“Taken not earned”
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A new report on monopolists
“The world’s wealthiest billionaires have a common secret hiding in plain sight:
they are monopolists. Much of their wealth and income was taken, not earned.
This report focuses on how a handful of individuals and their companies have
built positions of market and strategic dominance where they’ve become too big
to fail, too big to trust, and ‘too big to care’. They have accumulated so much
strategic power that they make decisions that deeply affect the lives of all of us.”“For the five years to 2022, we find that for the top 20 companies the average
“markups” – meaning the difference between the selling price of goods or
services and their cost – has risen to around 50 percent. This is double the 25%
average markup for the bottom 50% of firms studied. This indicates they are using
their monopoly power in these markets to hike prices, and keep them high, ripping
consumers off in the process, just because they can.”Now, there are some issues with focusing on ‘monopoly’, in some of the cases as the authors admit, this is just strategic market dominance (such as Musk with Tesla) and eventually, this will even out as new entrants join the market. The kinds of mark-ups they are referring to is what Marx called Surplus Profit, structural inequalities that allow firms to rake in more than their rivals, over and above the going rate of profit and rate of exploitation.
Tendentially, capitalism divorces prices from values, and it tends to benefit bigger capitals over small (hence why small capitalists will join in the squealing about monopoly in the name of an idealised market).
This — opposition only to “monopoly capitalism” rather to capitalism as such — used to be the policy of the old Communist parties (and probably still is). It is a sign of this disenchantment with conventional party politics that this is now taken up by NGOs and think tanks who merely pressurise governments (as the only institution that could do anything about it).
Anti the Super Rich seems to be the flavour of the month as, according to today’s Times:
“Nobody deserves to be a multi-millionaire and no one, ideally, should be allowed to amass a personal fortune of more than £1 million. So says the Dutch philosopher and economist Ingrid Robeyns in a provocative new book, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, out this month.
Limitarians believe that there should be a ceiling on personal wealth. Just as governments routinely set minimum legal wage levels, so they should set maximum nest-egg sizes.
Much wealth is undeserved, amassed through criminality or market abuse of some kind, and undermines democracy. Worse, the process by which it is piled up has the effect of keeping the poor poor. That the limitarian view, anyway.”We have been sent an advance copy of a book, out in March, that makes the same argument. It’s by Luke Hildyard, the Director of the High Pay Centre, and entitled Enough: Why It’s Time to Abolish the Super-Rich.
Why do these people just want to try to reform capitalism into being a less unequal society by redistributing wealth instead of advocating the common ownership of productive resources by society as a whole, ie socialism, the obvious solution?
What they also miss is that the returns on capital are equalised through finance, , as noted before, these billionaires, to avoid having any taxable income live on a sea of debt, their entire wealth goes through financialisation, which in turn distributes profit back in the form of interest which is generalised among savers; likewise, their companies are mostly financed by public issuance of shares, and the market price of shares also does the work, actual genuine monopolies are vanishingly rare, firms like Vollkswagen and Ikea, tetrapack, etc. that remain family owned, perhaps, but even they rely on financing.
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