free market monopoly

Anton Sherwood (dasher@netcom.com)
Sun, 13 Jul 1997 00:48:22 -0700


Bobby Whalen writes
: It's corporations that are increasingly requiring piss tests to get a
: job. Imagine if you had to take a random piss test from the government
: just to stay in "good citizen" status and not be thrown in jail!

I have never been asked for a sample (not by an employer, anyway).
The companies that do that sort of thing are just the sort that wouldn't
hire me anyway, because of my other oddities, so they don't bother me.
They're doing it under pressure from the Official Drug Warriors, anyway.

: Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not defending government in any way.
: What I am saying however, is that a corpocracy is not a free-market.
: A good example was in the early part of this century when Rockefeller
: would open up a new gas stations next to small independent operators.
: When one of his stations first opened they would charge less then
: wholsale prices until the other guy COULD NO LONGER COMPETE and go out
: of business. As soon as the small-time operator went out of business,
: Rockefeller would raise the price of gas higher than the small-time guy
: was originally operating at. If you consider this practice fair-game in
: a Free-Market economy, then I will have to take serious odds with the
: whole concept of a "Free-Market" as you are presenting it.

You know, Bobby, you might have been on a roll but you blew it by
repeating the public school line about Rockefeller. Standard, like
Alcoa, got a commanding market share by vigorously advancing the
technology to drive costs down. When the govt stepped in to save us
from "monopoly", Standard had been losing market share for twenty years
-- which, according to the conventional scenario, ought to be impossible.

Now you have to start over. ;)

Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* DASher@netcom.com