Name: Markets not capitalism
ISBN: 9781570272424

What Hacker News says

sirponmDec 2025

I'm so glad that you mentioned railroads because there is a great book, Railroads and Regulation by Gabriel Kolko about the capitalist anti-competiton regulation of the railroad industry that caused their concentration. If you wanna read about it, an essay about it is called "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism" inside of Markets Not Capitalism (freely available online). I'll summarize what it says tho:

Every time big railroad magnates tried to form a cartel to fix prices, a smaller competitor would lower rates and steal all the customers; freight rates went wayy down in this time period. The big railroad owners (like JP Morgan's clients) lobbied for the ICC not to regulate them, but to regulate their competitors. They wanted the government to make price-cutting illegal (calling it rebates or discrimination).

Regarding sanitary packages, the essay _also addresses this_: the big Chicago meatpackers supported regulations because the compliance costs were so high they drove small local butchers and slaughterhouses out of business. The "sanitary" laws were a weapon to kill local competition, not a way to keep food safe

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classicsnootApr 2015

Third Edition of the HN Book Club. Past recommends: Where I Belong by Alan Doyle. Patterns of Enterprise Application Archetecture by Martin Fowler. Planning: Clean Code by Robert Martin. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin. Just Mercy by Bryan Stephenson. Reinventing Fire by Amory Lovin. Short Stories (Kafka). Dover's* Abstract Algebra Paberback. Cambridge's Demosthenes Selected Private Speeches. Getting More by Stuart Diamond. Classic Myths to Read Aloud by William Russell. The Power of Positive Dog Training by Pat Miller. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by ???. Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson. Markets, Not Capitalism by Various Authors. The Known World by Edward P. Jones. The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. River of Gods by Ian MacDonald. Delivered From Distraction by Edward Hallowell. Eye Mind: The Saga of Roky Erickson and the 13th Floor Elevators, the Pioneers of Psychodelic Sound by ???. Elantris by Brandon Sanderson. Assassin's Apprentice by Robin Hobb. Shadow Chaser by Alexey Pehov. Masters of Doom by ???. An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jameson.

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classicsnootJan 2015

OP: Just finished Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson. It was excellent and very inspiring. Currently reading Markets Not Capitalism, a collection of essays by multiple authors on the necessity of markets and the interference of central control on said markets, which is obviously heavy but very informative. My next book is The Known World by Edward P. Jones. It is about slaves. It is supposed to be rough on the emotions but well done.

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icebrainingJul 2014

http://www.amazon.com/Markets-Not-Capitalism-Individualist-I...

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icebrainingJul 2013

You've given the textbook definition of corporatism, then say it is done by "the capitalists", therefore—I guess—corporatism = capitalism.

No, that conclusion is not what I'm claiming. I'm not saying that capitalism is the same as corporatism; I'm saying that capitalists (people who control the capital, not supporters of capitalism) have an incentive to change a capitalist system to a corporatist system.

Isn't there something fundamentally different which is also called capitalism? Without any reference to who owns the means of production, where mutually voluntaristic exchange occurs in an unhampered market scenario we call this process capitalism as well.

Capitalism necessarily entails ownership of capital; this is not to say that it's the same as corporatism.

There are people who defend markets without defending capitalism: these are usually called mutualists, and they're usually connoted with the left, though unlike state socialists, they defend a stateless society.

I've been reading this on the subject, but I'm still very early on: http://www.amazon.com/Markets-Not-Capitalism-Individualist-I...

Saying "the capitalists" is a lot like the us vs. them tactic of left vs. right or republicans vs. democrats.

That depends on the intention, no? I wasn't judging them, I was stating a fact about the incentives that people who own capital are subject to. This doesn't mean that all capitalists are necessarily promoting corporatism; just that it's in their self-interest to do so.

And again, this is hardly a leftist position, it's (as I said) shared by people like Friedman, and it's one of the arguments in favor of anarcho-capitalism.

What is "an established capitalist"? Is that somehow different than a run of the mill capitalist?

It's what it says. There are established companies and startups, and there are established capitalists and young entrepreneurs trying to compete with them.

If you buy into the outmoded doctrine of profit seeking automatons as "capitalists", then your argument works. Competing theories of the firm have discovered the tendency toward revenue-maximization versus pure, blind monetary profit maximization.

Having state protection against competition helps with both. But again, this is not a judgment of individual capitalists, it's statement about the incentives they have. It doesn't mean they're all bound to lobby, they just have a incentive to do so.

Just because you recognize that utilizing a state's ability to assign perks to business is properly called corporatism as well doesn't mean that you aren't conflating this process of exploitation with genuine free-market capitalism.

My point is that economic systems are not immutable; a free market capitalists system can be replaced by a corporatist system, much like feudalism was replaced by the current system.

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