land and therefore establish a transportation monopoly.
Now market law says, since I do HAVE a monopoly I will raise prices, and eventually prices will get so high that competition will arise. For example, an airline flying over the pass.
HOWEVER, after I have established a monopoly, I'm not forced to behave in a MARKET kind of way. I do not HAVE to raise prices to a level that would make competition easy. I also can simply use my monopoly profits to BUY OFF the competition. I even can CREATE phony competition with my profits and steer customer behaviour.
The main thing is, once I AM in control of a certain shard of economy and do establish some kind of monopoly, it's ME who writes the laws, not the market, which is where the system simply fails - it just reaches its limits. A monopoly is like a black hole or infinite in arithmetics - it's UNDEFINED in its properties.
Which is why the whole discussion makes no sense. There is no law a monopoly would have to follow.
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markkur
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posted October 11, 2013 12:29 AM |
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JollyJoker said:
You people miss the point, and you miss it completely.
Not so, you're focusing on Monopoly by the strictest definition. Which is not all-defining, as in the following;
i.e. How does your example apply when no service exists whatsoever? Where are some examples of competition from the gitgo? Isn't one aspect of this discussion a sort of "grace-period" ( like is done with Patents)where the investing company can recoup the initial investment instead of going under because non-investing companies profited nicely because they made no outlay of their own capital?
Quote:
Say there is this mountain pass and I own the land and therefore establish a transportation monopoly.
... For example, an airline flying over the pass.
I'm lost in this example. Maybe use something else?
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OhforfSake
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posted October 11, 2013 12:29 AM |
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The monopoly discussion reminds me of an episode of a tv-show I saw, where oil companies buys rights for an electric car, so it won't be produced.
To that I thought if there exists an arbitrary amount of ways rights to a superior products can exist, such as by making the product very specific and thereby making it possible to claim rights to very similar final products through various means, then such tactics of buying someone out ought to lead to bankruptcy, because it takes out money as fast as someone is willing to produce.
What I didn't understand was why they did not simply produce the car and thereby invested some more, but was sure to be able to compete with any competition in stead of being forced to hand over hard earned cast in millions to whoever could compete with them.
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Zenofex
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posted October 11, 2013 08:45 AM |
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Edited by Zenofex at 08:49, 11 Oct 2013.
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DagothGares said:
Well, I only know about your northern and western neighbours and I'm reasonably sure it doesn't ring true for at least a couple of those countries. Every country differs, but I doubt Moscow's learning plans were THAT good. Or was Bulgaria relatively free from Moscow's influence?
Free? Heh, we were probably the most loyal satellite. Even though the relations between the Eastern Bloc countries and the USSR are usually incredibly simplified when described by outsiders and newly-baptized historians (i.e. historians who found it necessary to start spitting on everything and everyone "communist" after the collapse of the Soviet Union and facts be damned), you can say that Bulgaria was probably the least problematic ally of Moscow.
Also, where do you have your information from? In the Soviet years the education was put really high in the entire Eastern Bloc. This was partially so due to the propaganda that was an integral part of it, but not only. There were idiotic parts of course, like being a son/daughter of some partisan pretty much ensured that you'll go to the university without any trouble, however it's not much different now with when you can just put money under the table and get a diploma. Other than that, the state used to have much greater budget for education as a whole and the standards were MUCH higher than they are now.
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DagothGares
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posted October 11, 2013 11:22 AM |
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Well, I had history of the Balkans (though the emphasis on Bulgaria wasn't that high.) and I studied Slavistics at university. I've read interviews and accounts of western professors going to the USSR and of professors going right after. Most of my information comes from a particularly desillusioned professor who criticised education in the former USSR and in the time right after the fall of the berlin wall:
- Western quality is higher, since in the east they focus on learning their students things by heart, rather than teaching them the underlying principles. It's possible for someone to become an engineer there and only know how to make fridges. The high number of engineers they had in the USSR had a reasonable percentage no better than our electricians with a college education.
People don't analyze Pushkin they just learn his poems by heart, par example.
