Re: The irony, tragedy and morbid humor of Ayn Rand

From: quasarstrider (quasarstrider_at_yahoo.com.br)
Date: 01/04/05 

Date: 4 Jan 2005 12:53:40 -0800

Pete Lynn wrote:
> No, the corruption that she despised has resulted in the quasi
> government corporate socialism that she really despised. The corrupt

Actually, it resulted in corporativism, i.e. effective government by a
couple of large corporate conglomerates.

> big business you speak of has more to do with government than it does
> with private industry. If an industry is not openly competitive,
then
> directly or indirectly, it is government.

Yet all Ayn-Randites I know love copyrights and patents, which are
government enforced monopolies created to provide corporate welfare.

> Big corrupt business works by establishing and maintaining a monopoly
> via corruption, (I use the term loosely), and then using that
monopoly
> to extort money from the people. Think mob protection racket. In so

Such as copyrights and patents.

> doing it tries to become a government unto itself. This is morally
> reprehensible to a meritocratic "free industrialist".
>
> Her utopian corporate environment is a grass roots thing, every
business
> competing on a level playing field around the world without
government
> influence. She placed great emphasis on very intense but also very
fair

The issue is, as soon as a corporation starts to dominate, it tries to
push the government into granting it perpetual licenses to print money
via a monopoly of some kind. See Disney and copyright extensions for an
example of this.

> and honest competition in the market place. Put simply, a business
> meritocracy. This is all she was ever about.

That is not what her disciples preach. They want government enforced
monopolies in the form of copyrights and patents.

All corporations aspire to become monopolies some day. Why do you think
the most popular game depicting how capitalism works is Monopoly? :-)

It is quite simple really, raw capitalism is motivated by greed, you
want to maximize your capital. Given that wealth is finite at any
given time, the corporation has to settle for all the wealth that
exists at that time.
De facto monopolies come naturally as a corporation engulfs the
total amount of wealth in its market. Once the monopoly position
is achieved, the corporation will try to keep it by all the means
at its disposal. Leveraging its capital, the monopoly can enter
and control other markets, spreading its damage.

The fact is all monopolies are intrinsically bad, because they lead
to inneficiency and distortion of the real production prices to the
consumer. When economic fantasy rules and realism suffers, the result
is always disaster.

One may try to use monopolies to gain short-term benefits for society
in general, but this is like doing a pact with the devil. It always
tries to get out of its box, one way or another.

Corporate monopolies, communist statal monopoly, different shapes, same
beast.

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