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Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: The Watermelon
Summit
For centuries the common law defined "monopoly" as a
governmental grant to an individual or enterprise to operate without any
legal competition. Government-sanctioned monopoly was a key feature of
European "mercantilism," the type of political/economic system that
Adam Smith railed against in his famous 1776 treatise, An
Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations. So-called
mercantilism was essentially a collection of government policies, such as
protectionist tariffs and government-sanctioned monopolies, which benefited
producers at the expense of consumers. Granting such favors to
politically-connected businesses was a way in which the European monarchs could
share in the plunder of their citizens through kickbacks from the
monopolists. Today these kickbacks go by various euphemisms, such as
"campaign contributions."
Of course, the worst of all monopolies is a government-run monopoly
financed directly by tax dollars, for the consumers refusal to pay for the
"services" of government monopolists can lead to the forceful
confiscation of ones income and property or prison (for tax evasion). At
least with most "private" government franchise monopolies a
consumer can always say "no thanks, Im not wasting my money; you can go
play in the traffic as far as Im concerned."
There is no such thing as "free-market monopoly" and there never
has been. The notion of "free-market monopoly" is especially
ridiculous in todays age of globalization, where competition can spring up
from anywhere on the planet as long as governments do not interfere with
the free market by prohibiting competition, as they often do in myriad ways.
Monopoly has always been solely a creation of government.
In addition to being the sole source of monopoly power, government is also
a relentless propagandist in opposition to genuine free-market competition.
Its university systems are filled to capacity with poorly-educated anti-capitalist
ideologues of all sorts, including thousands of "market failure"
economists who spend their entire careers spinning tall tales of mathematical
models that purport to define a "perfect" market. Having concocted
such definitions they then matter-of-factly point out that, lo and behold,
real-world markets "fail" to meet their definitions of
"perfection." This is known as "the Nirvana fallacy"
among free-market economists.
No such perfectionist models of government are ever invented by the market
failure economists for the obvious reason that government failures would
appear to be many orders of magnitude worse than anything that ever happens
in the marketplace. For example, the Ponzi scheme known as "Social
Security" is a thousand times worse than the most famous private Ponzi
scheme, the one pulled off by Bernie Madoff. Madoffs rip-offs
"only" amounted to some $50 billion compared to trillions of
dollars in Social Security System rip-offs and swindles. And the Madoff
scheme was not an example of the free market but of criminal behavior.
That government is always and everywhere the source of monopoly power was
on display recently in the June 24, 2012 issue of the Palm Beach Post
in an article entitled "21 Arrested in 3 Delray Gambling Raids." Like
most other states, the state of Florida "legislated" itself a legal
monopoly in gambling and advertises relentlessly to persuade mostly
lower-income Floridians to spend more than $4 billion/year on lottery
tickets. These billions are used to pay the salaries and perks of myriad
government bureaucrats, including not only $25 million/year for lottery
employees, but subsidies for government school bureaucrats,
TV-watching/weight-lifting fire station loafers (our "first
responders"), police, and many others.
The state of Florida, like other states, is not hesitant to use deadly
force to protect its gambling monopoly. As such, it is no different from any
other criminal gang that protects its monopoly profits from illicit drugs,
prostitution, kidnapping, extortion, etc. According to the article in the Palm
Beach Post, the states lottery police got wind of a private
lottery game called "bolita" taking place in the back room of a
hair salon. The game involved about a dozen people and a bag with 100
numbered marbles. The people in the room were putting money in on gambles as
to what numbers would be pulled out of the bag, just as the state lottery
does several times a week but on a massively larger scale.
"Something sinister was going on" there, the Delray Beach,
Florida police were quoted as saying. Consequently, "SWAT teams from the
Delray Beach and Boca Raton police departments arrested 21 people." The
newspaper article included pictures of "a couple of dozen officers"
who arrived in a faux tank dressed in camouflage, wearing bullet-proof vests,
and carrying automatic rifles. Twelve people were arrested while all of the
hair salons patrons were "detained" (a.k.a. kidnapped) for hours
while undergoing "questioning" by police. The cops must have
realized how ridiculous they looked (jungle camouflage in a suburban hair
salon?!) since they immediately came up with the rationale for the raid that
"Bolita can lead to bigger crimes . . ." Todays bolita player may
well become the next serial killer in the eyes of the Florida lottery police.
An especially entertaining (and educational) aspect of the Palm Beach
Post article is the fact that the newspaper placed directly below the
article about the hair salon raid the latest winning Florida lottery numbers
for the previous evening, including "Fantasy 5," "Play
4," "Cash 3," and "Mega Money" picks.
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