Reflections of a stormy petrel

businessmen, as a rule, hate competition.

It would be very hard to find a more blatantly foolish, ignorant, and prejudicial stereotype in the realm of economics. I’m tempted to ask whether you have ever actually met a businessman; you certainly don’t appear to know anything about business.

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I have been a businessman, worked with businessmen, worked for businessmen, since about 1980. I stand by what I said, and, if you wish, I shall give you examples from my own career and life history. Please do not let free marketeering ideology blind you to real human life.

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And you hated competition, did you? You wanted your field of business to be a monopoly? Please.

I’ve been in business, too, you know, and known huge numbers of other business owners. Not one of them had a monopoly in his field. Not one of them wanted to have a monopoly in his field. Not one of them was the first entrant in his field, or the largest; if there had been monopolies in any of those businesses, every one of those business owners would have been out of business.

Hate competition, my foot.

And I suggest you stop accusing me of ‘free marketeering ideology’. That is demonstrably false and grossly insulting. If you don’t back off and offer an apology for insulting my intelligence repeatedly in this way, I may well decide that you are not worth the trouble of arguing with any longer.

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I am sorry, I can't help this, it is too perfect. On the same day and morning you are yelling at me that businessmen never never never seek after any such things as monopolies and cartels and that I am some sort of moral degenerate for even suggesting that there might be some who do - Britain's most conservative, pro-business newspaper, the Daily Telegraph (also known as the Torygraph) comes out with a front-page story charging most or all of the gas industry with cartelization. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2008/08/08/cnbills108.xml (Of course, the reason it denounces is that no British businesses are involved. Had Britons been prominent in the cartel, the Torygraph would no doubt have promoted it as a beneficial measure to protect the economy.)

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Incidentally, why do ideologues always brand those of us who actually make use of our own life experience as "ignorant"? One finds exactly the same phenomenon among aggressive homosexual activists: anyone who does not share their skewed and narrow view of the world is not just in disagreement, but "ignorant". Is it because, unlike real life and experience, these are things that need to be learned out of books and magazines?

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I could ask you exactly the same question. What the hell do you think I’m making use of? My own life experience, you fathead, that’s what. I am sick to death of being told that anybody who has the temerity to disagree with you is blinded by ideology or ignorant of basic facts. YOU are the ideologue here. You are the avowed Socialist, which means you are dedicated to State ownership of the means of production, whether it works or not — as, for the most part, it doesn’t. (If that’s not what you mean by Socialism, I suggest you look up the definition of the word. But your constant sneers against ‘free market ideologues’ suggest that you do mean it — so much the worse for you.)

I repeat: I have owned businesses, and I do not hate competition. I have known many other business owners, not one of whom had any desire to be swallowed up by a monopoly or a cartel. NOT ONE. EVER. I have yet to encounter the least scintilla of evidence to support your assertion that ‘most businessmen hate competition’. It is ridiculous and demonstrably false, and it is a GROSS insult to my intelligence (and that of every small business owner, and I ask you to remember that the overwhelming majority of businesses are small, and EVERY business was small when founded) to claim otherwise.

I am getting thoroughly fed up not only with your lies and insults, but with the smug and supercilious way in which you insist that yours is the only opinion that can possibly be supported by the facts.

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And I am getting sick of your habit of steamrollering opposition. If you had not started with an open insult and a rejection of my entire statement - which contains my experience of dealing with big and small business since I was 18 - I might not have reacted as angrily as I have. If you do not want to be treated harshly, treat others with respect.

I will not answer any substantive points from you until I have a clear signal that you have understood what I said here in this response.

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I said that your statement was FALSE, and you interpreted that as an insult. I also said that your statement was insulting, which it was. It was you who BEGAN this argument with an insult.

Has it ever occurred to you that there may be a reason other than ideological blindness and plain stupidity why so many people get sick of you and cut you off from their friendship? It is precisely because you insist upon arguing with a maximum of rudeness and a near-total unwillingness to listen to any point of view but your own. I can’t remember when anyone has convinced you of a point of view that you did not hold already. I’ve changed my mind about a great many things over the years, but I have yet to see you do it once. Your only reaction to opposition is to call your opponents stupid and blind, and rule their evidence out of court without even listening to it.

