Tim May wrote: > I'll let you and our othe socialist, Aaron, blither to each other > about "theoretical free markets." it's been amusing to follow these personal attacks. a few years ago, I've been branded as a nazi, now I'm a socialist - all by people I've never met and who haven't read anything by me but a couple mails. funny. :) > Oh, and there is no acceptance of your point that in a "theoretical > free market" there is some equipartition of suppliers such as you > suggest there would be. Which is why Cisco and Intel have about > 80-90% of their markets, about as expected. There are more choices in > the OS market than there are in the microprocessor market (the viable > micros, that is). Ditto for routers. a) I didn't say that M$ is the only near-monopoly company out there b) "theoretical" means exactly that. I AM aware of the fact that the diff file between anything.theory and anything.real-life is often quite large. c) you ignored the main point, namely that both the theory and what experiences we have prove that a monopoly situation is bad for the economy as a whole. > And look at relational data bases. Oracle probably has 90% of that > market, with Sybase and Imprise and Microsoft picking up the crumbs. > Should Oracle be broken up or penalized just because 90% of sales and > corporate deals go with Oracle? from an economy-theoretical point of view, this might indeed be worth a discussion. the real life implementation (anti-trust and related laws) says that ABUSE of a monopoly position will be punished. > Guff about "theoretical free markets" is just Marxist rhetoric. so all our economists are marxists, since talking about markets, free markets, market theory and any other combination thereof forms a good part of their time? great point, tim. ps: marx was not very concerned with markets, from what I've read. property distribution and the "working class" were his focus, not trade and price-fixing mechanics.
