Monopoly and the American Political Spectrum

The vast bulk of what the United States' professional commentariat writes about the American political spectrum is, of course, drivel--as is especially evident in the way that its personnel toss about words like "right" and "left" and "center." Two minutes' study of political science suffices to make them look ridiculous--but that is two minutes more than all but a handful of the population puts into it. Still, a matter like the emergence of monopolies in economic life and what to do about them seems an occasion for clearing up, at least, the difference between right and center and left on this matter, and the issue of where they all stand in contemporary American politics.

The right defines monopoly in the narrowest possible terms (just as it defines "choice" in the broadest possible terms). Accordingly it sees actual monopolies as very rare occurrences, while in line with its extreme "faith in the market" downplays the harm they do, and action against it as a cure worse than the disease. Per Joseph Schumpeter, anything short of one hundred percent control of the market is not a real monopoly at the extreme end, while in their view market forces continue to discipline even such monopolies--because the monopolist must expect rivals to emerge if they fail to "deliver the goods" with regard to efficiency and pleasing the consumer who is king in this vision of the economy, where the gale of creative destruction is ever blowing. Besides, many here are prepared to argue that the hope of monopoly rents for at least a while is not just to be tolerated out of respect for the rights of property, but a necessary spur to entrepreneurial activity--all as their horror of government interventions in the economy as not just hopelessly inferior to "market forces" in outcome but a threat to "freedom" means that even if monopoly ends up entailing costs it is best to let well enough alone.

The center is less sanguine about monopoly, but it is a believer in market forces and their discipline. The difference between itself and the right is that wonderful a thing business is not quite so much a slave to them as the Schumpeterian vision suggests, with situations existing where they cease to be effective, such that markets need a bit of help from time to time. Monopoly, not just in the sense of the "natural" monopolies they acknowledge as existent in areas such as utilities (water, power, rail lines, etc.), but even monopoly more loosely defined (where the issue is not 100 percent control of a market by a single entity but a handful of firms controlling the bulk of market, "oligopoly" in the definition others use), is one such case, since such preponderance within the market is quite enough to let them shield themselves from market forces in meaningful degree. (Thus did the mid-century centrist John Kenneth Galbraith regard the country's larger industrial firms as largely outside the market, instead existing in a "planning system." Where this is concerned their preferred solution is helping market forces along by breaking up the monopoly, reducing one giant, all-controlling firm to a group of smaller competing firms whose competitiveness with one another will mean room for market forces again, with their spur to efficiency. One may question their actual enthusiasm for this course in practice--the centrist, at the level of theory as well as practice, quickly reaching for excuses for government inaction (they, too, prefer markets to a government they tend to prefer tread lightly), and tending to be less than vigorous about the matter in practice. However, they do at least allow for the possibility.

By contrast the left is no worshipper of market forces. Rather it is defined by its critique of market outcomes, which holds such outcomes to not just be inegalitarian or unjust but increasingly suboptimal with regard to efficiency. It also tends to see the emergence of monopoly as suggestive of market forces having run their course in a particular domain--all as market forces at any rate become decreasingly the solution (capitalism having a definite expiration date, so to speak--and that likely to have been quite some time ago). The result is that the left's answer to the situation is not attempting to "bring the market back," but rather collective ownership of the means of production and their use not for the maximization of private profit but the satisfaction of human need. The result is that rather than trusting markets to make sure monopolists are on their best behavior, or even settle for "breaking up" a monopoly to open the way to the play of market forces yet again, they are apt to advocate the nationalization of the monopoly.

All that should make at least two realities clear to the reader. One is that the center is in its thinking far closer to the right than it is to the left--in line with the reality that what is called centrism has in theory and in practice been an anti-leftist conservatism from the start (in spite of the pretensions of the "horseshoe theory"). The other is that anything that can be called a "left" is all but excluded from the mainstream--for those who would speak of nationalization, rightly or wrongly, are simply not heard from in it, their views expressed only at the margins of the discourse. By the same token, so long as nationalization is unspeakable within the "safe spaces" mainstream opinion provides for orthodoxy as a matter of course anyone who speaks of the left as anything but a marginal presence in the American political dialogue is simply participating in the hyperbolism and obfuscation that have done so much to muddle American discussion of public affairs for nearly a century.