: : Perhaps laissez-faire should be applied to the behavior of large corpoations and their ability to manipulate their (and other) governments. : Manipulating governments is laissez faire? How about governments that cannot be manipulated because their remit only extends to defence of 'negative liberty' and nothing else, not that such exists.
In the business world, laisez-faire is do anything you can get away with to increase your bottom line. If that means using sweatshop or child labor, fine. If that means polluting the skys and soils, fine. If that means driving a local business out of an area because you have a chain and can afford to temporally Lose money at a particular location for that purpose, fine. If you are able to buy out all competitors, fine. What's to stop you? Regulation? But that's the big G. again.
: Mixed economy - because that is what they are. If they are not laissez faire (which they aren't) then they must be something else, if they do have some degree of free trade then 'mixed economy' is the best label. Socialists get very upset when various state-socialist-dictatorships get called 'socialist'.
Yes, and rightly so.
: : Why strange? If one believes that private ownership of the means of production, the natural tendency toward monopoly
: What 'natural tendency'?
The desire and Goal is a monopoly. Are all these mergers and acquisitions going on right now resulting in the same number of competitors? It doesn't have to be "one left standing". Three or four can easily agree to carve up their share of the world market.
:Who does the most to enable coercive monopolies (the only bad ones) - regulative frameworks that bar competitors in one form or another.
Huh? Who the hell do you think "regulates" the regulators? Who do you think wrote the rules for the WTO? Governments? Not on your life. It was the corporations!
: : the "natural need" to wring the maximum amount of profit (surplus labor) from a workforce
: Set against the need to compete for a workforce, and a better anf better one, in order to compete with eachother for consumers.
Fine - but guess where the cards are stacked. Guess which sector of the economy is most delighted when there is high unemployment?
: : I realize the question is to Lark,...but it's just possible that "the governed" (in a true democracy) Could Be the State in which individual responsibility becomes collective responsibility (versus No responsibility).
: Collective responsibility is what exactly?
It takes a village to raise a child. (I heard that somewhere)
:Some*one* has to do the things required of it.
Some *one* isn't enough.
