Welcome, friends, to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives. I’m your host, Richard Wolff. Today’s program is going to be going into monopoly versus competition, to organizing campuses across the American South to inflation, and more. In the second half, we’ll be interviewing America’s number one progressive podcast host, Thom Hartmann.
So let’s jump right in, Larry Summers, President Obama’s Secretary of the Treasury, has jumped into the fray to give a speech telling us that monopolies aren’t so bad because they can lower the cost of producing things. I couldn’t quite believe my ears or my eyes watching this, since one of the stalest, oldest arguments in the history of capitalism is the argument between those who excoriate monopolies and celebrate competition versus those who do the opposite. I have long explained, as the literature does, that competition is how you get to a monopoly, and what monopolies do is make so much money that they induce competition and the system goes back and forth between them.
It’s long past time to claim that one or the other is the culprit. It doesn’t really matter. Competition means you can’t quite raise the price the way you would like to but then you fight [it] out [in] other ways. You become the monopolist who—when he or she or it is the only thing left— jacks up the prices and makes the big profits. Which do what?…induce people to come in to compete to get those big profits. Competition provokes monopoly, and monopoly re-provokes competition back and forth. It gets
— source democracyatwork.info | Jun 13, 2022