Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

In reply to Loquitur Veritatem. There are also diseconomies of scale, though, which would place an upper limit on the extent of firm size and concentration — were it not for government-granted privileges that enable the corporate elite to reap th…

I remember my principles of microeconomics from long ago. The rap against monopoly and oligopoly is that they result in lower output and higher prices than would be the case under something closer to perfect competition. But here’s the thing: Mon…

Many more people have democratic rights than in the past. Some of this progress has recently been reversed.

In reply to Stephen Lindsay. Rand was pro-egoist before she was pro-capitalist; in her early notes, when she was already an egoist, she expresses uncertainty as to whether to be pro- or anti-capitalist. So her economic and political views were downstr…

Given the ways in which government intervention promotes capital centralisation and corporate centralisation, why should we regard the problems you describe as cases of market failure? Click to access cjohnson-state-monopolies.pdf LikeLike

Apologies that my posts are much shorter than Irfan’s. But sometimes I have only the nugget of an idea that still seems worth developing enough to warrant sharing at a preliminary stage. I’ve done a lot of reflecting in recent years on the growing problems of oligopoly and monopoly in American commerce — having taught…

I think this is basically on the right track. But what it shows, I believe, is that principles of justice for various non-ideal scenarios play a backup role in ideal justice. They direct us, for example, not to insist on a perfect Nozickian chain of vo…

In reply to Irfan Khawaja. Actually, I’m not taking the picture down. Fuck you. You’re wasting my time. It’s not my fault you can’t understand why it’s there, and I don’t have the time to cater to your ignorant whims. Your picture is in the public doma…