Globalization and the Human Condition
Globalized capital will drive globalized labor down to a globalized subsistence level.
What do you think?
The Case for Breaking Up Wal-Mart alternet.org/workplace/39251/
For those who are interested in this problem the above article will be very interesting.
The following are a few excerpts from this article.
There is an undeniable beauty to laissez-faire theory, with its promise that by struggling against one another, by grasping and elbowing and shouting and shoving, we create efficiency and satisfaction and progress for all. This concept has shaped, at the most fundamental levels, how we understand and engineer our basic freedoms – economic, political, and moral. Until recently, however, most politicians and economists accepted that freedom within the marketplace had to be limited, at least to some degree, by rules designed to ensure general economic and social outcomes.
It is now twenty-five years since the Reagan Administration eviscerated America’s century-long tradition of antitrust enforcement. For a generation, big firms have enjoyed almost complete license to use brute economic force to grow only bigger. And so today we find ourselves in a world dominated by immense global oligopolies that every day further limit the flexibility of our economy and our personal freedom within it. There are still many instances of intense competition – just ask General Motors.
But since the great opening of global markets in the early 1990s, the tendency within most of the systems we rely on for manufactured goods, processed commodities, and basic services has been toward ever more extreme consolidation.
The stakes could not be higher. In systems where oligopolies rule unchecked by the state, competition itself is transformed from a free-for-all into a kind of private-property right, a license to the powerful to fence off entire marketplaces, there to pit supplier against supplier, community against community, and worker against worker, for their own private gain. When oligopolies rule unchecked by the state, what is perverted is the free market itself, and our freedom as individuals within the economy and ultimately within our political system as well.
Popular notions of oligopoly and monopoly tend to focus on the danger that firms, having gained control over a marketplace, will then be able to dictate an unfairly high price, extracting a sort of tax from society as a whole. But what should concern us today even more is a mirror image of monopoly called “monopsony.” Monopsony arises when a firm captures the ability to dictate price to its suppliers, because the suppliers have no real choice other than to deal with that buyer. Not all oligopolists rely on the exercise of monopsony, but a large and growing contingent of today’s largest firms are built to do just that. The ultimate danger of monopsony is that it deprives the firms that actually manufacture products from obtaining an adequate return on their investment. In other words, the ultimate danger of monopsony is that, over time, it tends to destroy the machines and skills on which we all rely.
I’m reading the World is Flat right now, and there is a passage in the book that talks about how chain supplies share information, which goes on to mention that certain clothing stores, immediately after 9-11, changed the colors of that seasons clothes to black, to capitalize on the somber mood of the masses. Immediately. Mid-Supply.
I was blown away. I decided that who you are as a person, whether you have a well adjusted attitude, can be determined by how you react to that fact.
How do you view that fact, positive or negative?
(I know that these aren’t your words, but something that you are quoting.) I wonder what “brute economic force” is. If a company like Walmart becomes large and powerful, it does so by satisfying consumers. The only other way is to work with the government to keep competitors out of the market. But this latter method is not, by definition, an example of laissez-faire, so it cannot, by definition, be what we are talking about. It seems to me that the only source of “brute economic force” is from below, not from above. Some may argue that the business such companies genereate, through bulk purchases at low prices, drive competitors out of the market, and thus leave the giant company in a position to raise prices. But this is only possible if the government prevents potential competitors from entering the market. Why? Because if there are no such restrictions, the higher prices charged by the giant will create an opportunity for other companies to come in and take business away from the giant.