Great video - very informative. I came to PP to navigate Covid, and have learned so much in last 1.5 years here. Thank you. I also purchased the book to support RFK Jr.
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Dave,
I might argue that monopolies almost always require government intervention in the first place. So, far from being the solution to monopoly, government actually facilitates it. Likewise, oligarchs cannot exist without government.
In nearly every case, the when a business, individual, or corporation gets big they immediately begin lobbying government for competitive advantages to stifle competition. A framework of regulations and laws are erected to insulate the entity from competitors or even normal market conditions.
At the top of our enterprise system, there is no free market. Some free market vestiges exist in small business, where businesses fight it out with their competitors but above the small business level it becomes all about currying favor with government [ state/local/federal ].
Government grants monopolies to favored vassals. Try building an automobile in your garage like Henry Ford. You cant even give a haircut without a government license. The government doesnt break up monopolies, that hasnt happened since Ma Bell. They grant monopolies to those who curry favor through campaign donations, lobbying, kickbacks and back room deals. They then get the government to create the regulations, grants, and contracts which tilt the playing field in their favor.
In a truly free market a monopoly is almost impossible.
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My mom was a nurse in the 90âs/early 2000âs before quitting in disgust at the system, and that was back THEN. She implored me never to agree to be an organ donor.
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Hi DKN, thanks for your thoughtful and extensive reply. Those were not my comments, they were quotes from the article I linked to. I like your definition of corporatism, so I think we are really on the same page.
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Dave,
I can agree to an extent. But I think the regulations that are created by government prevent natural competition from arising. Even regulation that is created to prevent a dubious and predatory rise of a corporation doesnât undo that corporations rise, it only prevents other competition from joining the market by the same means. Even fines, regardless of how financially impactful they may be, are not enough to discourage behavior, they simply put a price on bad behavior and become a cost of doing business, ultimately passed on to the consumer. Even monopoly busting isnât truly anti-corporate as Ma Bell demonstrates. It reformed as a more monolithic entity over time.
Yes, industry drifts toward singularity, particularly when it is too large to face organic competition. Whether that singularity be oligarchy (or cartel) or monopoly, the surest way to ensure that outcome the fastest is to regulate competition out of the market.
The economy is like a vine, and the government regulation is a trellis and the trowel. If there were nothing to support the monopoly, it would collapse under its own weight and the free market would flourish. Though admittedly the weeds of corruption too would take over creating a wild and impenetrable undergrowth of its own.
The problem is that invariably, and every society ultimately follows this pattern, is that government requires taxation to function. Taxation is inherently tied to the economy and so to maximize taxation, government is incentivised to reduce competition because economic singularity sets prices that maximizes tax revenues.
I agree we are largely at the end stages of our system. Oligarchy is definitely the systemic norm now, but it was created and incentivized by the relationship between corporations and government.
I see government as being ultimately responsible for that, you see corporations as the responsible parties. Both follow their mutual interests to reach that inevitable outcome, but ultimately we can agree that the union of those two entities ALWAYS leads to the bad outcomes we are seeing today and 80 years ago.
I would suggest that, just like the separation of church and state our founders insisted on, we should similarly have a separation of state and economy. End the Fed. End fiat currency.
Update: Youâre right though Dave, now that Iâm thinking about it. What we are seeing is definitely late stage. I just wouldnât call it Capitalism. But like every Communist who decries never seeing real communism. I have to agree that more often than not Economic dominance habitually takes this course. I refuse to believe itâs ânaturalâ but Iâm hard pressed to find any alternative examples.
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âThe problem with capitalism is, the logical end state of capitalism is a collection of monopolies.â
With respect, I disagree. A company that outcompetes and dominates its market space can become a monopoly - so long as it continues to outcompete, even with the advantages of a market leader. As soon as a better competitor arises, it loses marketshare to the competition - provided there is a free market for competition.
Itâs only when the government steps in to use laws and regulations (i.e., force) to establish a cartel or monopoly that predatory monopolies persist.
Conversely, the modern economic theory of perfect competition is also flawed. We donât have a huge number of equal competitors with equal information.
The reality is we have in free markets nearly everywhere a rank-size distribution following Zipfâs law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rank%E2%80%93size_distribution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
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The last few sessions I listened in the car or while cycling. Somehow this helps me focus more on the voices of the persons. Biden is totally fake, that Canedian guy is even more fake, just listen, donât look. This interview however kind of touched me. Kennedy is so sincere. Plus, I totally liked the content. U will buy the book, but most definitely notcread it. Iâm not interested in the machinations of psychopaths.
