Someone defends the small newspaper's coercive actions
After reading my post, Tumblr user Squashed defended the little guy with the following point:
A giant media conglomerate owns a bunch of newspapers. One of those competes with an independent newspaper. The media conglomerate decides it wants the independent newspaper to go away. (So far so good. Capitalism encourages competition.) Then the media conglomerate does something illegal. It cuts the ad costs its competing newspaper to below the cost of producing the newspaper. It uses profits from the other papers to keep the paper losing money afloat. As soon as the little paper went under, it would have jacked the ad cost up higher than it had ever been because there was no longer any competition in the market. This is illegal.
I’m not disputing the fact that the big company broke the law; I am disputing the law itself. A moral action can be illegal if the law itself is immoral.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Your passion for pure capitalism is palpable, especially when bolstered by Ayn Rand’s zest for actualization, however all ‘pure’ forms of political ideology have failed when taken to their respective horizons. Socialism, Marxism, Libertarianism, and even Capitalism all fall apart when you factor in the human element. Sherman Anti-Trust laws were enacted, essentially, because of three men. Three men! There is a reason the names Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Vanderbilt immediately came to mind. Lord Acton had another line in the speech from which the above quote was pulled: “Great men are almost always bad men.”
Great men think singularly. Do we really want Rupert Murdoch controlling all of our news? What if Microsoft controlled the Internet? What if all of our food was produced and processed by ADM or ConAgra?
There is no doubt that competition is advantageous to the consumer, so I’m curious as to how you can reconcile pure capitalism with its inevitable slope towards monopoly and commodification?
The right of the “little guy” to compete on an even playing field is but one essential gene we’ve sussed out in the evolution of capitalism. I’m certainly not saying we’ve got it right, but The Great Experiment is only a couple hundred years young and as long as we have entrepreneurs like you, we’ll figure it out.