I have had enough of you. This isn’t worth my time, and it isn’t worth the rise in my blood pressure. If I continue trying to answer your insults and your arrogance, I will make myself seriously ill. You are not worth that to me.

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A last word. I do not appreciate having you tell me what I think, when you have never ASKED me what I think.

You tell me that I believe in A, that I must therefore agree with B, and that I am a hypocrite for doing C. Well, I do not believe in A, I see no need to agree with B, and I do not even do C and can therefore not be called a hypocrite for it.

Your statements about non-Socialists are not only insulting, they are blatant falsehoods. I am not your strawman and I resent having ridiculous caricatures of other people’s opinions fathered upon me.

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So stop acting like a "ridiculous caricature". Your statement about never meeting a businessman who hated opposition or took part in a cartel is not credible, and the way you use aggression and insults to support it does not make it any more believable. Incidentally, you will have to tell me where my first statement was insulting. You have a right to disagree with it, but not to call my integrity, life experience, and knowledge of business into question.

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ARE YOU SERIOUS?

YOu stick me with the straw-man "socialist" and use it to demonize me, and then have the nerve to tell me that is what I am doing? Come on, nominate any judge you like, and let a third party decide who is the aggressor and the straw-man merchant here. I do not think I am dealing with reason here.

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MOre than anything else, this makes me sad. You remain the finest literary critic I have ever met in person, and your writings about literature - not only fantasy fiction - are illuminating. I only wish you could apply one tenth of the discernment and insight you manage in the art of words for other matters.

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Excuse me, who asked you to get all worked up about a brief entry in someone else's blog? Did I come to your blog to spit it in your face? Did I wake you up in the night to demand your opinion? What makes it so jarring and infuriating for you, that someone might be taking his own time and his own space to express opinions you do not share? Is it really so difficult to share the world with people who do not agree with you?

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That is because I rarely write anything down that I have not thought seriously about first, and that I am not disposed to defend. In other words, I treat what I have to talk about seriously. If that is a fault in your eyes, I refuse to apologize. I have changed my mind, very often - check the article about Jack Kirby's politics which I wrote ten years ago - but never to suit anyone's pleasure. If you don't like what I said, you are welcome to argue against it, but your arguments had better be good; and you had better not start in a way that implies hatred for things I take seriously.

You are the aggressor, here, not me. You have come to a small entry in my blog and covered it and me with invective. Answered back in kind, you have shown not the least desire to compromise. You have committed a grave intellectual sin: that of explaining my views by my supposed ideology. That is no less bad than the Marxist sin of explaining someone's views by their class interests. First, if you had bothered to read what I wrote elsewhere, you would find that I described myself as "conservative, liberal AND socialist", because I find the moral and ideological foundations of the three groupings all valid and not contradictory. You will of course never understand that, so I will not even bother to explain it to you; but take it as a fact, at least, because I am not disposed to have your own home-made caricature of what I am forced on me. Most people on LJ firmly believe, on no better evidence than you have, that I am an all-out dark-as-night conservative. If you want a word for what I am, it is independent. And leave it at that.

I have dozens of people on my f-list who disagree with me on substantial matters - even on things I do not compromise on, like abortion and euthanasia. You are evidently less able to deal with opposing opinions than

curia_regis,

elskuligr,

kikei or

soavezefiretto; or, on the libertatian right,

becomethesea. I could name more. You are neither representative nor typica.

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malkhos.livejournal.com

I think it sbecuase anecdotes aren;t evidnece, But in this case you are absolutely correct. This is why a less than 100% increase in the cost of producing gasoline from the run up on oil by speculators led to atrebling of the price at the pump in the US. They did it becuase they are effectively a monopoly which ahs taken over the executive branch of government (hopefully temporarily)

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fishlivejournal.livejournal.com

[bemused] The 'argument' above certainly puts me in my place. You see, I intended to point out that saying this is close to a tautology: that to have a "free market" requires it being "free". And yet something so simple is enough to invoke the internet's infamous flaming...

