[AnthonyMouse]

Yeah, the operators of company towns were violent pricks who didn't much like it that workers increasingly had better options than to die in a mine. That didn't change the economics though. Neither did committing violence against them, which was not only already illegal even then but also wildly unpopular.

There's nothing better for workers than a competitive market. What's the boss going to do when the workers have the option to quit and get a better job somewhere else?

[conception]

Get legislation passed like “right to work”, conspire with other business leaders to suppress worker wages/benefits, make striking illegal, etc etc etc.

[AnthonyMouse]

"Right to work" is not going to stop anyone from quitting if some other job provides better working conditions.

The only reason you need to strike is if there isn't any other employer offering better terms that you can go work for instead. Otherwise you can just threaten to quit unless they meet your terms and actually do it if they don't.

Conspiracies only work if the market is concentrated enough; if there are ten thousand employers and it's easy to start a new one then you're not going to be able to hold together a secret illegal cartel.

None of those actually work in a competitive market.

[syntheweave]

The market can de-competitiveize itself through non-compete agreements, intellectual property laws, and other barriers to entry. The competitiveness occurs around the "ruleset", which shifts around according to the regulatory environment.

The government tends to default to supporting strikebreaking(and still generally does in any era, including this one) because industrialists, financiers and politicians share lines of mutual support: legal ownership of intangibles like a corporation acts as an alternative to feudal fiefdoms and warlords, in that it's less destructive and lets complex processes evolve.

Corporations are very effective at putting taxable assets on the books, which allows a more complex state bureaucracy, so politicians end up wanting the support of business for government power and expenditures. Financiers want their thumb on the scale, for the winners they picked to continue winning, rather than to run off and form a competitor. And the industrialists themselves, though they are often at the forefront of the most dramatic reorganizations, tend to get stuck in equilibriums where either they're the evil monopolist, or someone else is. Once you arrive at the equilibrium, the elite players lose their dynamism and are pressured to stay within the existing trends or lose their place.

Thus when the Pinkertons or their modern counterparts come in, the officials shrug and say "business as usual, business as usual". The system convulses when it becomes a riot and property is destroyed because that weakens the whole premise: less capital to deploy, fewer assets to tax, failure to return on investment. And people out of a job, but if they were rioting it may have been a crummy job. It creates a shock that can break the equilibrium and enable a different deployment of labor and capital in a new technological environment. That's essentially why the industrial era has so many short, distinct periods and upheavals within it; the sausage is being made, though it's ugly to witness.

[AnthonyMouse]

> The market can de-competitiveize itself through non-compete agreements, intellectual property laws, and other barriers to entry. The competitiveness occurs around the "ruleset", which shifts around according to the regulatory environment.

What you're getting at is that market competition can be destroyed through regulatory capture. But now you're making the case for regulatory form and anti-trust rather than some kind of labor laws, which was kind of what I was getting at to begin with.

Trying to regulate an artificial monopoly is a fool's errand, not least because if they have the political influence to capture regulators and retain their monopoly then they can also interfere with the passage or enforcement of anything that benefits workers at their expense. So all efforts should be directed to breaking them into tiny, tiny pieces none of which have enough power to capture the government.

[ffgjgf1]

Free market competition rarely develops without regulation and/or government/public oversight.

With no external control businesses tend to form cartels and/or adopt practices and regulations that are more hostile towards both consumers and workers than what governments can come up to.

On average anyway. Of course there markets and goods which are somewhat immune to this and exceptionally incompetent governments which can do significantly more harm than good.

[AnthonyMouse]

> With no external control businesses tend to form cartels and/or adopt practices and regulations that are more hostile towards both consumers and workers than what governments can come up to.

Cartels are generally a result of government regulation, because they require something to be creating a barrier to entry that prevents new entrants from breaking the cartel.

You can also have cartels enforced by e.g. acts of violence or vandalizing competitors who won't join the cartel, but who claims that non-consensual violence or property damage shouldn't be illegal?

If you encounter an uncompetitive market in practice then you clearly have some kind of a regulatory failure, but the answer in these cases is not to pass more laws to mitigate the consequences of insufficient competition, it's to address whatever is causing the market to be uncompetitive.