With this the discussion turns serious, as Mr Peters is advocating some pretty radical ideas all of a sudden.

On 7/19/2003, Mark Peters wrote:

Adam Smith was wrong about monopolies. His labor theory of value is also wrong, but that's a separate issue.

The only time having a large or exclusive market share is damaging is when that market share is gained through force. And by force I mean real, physical force, as in guns and beating people up.

If you look through history, you will find that without exception, the harmful monopolies were created by such force - government force. These companies were granted legal exclusivity to their markets, and competing against them was illegal. The same sort of thing was accomplished through government subsidies.
By contrast, a company that gains such a market share through voluntary means is beneficial to everybody, not harmful. They are beneficial because voluntary exchange, i.e., trade is beneficial. Trade doesn't magically become harmful when done on a large scale.

If some outside party to a trade doesn't like it, he doesn't have any right to interfere, even if the end result is that he is out of business. This is especially true when the government is that outside party.

For the government to interfere by breaking a company up, fining it, etc. is forcibly to substitute a judge's or bureaucrat's judgment for the judgment of all the people who voluntarily traded with the company. And that is a massive violation of individual rights.

In a laissez-faire system, the initiation of such physical force or threat thereof would be banned. This is really what the concept of "limited government" means - a government limited to the function of securing individual rights, that is, of banning the initiation of physical force and enforcing that ban with appropriate laws.
Such a government is not a restriction of individual liberty. Only governments that violate people's right restrict liberty. Liberty is not the same as license.

Mark Peters

P.S. - You mentioned Alan Greenspan - at one time he understood all of this very well. I'm glad that he's the head of the fed rather than somebody else, but today he is no friend of freedom.

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