Comments on: United States Department of Justice goes after optical drive companies

By: bile

bile — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:22:59 +0000

@Mike Why would that be any more wrong then union members colluding to force up wages? The businesses own those drives and components. Why can’t they make agreements with others on how to go about selling them? You may not like it but it’s their property… it’s their business. Don’t give them your money… advocate others don’t either and they’ll have to lower prices.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 15:52:46 +0000

The companies here, even if they were colluding to keep prices up, did nothing wrong.

Seriously?

By: bile

bile — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:47:47 +0000

I'd argue that the large scale voluntary unions of past were primarily successful due to the fact that those businesses they were unionizing against were often artificially large because of government intervention on the businesses behalf. Therefore solidifying support against them. It was more or less a necessity. However, in a freer market the same competition that causes voluntary cartels to be short lived or relatively small will also limit the size and duration of voluntary labor unions.

My point was merely to point out that both actions are taken to strengthen a group's bargaining position and in a free market there is nothing wrong with doing so. Yet government busy bodies and many layman will praise labor unions and trash business cartels. They are fundamentally the same thing. As a consumer of either/both I dislike both because they can create increases in prices.

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:29:16 +0000

And how is a cartel much different from a worker’s union?

One way it’s different is that cartels depend much more heavily on government intervention; see Gabriel Kolko’s “The Triumph of Conservatism” for explication. No voluntary cartels of corporations were successful; in contradistinction, the history of the labor movement is full of large-scale, coordinated actions among workers without government support. In fact, intervention by the state into labor and corporate business singlehandedly weakened labor and strengthened corporations.