[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.

[ffgjgf1]

> Cartels are generally a result of government regulation,

They are often the result of companies bribing or otherwise coopting the government to enact those regulations.

> You can also have cartels enforced by e.g. acts of violence or vandalizing competitors

Or you could just abuse your dominant position by preventing your suppliers or retailers from doing business with your competitors, outright buying them, running them out of business by temporarily dumping your prices etc. these are all both more effective and more realistic options than outright violence.

> but the answer in these cases is not to pass more laws to mitigate the consequences of insufficient competition,

Having corrupt and incompetent governments leads to bad outcomes. That’s not particularly insightful nor does it automatically discredit any form of regulation.

> it's to address whatever is causing the market to be uncompetitive.

You’re certainly right. Sometimes this can be accomplished by reducing restrictions and sometimes by introducing additional laws. We should also take into account that unregulated markets are hardly ever competitive.

[AnthonyMouse]

> They are often the result of companies bribing or otherwise coopting the government to enact those regulations.

Which is the thing that does this:

> automatically discredit any form of regulation.

The default assumption is that a proposed regulation benefits powerful interests, because powerful interests are the ones who can have regulations enacted.

That doesn't mean it's a violation of the laws of physics for a regulation to do something good, but if you open the US Code to a random page it's not what you'd expect to find, and if someone proposes a new rule they should be viewed with skepticism.

> Or you could just abuse your dominant position by preventing your suppliers or retailers from doing business with your competitors, outright buying them, running them out of business by temporarily dumping your prices etc. these are all both more effective and more realistic options than outright violence.

These also require the market to already be uncompetitive. If there are a thousand suppliers and retailers, you have to be able to strongarm them all or your competitor can just use any that you can't. If there aren't regulations creating a market barrier to entry then new competitors can form and you have to buy them out for more than they make in the market which in turn is more than their entry cost, but if you do this then it's profitable to keep creating new competitors to make you buy until you run out of money. You can sell at a loss but with low barriers to entry now customers or retailers can go into competition with you just to force you to keep doing that forever and lower their own costs.

Also notably such things have been anti-trust violations for a hundred years or so without requiring any new legislation (and this is still a useful check when some other regulations have caused a market to already be uncompetitive or have high barriers to entry).

> Sometimes this can be accomplished by reducing restrictions and sometimes by introducing additional laws.

But many of the laws proposed to address problems caused by a lack of competition are not even attempts to restore competition. They're commonly attempts to mitigate the damage caused by the lack of it. And these laws typically make it harder rather than easier to actually restore competition, because regulatory overhead favors large conglomerates with legal departments, reduces the flexibility that could allow new challengers to find a niche or is just literally drafted by the incumbents to create a regulatory moat.

> We should also take into account that unregulated markets are hardly ever competitive.

There is no such thing as unregulated markets. Governments at a minimum enforce contracts and property rights, and then must do so in a way that doesn't enable market consolidation, e.g. by not enforcing contracts for the formation of a cartel or allowing one entity to buy all of the land in a city.

But regulations should be directed to pricing major externalities and promoting competition rather than trying to micromanage a society made rotten by other rules that make markets uncompetitive.