A short thought

[fpb]

If you believe in the free market, you MUST NOT allow a monopoly or a cartel to happen. If you do not regard a monopoly or cartel as the worst thing that can happen to a free market, you do not believe in free markets at all. And you will have a sweet time making sure, because businessmen, as a rule, hate competition.

Comments

[fpb.livejournal.com]

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?

[superversive.livejournal.com]

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.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

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.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

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.

[superversive.livejournal.com]

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.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

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.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

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.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

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.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

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?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

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.

[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)