I want to see if the "hype" is true.
Returning to reality,
You should.
control of larger market shares often does not necessarily reflect efficiency or this greater capability so much as previously existing concentration.
It does if it is through consumer preference that the firm attains such a position.
Market power
Meaningless drivel.
skews affairs so that those with the greatest amount of resources to draw on remain established firms, with this constituting a barrier to entry for small firms regardless of their efficiency.
If the firm is enjoying high profits, it will attract competitors willing to supervene said "barriers" - either existing well capitalised firms or upstarts. The exception is firms which enjoy legal protection and thus have market share solely because of the state slanting matters in their favour. Existing resources are absolutely no guarantee a firm will retain its share, and competition is making it ever harder for firms to entertain such stupid notions.
Personally I doubt more 'hierarchical' firms will predominate in market anarchism as they will suffer increasing inefficiencies, but this will not hold for all markets, where in some cases such firms will better serve consumers. This is a non-issue to me... There's always exceptions like that Brazilian 'worker'-owned firm, though of course based on details I've read its divergence from the stereotypical capitalist firm is not huge. Merely broader dispersion of share ownership by employees of the firm.
Freedom of markets is positively correlated with the degree of evolution in any society...
Leviathan,
I think that just because something is more productive doesn't necessarily mean that it is the best economic system. Take the sushi economy example where the islanders discover and use a motorboat to cash extra fish and expand output. The problem is that the villagers don't have sufficient capital to maintain the motorboat and their other tools so something has to give and this is usually seen in an economic downturn and increasing unemployment.
OF course it is possible for output to rise in the interim but your preference for more consumption now is, like everything else, subjective and depends on purposes.
So in the example the motorboat would be the cooperatives.
But I am sympathetic to left-libertarians like Roderick Long who would like to see a greater variety of organisations and types of employment.
Ditto. However, they neither involve central planning nor some fantastic notion that capitalist firms (as in those engaging in division between capital owners/entrepreneurs and "workers") will disappear or even should be banned (the latter utterly disqualifying one from being an anarchist.)
Leviathan: krazy kaju: If worker coops were as amazingly productive and efficient as you claim them to be, one would expect them to be the prevalent form of economic organization in this country. That's the real empirical evidence. Well, no...the market utopianist would. The person who realizes the concentrative effects of market power would realize the shallow nature of such a claim, as I explored in my first post on the forum. It's curious, because I've become quite accustomed to the junior Misesians across the Net rejecting every single study in existence because of their insistence that the inability of social science to completely isolate all variables renders them all useless. It's certainly a shift to find someone claiming that raw data without any controls whatsoever proves anything, though if it lines up with your preconceived ideological biases, I can see why it would be tempting.
krazy kaju: If worker coops were as amazingly productive and efficient as you claim them to be, one would expect them to be the prevalent form of economic organization in this country. That's the real empirical evidence.
If worker coops were as amazingly productive and efficient as you claim them to be, one would expect them to be the prevalent form of economic organization in this country. That's the real empirical evidence.
Well, no...the market utopianist would. The person who realizes the concentrative effects of market power would realize the shallow nature of such a claim, as I explored in my first post on the forum. It's curious, because I've become quite accustomed to the junior Misesians across the Net rejecting every single study in existence because of their insistence that the inability of social science to completely isolate all variables renders them all useless. It's certainly a shift to find someone claiming that raw data without any controls whatsoever proves anything, though if it lines up with your preconceived ideological biases, I can see why it would be tempting.
Ehm, if the workers wanted to buy all the the corporations they could do so in like 25 years. (I think that is a calculation from the 80s found in the Machinery of Freedom.)
Still now corporate profits are like 3% of the economy, it is very small.
The real question here has is: Do the workers want to own capital?No, they don't. They wouldn't be poor workers if they wanted to own corporations. If that is what they wanted they would be saving rather then spending everything they earn. But they think that having fun today is more agreeable then saving for the future, so they consume.
Anyone with any kind of a job in any western country should be able to save money, and a good portion of there wage too.
Just taking my own economy as an example:
- I am a full time student.- I work weekends cleaning trains (about as bad as a job gets).- I pay the highest taxes in the west. Swedish taxes....- I live in a decent place in down-town Gothenburg .. which is the second largest city in the country so the second most expensive place to live in the country.- I can afford to go to many college events and parites.And I still manage to save almost 100 Euros per month.
When I work full time during the summer could easily save 400-500 EUR per month and still increase my standard of living from how it is during the semesters. If you have any brains you should manage at least a 25% return per year on that.(Pension savings etc isn't calculated in that cause that is already forced by the government on top of that amount.)
Unless they are in the 15-20 years of there adult life when they have kids and stuff there is no reason what so ever for workers to not to be saving money.
Workers have a choice and they choose to spend to there money rather then become capitalists.
This has nothing to do with "concentrative effects of market power"
Workers choosing not to save at all is the primary reason there are so few large coops.The few workers that do save some money tend to avoid risk. To start a coop they would put almost all there savings into one extremely risky asset (new companies are very risky). This is complete insanity, even to the most highest risk seeking investors out there ... and workers seek low risk.
Escaping Leviathan - regardless of public opinion
"Democracy is the road to socialism." - Karl Marx