We are having a peaceful discussion though? That is rare today. I agree with your points actually.

But today monopolies arise as competition is bought out. Is that healthy for business?

In context of aircraft production, government regulation and sales, keeping Boeing healthy and competitive by not trying to destroy or hamstring the company over this failure is good for the worldwide Aerospace business. The 737 Max plane needs to be fixed, the pilots need to be trained , proper liability needs to assessed and improvements in certification need to be made.

In the future planes would fly themselves, and the only thing in the cockpit would be a pilot and a dog. The pilot’s job was to make the passengers comfortable that someone was up front. The dog’s job was to bite the pilot if he tried to touch anything.

 

But today monopolies arise as competition is bought out. Is that healthy for business?

It's healthy, as long as those monopolies don't stay around too much. Microsoft comes to mind.

On the other hand, what's the option? I see socialism as nothing more than a monopoly of state, which is even worse. Much worse in fact.

I think we need a third system of economics that unfortunately no one has yet come up with.

 

It's healthy, as long as those monopolies don't stay around too much. Microsoft comes to mind.

On the other hand, what's the option? I see socialism as nothing more than a monopoly of state, which is even worse. Much worse in fact.

I think we need a third system of economics that unfortunately no one has yet come up with.

I still cannot understand why it is not acceptable to have many successful smaller companies. Everyone wants to expand. Once a company expands, services and quality always go down. I have experienced this multiple times with high end sports line clothing.

Example: Arcteryx produces top of the line gortex clothing for various activities. It has been pride of BC for a long time. It has been bought out and outsourced to China (for the most part) by the parent company. They do still honor lifetime warranty, but it is an uphill battle and there has been a noticable decline in quality.

p.s. yes I am aware a jacket is not a plane... And yes having started my life back in USSR, it seems like there is an abundance of choice, but when you examine the choices carefully, there really isnt, we are being sold what the companies want us to buy and are told that we want it.

 

I still cannot understand why it is not acceptable to have many successful smaller companies. Everyone wants to expand. Once a company expands, services and quality always go down. I have experienced this multiple times with high end sports line clothing.

It's all about thermodynamics. It's how the entire universe works that can only be temporally counteracted by the redirection and loss of energy from the system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law

Scientific interest in power-law relations stems partly from the ease with which certain general classes of mechanisms generate them.[14] The demonstration of a power-law relation in some data can point to specific kinds of mechanisms that might underlie the natural phenomenon in question, and can indicate a deep connection with other, seemingly unrelated systems;[15] see also universality above. The ubiquity of power-law relations in physics is partly due to dimensional constraints, while in complex systems, power laws are often thought to be signatures of hierarchy or of specific stochastic processes. A few notable examples of power laws are Pareto's law of income distribution, structural self-similarity of fractals, and scaling laws in biological systems. Research on the origins of power-law relations, and efforts to observe and validate them in the real world, is an active topic of research in many fields of science, including physics, computer science, linguistics, geophysics, neuroscience, sociology, economics and more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

 

It's all about thermodynamics. It's how the entire universe works that can only be temporally counteracted by the redirection and loss of energy from the system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

Yes. But there is also this thing called equilibrium. Why cant that be established?

 

Yes. But there is also this thing called equilibrium. Why cant that be established?

Equilibrium is ultimately what's achieved with the power-law at the lowest energy state. Our efforts to stop consolidation artificially alter that state of equilibrium. It might be good and desirable for some idea on human contrived idea of fairness and equality but the basic laws of physics push back constantly and will eventually overcome our efforts unless there is a crisis of some sort that shatters it. The movie trope of some AI (natural or supernatural) logically reordering the entire planet to one unified society is a classic example of how we see this process.

 

but I think a better argument against monopolism is that it ends up shutting the doors of opportunity to everyone else. And it thus ends up promoting a culture of mediocrity and bereft of competitiveness that negatively affects every citizen.

Well as some one that's been there and suffered from that I have a different outlook on it. The same products that were made at the company I worked at are still being made. Made in counties that don't have the same pay scale we had. And did the price of the products go down? No they have escalated yet again.

And in the case of China making those parts, they get to put the same parts in boxes with there logo on them for one shift out of three. And the same exact part gets sold under a different name at around 30 to 50 percent less.