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Canuck21,
Its all good. I appreciate your post. It spurred my thoughts and created a thoughtful debate. That makes it a great comment. Iâd like it twice if I could.
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Dave,
I get what youâre saying about âreal liberalsâ but see it differently. There are ongoing changes between generations, where often historically one generationâs liberals are the next generationâs conservatives (in terms of broad political positions). JFK, for instance, would fit in better with todayâs conservatives than with todayâs leftists or liberals.
More, though, I find the right-left axis problematic in describing political views. Yes, there are many who agree with the hodgepodge of stances on particular issues that come from joining one party or group. I see the root issue on all particular debates as freedom vs tyranny: does a particular policy recognize the sovereign rights of the individual, or does it infringe on them? So rather than a liberal-conservative axis, a liberty-tyranny axis is a better way to conceptualize political debate.
From that perspective, we have a horrifying move this century away from individual rights and toward outright dictatorship. Even commonly accepted social norms like agreeing to disagree, or recognizing someoneâs right to speak even when we disagree, are largely removed from social media and political discourse. And relevant to this thread: the idea of questioning authority is largely gone, replaced with blind obedience to authority, public shaming, refusal to debate, rejection of the very idea of debate and reasoning, cancel culture, shadow banning, doxxing, ostracizing, etc. All of these are tools to establish and maintain authority - even when used unwittingly by those who have no authority but subscribe to the official narrative.
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Very powerful interview. I am not a fan of the Kennedy clan. I am not anti-vaccine. But, RFK jr did an excellent job of putting these pieces together, and raising interesting questions.
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Redneck Engineer,
Just so I understand you correctly, youâre saying the free market breaks down naturally into the first place outperforming the second place by two and the third place is again half the second? So for a market of five competitors one has half the market share, the next has 25%, and the third has 12.5%, fourth is 6.25% and fifth is 3.125% with the rest being consumed by small market competitors and cottage industry. If you know of a paper that illustrates this Iâd love to read it. Thatâs fascinating if true.
I donât mean to have derailed this comment section though. RFKJr really surprised me as an articulate and sensible man driven by compassion. I had a negative view of the Kennedyâs as a power hungry family of entrenched elitists. This interview was refreshing as well as informative. I will be buying that book!
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If that is possible.
On another note: the Richard Dolan interview linked by mpup and crossland follows the stages of take over from the 911 false flag (and UFOs which were Dolans awakening sparks) through to the patriot act, surveillance state and now the medical dictatorship âto protect the public.â It is an our long. Little that is new to many here at PP. But ties the story together.
This is why it is so important that we not participate in the mandates or tracking process.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJR99bWe9js
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What Iâve noticed, is that the big guy in an industry buys up all the little guys, gets bigger, keeps buying more little guys, and ends up having more or less total pricing power over individual markets. The big guy becomes âthe company store.â
Absent restrictions from the government, the largest player will work to acquire all competitors in a market, and that lets the big guy set prices higher than they would have been had he not bought up all his competition.
Take airlines as an example. Three carriers serve a city. The big one buys the medium-sized one. Then he buys the small one. One one carrier serves the city now. What does the big carrier charge? Whatever price they want. No competition is left. If a new one gets formed - the big guy buys that carrier too. I recall having to pay $400 to fly in some puddle-jumper plane on a 30 minute flight to visit my older sister in northern CA. Only one carrier served the market.
No bribing of government is required. It is just acquisition.
The only reason it doesnât happen more often is the âanti-trustâ legislation, which is mostly ignored these days.
We have seen this happen a million different times.
End-stage capitalism. We could also call it âthe harvesting-stageâ capitalism.
Capitalism only works best when there are lots of little companies, all competing for customers. âLargeâ businesses kill capitalism. Its not a factor of government bribery. It is just size, and an engineered lack of competition. Which is the goal of every good capitalist participant.
Hereâs the paradox: while capitalism at a theoretical level is all about competition, actual participants in capitalism do NOT like competition. Participants want MONOPOLY, because that maximizes profits. Profit-maximization is, after all, the end goal of capitalism participants. And if the participants execute this properly, the âprofit-maximizingâ function of capitalism at a participant level ends up producing monopoly.
