Michael Moore, writing at Alternet (“Why Republicans Are Always Worried About Their Pet Corporations Facing Any Real Free Market Competition,” Oct. 21), makes a very acute observation: “whenever corporate executives begin talking about how they support ‘free markets’ and ‘competition,’ check to see if you still have your wallet.” The reason is that “nobody” — not even Marxists — “hates competition more than corporations.”
Take a look at just about any industry. The one that employs me, healthcare, is as good an example as any. The two largest national hospital chains — HCA and CHS — are both headquartered in the Greater Nashville area (as are a number of other major hospital chains). Although in legal theory the corporations are two distinct artificial persons, the same actual flesh-and-blood human beings shuttle back and forth as Directors and Vice Presidents from one organization to the other. Their senior managers went to the same B-schools, they share the same corporate culture, they all socialize together with the same bunch of Rotary Club yahoos, and their wives are in Junior League together. They all show up in the society pages kissing pigs for diabetes, wearing pink ribbons for breast cancer, or handing over a giant check to the United Way.
Meanwhile, the individual CEOs carry out massive downsizings and staffing cuts within their separate corporations, managing to keep straight faces while justifying them to their rank-and-file employees based on the need to provide “shareholder value” in a “hyper-competitive global marketplace” — and then get together and laugh themselves silly over martinis after eighteen holes of golf at the country club. And they collect their own multi-million dollar salaries and pay hundreds of millions in administrator salaries in their local hospitals while earnestly informing their workers that “patient care staff is our biggest source of unit costs.” (“We pigs need the milk and apples to keep up our strength for intellectual work, comrades. You wouldn’t want Jones to come back, would you?”)
But it’s about the same in any other industry dominated by a handful of oligopoly firms.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Brezhnev and Nixon solemnly justified their respective systems of power to the domestic population in terms of the communist or imperialist “threat,” and then laughed it up about the gullibility of their domestic populations at the Happy Hour after the next summit conference. (If you’ll forgive another Animal Farm reference: “If you have your lower classes, we have our lower animals.” Haw haw haw.)
Avoiding competition is the law and the prophets for large corporations. As former ADM chief Dwayne Andreas put it, “The competitor is our friend; the customer is our enemy.” The ideal world for large corporations is one in which competition between them is severely constrained if it exists at all, and the only real competition is that between workers desperate to get jobs on any terms offered — and the “competitive marketplace” exists only as a useful legitimizing myth for justifying downsizings and speedups to their respective workforces. (Even as the CEOs collect enormous “performance bonuses” for hollowing out their organizations, of course).
Moore was so close — but he just missed it. Moore frames the issue as one of big corporations trying to suppress competition by weakening the antitrust laws. “When corporate executives start pushing for ‘free market policies,’ what they mean is a government that lets them become a monopoly.”
If he’d said they want “a government that HELPS them become a monopoly,” he’d have had it just right. The main factor behind monopoly isn’t whether government lets it exist by failing to enforce antitrust laws. It’s whether government enables it by erecting entry barriers, suppressing competition with cartelizing regulations, and enforcing legal monopolies like “intellectual property.” Government doesn’t “allow” monopoly. It props it up.
But Moore’s right about one thing: Competition is for the little people.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, Michael Moore Almost Gets it Right, Deming, New Mexico Headlight, 27 Oct 2010
The health care business certainly has a lot of intellectual property. They just add a methyl group here and there…intellectual property minus the intellect. 108 vinficts.
Thanks, Kevin. I still hold out hope that Moore is not a lost cause. Articles like this will help.
I've never considered the whemater a lost cause, but I'm not particularly 'orthodox.'
Actually, if Corporate CEO's started to lobby for free-market policies, the end result would be the complete opposite of monopoly, as monopoly has always been defined as special privilege levied to private interests by the State/Government. There can be no monopoly on the free-market. A single-supplier a monopoly does not make. No entry for competition is a monopoly. Only Governments/States can create a monopoly. This also goes back to the Menger/Mises theoram of monopoly price that Joe Salerno has a great video about. Even if such a monopoly could exist in the market, it would still have competition, because they could only sell for what the consumer prices the goods at (Even inelastic).
In any event, I am surprised you actually believe Anti-Trust laws do any good. The reality of the situation is far different. Thomas Di'Lorenzo did some great work on ALCOA, US Steel, and Standard Oil, showing how Anti-Trust laws, like any good regulation produced the opposite effect, and were lobbied by these giant entities to stifle the growing competition. If only the immediate repeal of Anti-Trust would actually happen
Scott:
1. It's a safe bet large corporations won't lobby for free market policies. What they'll do is what they do now: lobby for fake "free market" policies that don't touch their state-enforced monopoly power.
2. I agree that monopoly would be impossible without government-enforced entry barriers — which is exactly the "free market" policies corporations lobby for don't have much to do with real free markets. But what does that have to do with what does or doesn't exist under the actual version of corporate capitalism we live under?
