[Gllug] An article for you from an Economist.com reader.

[Richard Jones]

On Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at 02:48:42PM +0100, Amias Channer wrote:
> > The opposite would be some sort of communist centralized command-
> > and-control economy, where the government enforces a monopoly position
> > and as a result prices are not driven down and people never become
> > better off.  Now whom does _that_ remind you of?
> 
> s/communist/capitalist/
> 
> Capitalism isn't really about competition , its acutally about monopoly.
> You win as a capitalist by securing your market not sharing it with
> others. Also capitalist activities usually focus on much more short term
> activities than the average open-source project.
> 
> Capitalism relies on an entity capturing what people want and providing
> it on their own terms .
> 
> That situation reminds me entirely of microsoft who are most definately
> capitalists. They have created and defended their monopoly above all
> other activies , including writing decent code and have only given
> products away when they want to capture a new market.

Most capitalist economies recognise (to a greater or lesser extent)
that when a company achieves a monopoly, it's "game over" for
competition.  Since it's competition that drives down prices and
increases efficiencies, it's not in the interest of citizens to have a
marketplace with reduced competition.  So they have laws to control
monopolies.

Now I'll grant you that sometimes these laws aren't effective, and
sometimes they are undermined by self-interested politicians, but
corrupt government is something we should all work against.

Rich.

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