 

If you want compassion in the current business climate, get a dog.

And who is responsible for the 'current business climate'? It's not the guy on the factory floor doing the work.

 

And who is responsible for the 'current business climate'? It's not the guy on the factory floor doing the work.

Who is responsible? Pick from your personal choice of bogeymen. It's much less a question of 'who' and more of 'why' as this has been happening since there were two worker cavemen and one cave boss competing to gather firewood with the next cave boss down the hill.

 

Who is responsible? Pick from your personal choice of bogeymen. It's much less a question of 'who' and more of 'why' as this has been happening since there were two worker cavemen and one cave boss competing to gather firewood with the next cave boss down the hill.

My choice is the boss caveman. He wanted to have more wood than the boss over in the next valley. You can have all the money in the world, but in the end you still die. Personally money isn't near as important as having a good full life, and money on it's own doesn't guarantee that. Greed is still the driver of the world, sadly.

 

My choice is the boss caveman. He wanted to have more wood than the boss over in the next valley. You can have all the money in the world, but in the end you still die. Personally money isn't near as important as having a good full life, and money on it's own doesn't guarantee that. Greed is still the driver of the world, sadly.

Perish the thought that he might not have cared a wit about how much wood the boss caveman over in the next valley had, but rather had this silly notion that it might help him and the people in his cave have a good full life if they had enough wood to not freeze to death during the winter.

 

There's a thin line between mere survival and living a life with a purpose. And another one between good quality of life and plain greediness ... I've always thought it's up to the individual where he wants to stand, as long as he doesn't affect other people's freedoms.

 

There's a thin line between mere survival and living a life with a purpose. And another one between good quality of life and plain greediness ... I've always thought it's up to the individual where he wants to stand, as long as he doesn't affect other people's freedoms.

To some degree, everyone affects other people's freedoms wherever they choose to stand. It's a balancing act and in many cases comes down to a decision having to be made between two perfectly reasonable and defensible choices by two people that just happen to be mutually exclusive.

 

https://www.bizjournals.com/dallas/news/2019/04/18/southwest-airlines-boeing-737-max.html

Southwest Airlines has no plans to alter orders for hundreds more Boeing 737 Max aircraft, Chairman and Chief Executive Gary Kelly said Thursday.

"It's a very good airplane, but Boeing has acknowledged that they’ve got some things they need to address with the software in that airplane," Kelly told an audience at a North Dallas Chamber of Commerce event Thursday afternoon. "It seems like it's a relatively straight-forward modification. We're obviously anxious to get the airplane back in service.”

Southwest has 34 737 Max aircraft currently in its fleet and "hundreds on order," Kelly said when asked specifically whether Southwest would alter 737 Max orders.

 

Perish the thought that he might not have cared a wit about how much wood the boss caveman over in the next valley had, but rather had this silly notion that it might help him and the people in his cave have a good full life if they had enough wood to not freeze to death during the winter.

This isn't the context that was given.

 

This isn't the context that was given.

It's one 'why' out of many on the more benign side of wanting to have more wood than the other cave boss collected.

 

It's one 'why' out of many on the more benign side of wanting to have more wood than the other cave boss collected.

But it's still like today, when he dies he can't take the extra wood with him. And since his kids probably didn't do any thing to earn the wood he left them, they will probably just have a big bonfire to squander it. Pretty much how things are done in modern times.

 

But it's still like today, when he dies he can't take the extra wood with him. And since his kids probably didn't do any thing to earn the wood he left them, they will probably just have a big bonfire to squander it. Pretty much how things are done in modern times.

So the solution is obviously cave regulators to tell each cave boss how much wood they need and are allowed to gather and how much time off they must give their cave workers. If the cave dwellers are extra careful and don't use all the wood, then the cave regulators can take what remains and redistribute it nice and equitably. If the cave dwellers consume everything that they were allowed to collect before the end of winter, then the cave regulators can explain how it's the fault of the greedy cave bosses that have an excess and promise them free wood for life.

 

The cave regulators can promise them free wood for life but somebody still has to go and collect wood.

 

They could also gather coal since it is more energy dense.