Monopoly is the expected result from unrestricted capitalism. It is the logical end state of participants looking to maximize profits. Or so I maintain anyway.
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Absolutely, transcript is coming soon!
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Thank you Chris for this interview! Thank you and bless you Robert Kennedy Jr., you are brave as RFJ. An elite telling everything. Will be getting several copies of his book.
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Jan/Feb 2017, Trump was coming into office. He met with RFK Jr and a couple other people about a push for Trump to involve Kennedy in a vaccine safety position. It all seemed very possible. It all quietly disappeared. Looking back, itâs clear that Big Pharma would never have tolerated that, and Trump probably realized he needed to focus on other major political challenges at the beginning of his first term. But OMG, Iâm not sure Trump could have had a more lasting impact on our national and future health than exposing the corruption and fraud that constituted our most basic vaccine practices and have largely destroyed our childrenâs health.
RFK Jr and Del Bigtree traded communications with US Health & Human Services in 2017/2018 on safety and efficacy issues surrounding childhood vaccines. One issue was the status of biennial vaccine safety reports that H&HS was required to submit to the Senate starting in 1988 (as required by the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act of 1986, in return for the liability protection granted to the manufacturers). Kennedy and Bigtree pushed the issue, which resulted in HHS stipulating in federal court on 7/6/18 that H&HS had no records of any reports ever having been prepared or submitted. The other communications established that of the 72 doses of 16 vaccines that children are given, exactly ZERO underwent legitimate safety testing. ZERO of the studies had a placebo or inert control. Anyone who wants to see those documents (a series of 4 .pdfs), PM me with your email and Iâll forward them along.
âVaccines are safe and effectiveâ That was the mantra going into the Covid pandemic. What utter rubbish. Not safe, and too many of them not very effective.
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Let me give you a different example; You try to build cars in a small private garage the way Henry Ford did. Ford motors will not try to buy you up. At this point they rely on a network of government agencies to shut you down. The quagmire of regulations will make it literally impossible unless you are a multimillionaire with good government connections.
In your example of the airline. There are hundreds of small, capable, experienced pilots with planes that would be happy to take a few people a day 30 minutes to the next airport. They canât do that by law. There are thousands of open fields with farmers, landowners, businesses, etc who would be very happy to allow small aircraft to land on a strip for a fee. They arent allowed by law. It isnt the airlines who are buying these people outâŠits the laws that have been lobbied for and curated that protect those airlines/airports from competition.
The free market America that existed a hundred years ago, when todayâs industry behemoths were just getting started, no longer exists. You CANT do what Ford and Rockefeller did by LAW. They arent going to bother buying you out [ which wouldnt be so bad ] because if what you say is correct about the goal being to maximize profitsâŠwhy spend money buying out every competitor when we can just get the government to stop you for free?
Next upâŠwhy bother to entice the public to buy our goods and services with low prices and good products when we can just get the government to force you to buy it??
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âJust so I understand you correctly, youâre saying the free market breaks down naturally into the first place outperforming the second place by two and the third place is again half the second?â
I see your point. To clarify: I didnât mean markets will have so precise a distribution. Clearly there is variation from market to market and over time.
What I was arguing against is the idea that markets eventually end up with winner-take-all or equal distribution among vast numbers of competitors, which are the two general views in economics.
Instead there generally is a natural distribution in fairly free markets where one or a few top competitors dominate a market, then there are others with increasingly smaller market share. For instance, look at how internet browsers divide up their market. Or computer operating systems. Or crypto.
Iâm not aware of papers arguing for or against this idea. Iâm not sure where I picked up the idea.
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Brushhog-
There are a thousand ways to skin the profitability cat. Profit maximization is about minimizing competition in any way possible. Acquisition, regulation, whatever it takes.
The capitalism-imperative is about minimizing competition to maximize profits.
Thatâs the dirty little secret. While - theoretically - capitalist theorists trumpet competition as the great equalizer, the individual participants hate the thought of actual competition.
Seriously. Whatever it takes - competition must be eliminated, by any means necessary. You talk about regulation. Fine. Acquisition. Fine. The details donât matter. Competition must be eliminated. Government is the servant here. The capitalist participants are the ones calling the tune.
Because - the profit maximization function thatâs an intrinsic feature of capitalism.
Whatâs the fix? You tell me. But âno regulation at allâ wonât work. The âlibertarian idealâ will lead directly to monopoly. The participant-profit-maximization function will see to it that this is so.
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