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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (299980)	8/14/2006 9:28:35 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575454

Things like the Post Office don't count Yes they do. I would count the post office as one. As well as primary and secondary schools. Yes the public schools have competition but so did Standard Oil). If you need to be 100% of the market then most private "monopolies" really aren't monopolies. In a number of areas cable companies might be monopolies anyway but certainly competition has been greatly reduced by government action, grating of exclusive licenses, as well as price and content regulation. Then there is all the monopolies created by patents and copyrights. There is some benefit to these monopolies but they are still monopolies. And you have government monopoly sellers of hard alcohol in a number of states. You have lots of licensing cartels, not technically monopolies but definitely restricted competition in things like taxi services. And support for unions as monopoly suppliers of labor (even if unions power is weakening) to certain businesses. Outside of the US government created monopolies (either a state industry or a company owned by the leaders cronies) are even more common. And when the government creates the monopoly its more likely to be damaging. Standard oil had to keep prices low to keep its near high market share. If the government just handed it the market on a platter it could have charged a lot more.