The emphasis on intellectuals who studied history and philosophy is high (especially the case in Serbia and Russia) and would lead to a high number of individuals who were smart, had studied somewhere prestigious, but had no marketable skills (apart from "history teacher"), but would still get paid really well, because they supported the state by writing about how the communist regime is a really good thing, guys.
Lots of funding doesn't really guarantee quality, especially when your methods are bad. Obviously, I only know of this second-hand, but it makes sense to me, really.
Every sattelite state had different relations with Moscow, so it's possible Bulgaria had a good education system, really. I just grow really suspicious when people say things were better in the days of communism.
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Zenofex
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posted October 11, 2013 11:59 AM |
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Well, believe it or not, some things were better. This usually can be seen only if you put the prejudice aside though. 
The education back then had its flaws but many of the things you're saying are either completely or partially wrong. Principles were not ignored for the sake of piles of raw data (seriously, I think there was and still is even too much emphasis on them at times). "Marketable skills" doesn't have the same meaning in a market economy and in a planned economy. The latter has different employment mechanisms - you can be a assigned to a particular job even before you graduate because according to the central planning what the economy needs at the moment is someone to take that job (that's not necessarily correct though and not always takes into account what you want) - you don't really go out and "look for a job" in most cases.
And what do you understand by "an engineer"? I've seen quite a few western engineers, in the IT industry example, and my impression about them is that they're heavily specialized in one or two fields but have next to no knowledge and skills in another which might be (almost) directly related to their job. In contrast, the eastern engineers are less specialized in a single field but generally have better all-around knowledge. In the end the job requirements decide which type is needed but frankly I can't say that the Eastern Bloc had inferior engineers.
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xerox
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posted October 11, 2013 12:48 PM |
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Edited by xerox at 12:56, 11 Oct 2013.
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I thought a bit on the mountain pass example and I think I'll have to concede a bit on the monopoly discussion. Though a company can't form a monopoly on violence, it can theoretically have a monopoly actively preventing all competition. If Mvass's transportation company buys all land and property in the village and the mountain pass, he will be able to dictate competition on his terms.
Now this is a problem for me ideologically because that means a company could effectively prevent people from moving away from the village. If the mountain pass is the only way out, they could have transportation fees so high nobody could afford moving. The company would then make profits out of rents and people's dependence on it due to owning all land and property in the village.
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baklava
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posted October 11, 2013 12:50 PM |
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My thoughts exactly, Zeno. I know several examples of our engineers working in the West, and I studied electric engineering for a couple of years before dropping out and changing to IT. Engineers were, and still are, even with our crumbling educational system, one of the main exports of Serbia. If anything was the problem with them, it was the reduced practical knowledge once they freshly left Uni (the logic being they'll catch up with that quickly enough; which was, as I hear, true), but as for the general and theoretical fields, they often surpassed their western colleagues. Belgrade Uni's currently in a state of under-funded and badly managed disarray, but the faculty of electric engineering was actually a quality institution during the reds.
As for social studies, there were, and are, of course, regime intellectuals and unmarketable experts turning to party-line employment since time immemorial, sure, though there was a large amount of them turning against the apparatus. Students of the Belgrade Uni's faculty of philosophy, for instance, were traditionally the vanguard of any protest against the reds.
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Stevie
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posted October 11, 2013 01:42 PM |
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mvassilev said:
Monopolies can be non-coercive. For example, if you live in a village that can only be accessed via a mountain pass, and I buy all the land in that pass, I have a monopoly on transportation into the village, without any coercion involved.
What kind of village would sell you their only way of passing through the mountains? Talking about not knowing what your "interest" is..
And how exactly is that non-coercive? I think isolating an entire village from the outside world is actually pretty coercive on the villagers.
Plus, even if you get your hands on that land legally, people won't stay idle in the village saying "it's the law" and expecting to die, they'll probably gonna be after your head, because they have the right to live, and you're puting their lives at risk, indirectly at least.
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mvassilev
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posted December 28, 2013 01:44 AM |
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