Sunday, April 11, 2010
I've got parkplace and boardwalk.McDonalds owes me $1 million
In class we began talking about monopolies. I've never come to a personal conclusion as to whether or not I think they are good or bad. As far as for consumers and potential businesses, it's rather obvious that monopolies are horribble, they allow no room for other firms and they have the priviledge of setting the market prices. However, I dont think it's right for government intervention to completly dissasemble monopolies, because it seems to violate property rights. Perhaps theres a happy medium somewhere in the middle, something like Wall Street, an entity that anyone can weasle into, and if the entity goes bad it drags everyone along with it.
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Government spends more time creating monopolies than it does destroying them. The government creates legal barriers that prevents new firms from entering the market. Patents, licenses, public franchises, and copyrights are all example of government created legal barriers.
ReplyDeleteSure it may violate property rights, but imagine the kind of explotation the company could do to its consumers. A company's objective is to make as much money as it can, so if they can squueze more out of the consumer, they will.
ReplyDeleteI've always had this idea in my head that monopolies were evil and the government should definitely take them down, but from the information we learned in class, I don't think they ALWAYS end up causing tons of heartache for us as consumers. I think the installation of the postal service seems to function well for us, and the whole Microsoft/Internet Explorer example didn't seem like it was really draining consumer's pockets either.
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