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The tragic thing about this is that

superversive is, where his politics are not concerned, the most brilliant person on my whole f-list, and I am not, repeat not, exaggerating. And I have plenty of brilliant persons on my f-list. His essays on literary criticism are comparable with Matthew Arnold, AC Bradley, CS Lewis, or Ann Douglas - and that means brilliant beyond forgetting. When he gets on to philosophy, you begin to get something unbalanced and unduly aggressive, as with his treatment of Kant. (Not that there aren't a few big-name philosophers I would not treat as frauds and scoundrels; in particular Hume and Hegel.) When you get into politics, it's his way or the highway. And he will, as you see, get on your own blog to assault your views. On a couple of occasions, rather than start a kerfuflle on someone else's blog, I have stated my views in my blog, which is my space, and with no direct reference to the person who had caused the thought. On BOTH occasions,

superversive, who was not even the object of the criticism, has come down screaming on me in my own blog for committing the sin of having my own views. I do want to remain his friend for the sake of his genius, but how does one cope with a man like that?

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fishlivejournal.livejournal.com

[instantly distracted] philosophy was my primary major while at uni, so I'd be interested in hearing more: panning Hume is shooting a fish in a barrel, but I'd like to hear why you what you have to say on Hegel. What I understood of his stuff seemed interesting (although I get the impression that he'd fallen into 'the end of history' trap, assuming that because he couldn't imagine anything new, nothing new could happen). Mind you, it's been years and I can't remember much, so I wouldn't be able to hold a decent conversation about him I'm afraid.

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The idea that being brilliant is an excuse to be obnoxious... Back when I was the big fish in a small pool, I was an extreme case, so took a rude clobbering when I actually found myself in an actual academic environment. Being torn apart by people substantially smarter than myself was an effective lesson, backed by finding myself on the receiving end of the treatment I'd dished out to others. So the obvious thought: is it practical to introduce him to people who can run rings around him? If so, they're not going to tolerate his attitude, and the intellectual stimulation would be a fine motivation to rapidly acquire manners.

Alternately, politics eventually influences everything: surely if his literary criticism was negatively influenced by his politics, his own skills would rebel? (I haven't phrased that well, but I'm not sure how to). Perhaps an example - if he was to critique a literary document that is both worthy of his skill *and* counter to his politics, would he be able to put his politics to one side long enough to write about it? If so, I would expect him to develop courtesy; if not, this might at least show him the problem.
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I'd assumed that posting about any controversial topic was an invitation to argue, and am more comfortable responding to someone else's post than posting myself. Am I breaching netiquette by this?

Thanks.

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"how does one cope with a man like that?"

Try courtesy.

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I did. He did not.
Please notice the reaction of

fishlivejournal, a wholly uninvolved stranger, to the episode. That should tell you how it looks.

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fishlivejournal.livejournal.com

Now that I've had time to have a look at Superversive's own LJ - you both come across as incredibly frustrated, having beaten your heads against brick walls one time too many.

And further, having been talking to each other in different languages. Frex, the tyrant/totalitarian dispute. Your position, if I understand it correctly, is that there is no practical difference between the two, that tyranny inevitably becomes totalitarianism?
That's a *practical* consideration, where he has been making a *technical* distinction. Neither of you can really address what the other is saying because you aren't actually talking about the same thing.
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Maybe reversing roles will help. Suppose you and he were discussing a historical matter: one in which both you and he mourn the lack of primary documents, and agree that the secondary documents have been compromised. All well so far. However, the subject of tertiary documents comes up - and he treats them as the same as the secondary documents.
Now sure, he would be correct in so far as they are also compromised, but as a historian I assume you would object to having secondary and tertiary documents treated identically? Even if, for practical purposes in this case, they were equally unreliable?

Hope you don't mind my sticking my oar in!

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What about monopolies that maintain their market position by lowering the price of the good below what it would otherwise be?

Are those antithetical to a belief in the free market as well?

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I am also curious as to what you propose as a corrective action. Suppose, as actually happened in the antitrust case of International Shoe, two businesses were competing for the market, and one gave up and pulled out, through no fault or action of the other. This other company found itself the only shoe manufacturer in a certain small region. While it had competition elsewhere, as far as that region was concerned, in the eyes of the law, it was a monopoly. What then? Are they to be punished? Fined? Forced to sell assets?

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