3. I'm surprised you actually believe that I believe anti-trust laws do any good.
If Corporate CEO’s started to lobby for free-market policies, they would be acting against their own self interest, and perhaps more importantly, that of their financiers. Am I to assume that the role of self-interest is different in free market competition and "free market" competition?
If Corporate CEO’s started to lobby for free-market policies, they would also be making life easier for their competitors, which would seem to imply that support for competition and opposition to competition both have anticompetitive implications.
Being a speaker of Plain English, I tend to operate with the assumption that a compeitive world is not a friendly place, unless of course we're talking about friendly competition such as amateur sports or maybe a penny-ante poker table.
Kevin, my comment was in particular about this part of your article:
“When corporate executives start pushing for ‘free market policies,’ what they mean is a government that lets them become a monopoly.”
While there are 'quotation marks' around free-market, I went with the assumption that the aforementioned was actually about free-market policies. So, I expounded upon why there cannot be monopolies in the free-market and that if CEO's of these Corporations were actually lobbying for free-market policies (E.g. end subsidies, end state licensing, end State-IP, etc.), it would actually produce the opposite of monopolization. I hate when the assumption is that free-markets bring about total monopoly. It is the assumption almost everyone I get into a debate with makes (which is logically, absurd, but that is beside the point).
As for your specific rebuttals:
1) I agree. Corporations hate competition and actively lobby for privilege. It is their raison d'être. (I caveat this statement with my support of joint-stock company business models (That JSC aren't creations of the State, and will exist in a market-anarchist society))
2) I agree again.
3) To be honest, I haven't read all that much of your work and I may have been mistaken, however your last paragraph seemed to indicate your support for Anti-trust laws.
Lastly, as a Spencerian Voluntaryist I just want to extend an olive branch to those who have similar policy goals, but different societal outlooks. Cheers.
Thanks, Scott. Any time I use "free market" in scare-quotes, I'm probably refering to the corporate "vulgar libertarian" fake version of "free markets." Much like Rosa Luxemburg or Pyotr Kropotkin would put Stalin's "communism" in scare-quotes.
Kevin,
Understood. However, I must say that the Corporate structure (JSC's), themselves aren't the problem, but the collusion between private and Governmental interests. I must say that among some of your fellow Mutualists (I do disagree with your view of property, as I am a non-proviso Lockean/Rothbardian), that the term 'vulgar libertarianism' is a misnomer. Considering that libertarianism encompasses a wide swath of disciplines – morality, economics, meta-physics, etc. – it is absurd to try and create a paradigm within libertarianism that doesn't exist. There exists a strict ontological definition of libertarianism most broadly encompassed by the Non-Agression Principle. Here I differ between Block, yourself, and most other libertarians when I say that there really isn't a plumb, thin, or vulgar libertarian, but only a libertarian if you believe in the aforementioned — NAP. In any event, I think Moore is your typical hyper-partisan. Sure, they may get something right or close to right every now and then, but that doesn't mean anything. Their methodology is unsound. Also, I hope you re-consider your views of the Keeniacs and the FSP. (I will be a mover there in the not too distant future) Hopefully Mutualists will try and set-up their own movement of the like. The more the merrier. I suppose us An-Caps are blazing the trail so to speak :p
I'll agree with Scott-Rothbardian that NAP directly implies capitalism, which as far as I'm concerned, is to the detriment of NAP. The insistence of so-called left libertarians on explaining themselves in terms acceptable to right libertarians and other conservatives, is self defeating, since whenever the topic of discussion goes to property the left libertarian arguments get more and more nuanced (and sometimes equivocal) in a way that's reminiscent of DLC Democrats.
I put the NAP itself on the table for dissection. It's an irrefutable principle of course, but I object to reverencing it as the be-all-and-end-all to all political questions. I find that the difference between aggression and non-aggression is a matter of degree, not kind. The rightist tendency to ultra-narrow definitions, while it facilitates 'clear' thinking, can also lead to oversimplification. The definition of 'aggression' agreed on by self-identified libertarians sounds like what I would refer to as 'violence' or at least 'hostility.' Aggression, to me, is any pattern of social interaction associated with 'aggressiveness' as a personality trait. If ten people are in a room and one obviously has more 'personal space' or gets 'the floor' for a greater share of the time, then I would say that there's aggression in the room, that there's a dominance-submission dynamic in the room, and that for that reason there is not anarchy in the room. The personal is political.
MIchael Moore, I'll grant, is sloppy in methodology, and his interview methodology is literally that of ambush. Perhaps the most egregious example is the interview of Charlton Heston (publicly known at the time to be suffering Alzheimer's) in Bowling for Columbine. Even if the intent is to point out that the NRA has chosen an Alzheimer's patient as its leader, it's overdramatizing the point. That said, I have more 'tribal' affinity for Michael Moore than for Murray Rothbard. Sometimes it really does boil down to 'which side are you on?'