[cyberax]

> Abusive monopolies without the imposition of violence (either by the government or the company) lasting for a long time horizon?

Example: Google. It happened all by itself in an essentially unregulated area, without any real government action.

> Compare the 1920 economic downturn (hands-off government, rebounds quickly) to the 1929-1940s economic depression

The 1920 downturn was _stopped_ by the government intervention. You're confusing the cause and the effect.

Want another example? Look at 2008. The US went with a tepid Keynesian approach of fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing. So the economy recovered to pre-recession levels in 2 years. Europe went with the Austrian approach of austerity and tight monetary supply (they RAISED the interest rates!), and it took 11 years for them to claw back to the pre-recession levels.

And what is the conclusion of Austrians? That there was not enough austerity!

[jostylr]

It was about abusive monopolies where consumers want something different. This is easily fixable by competition. Google is a perfect example of how incredibly easy it is to escape that monopoly. I do it all the time. Imagine what would happen if google started charging a $100 a month for its services. The issue is that the current situation does not conform to what "superior intellectuals" think people ought to do so they want to use violence (government) to force people to live the way they see fit. Yay! All it takes is changing the default. And the anti-monopolists did not even try to do a public awareness campaign of this evil; they went to court (violence) instead of persuasion.

I am unaware of what government intervention you are talking about in 1920. I have heard explicitly that the government did nothing by historians and I asked ChatGPT and it had nothing [1]. In that same conversation I also asked it compare Europe versus US in 2008 from an Austrian perspective. The main thesis Austrians have for busts is that of misallocated resources based on false price information whose remedy is reallocation, often through bankruptcy and repurposing of capital goods. It seems that the US was able to have a better reallocation of resources. I am not sure entirely of the mechanism, but at least some of it was allowing some things to fail and some of it might have been the government going in and manually realigning these things (taking over in the short term). It sounded like Europe did not allow for that, either direct intervention or simply allowing things to fail -- the bad businesses limped along as zombies. Europe kind of did the worst of both worlds.

As for the US, it also suggests that the Austrians, and I have heard this, cite our extreme debt, and it keeps growing, as a sign of a reckoning to come. Kind of like one can keep pumping sugar in to deal with sugar lows after a high, but eventually the bill comes due. Keynesians and others seem to view the economy as a short-term adjustable kind of thing, a chemical reaction with just the right reagents producing something wonderful. Austrians view it as a lumbering ecology, with things adapting and to the extent adaptation based on truth is present, it gets better. To the extent that distortions and violence happen, not so good. We shall, unfortunately, probably see soon enough unless AI can make a productivity miracle happen.

1: https://chatgpt.com/share/68e3ce42-6e78-8012-8a9c-1d7cff2d6f...