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Okay lets look at some examples, of what i mean:
So there is this german woman (forgot her name) who runs a rubber-tire-business (you know, for car´s wheels and such). Just prior to the crises, she grabbed the oppotunity to buy continental (i think it was - excuse me if i mistake A for B here, it doesnt affect the example). She did that at the time, because if she hadnt, someone else would have and it seemed to be a profitable investment. If she didnt buy continental, chances were, that the one buying them would have bought her out in a couple of years as well. She felt she had no real choice (another funny word is ´market-forces´ - like they were comparable in their universal appliance to physical laws). Now desaster strug, car sales plummted and she was, because she had bought continental on credit (of course) in big trouble, immerdiately calling for the gov to bail her out. The whole republic put on a deviois smile, when the gov said ´no´. It´s not like she had shared her profits if the thing had gone alright - so there you go. Competition forced her into her own desaster (and i am ready to bet any ammount of money i posses (about €10
), she would put it exactly the same way). She´d like to ´unbuy´ (e.g. not sell, but undo the purschase) of it now, but unfortunately she doesnt posses a time-machine. The risk was hers to take (along with the potential profit), not that of the society. Those are the rules of capitalism.
Arcandor: Expanding like crazy in recent years, they now need €900M and have to sell their unprofitable stuff again. Their original business was being a home-order-shop (lack a better word: Quelle and Karstadt, you recieve a catalogue every quartal and order what you like - they also have houses in major cities from which they directly sell) and only recently they acquired Thomas Cook. Now Thomas Cook is one of the very few examples of a still successfull traditional enterprise - they were actually one of the first travel agency worldwide, being in business for a good 150 years. Of course, again, it was bought on credit and thus, when the crises struck, problems emerged. Arcandor has now announced they want to concentrate in their ´core-business´ - another euphemism, because strangely enough, TC is now part of their ´core-business´. As a side-note they announced they will close about 150 technical support centers in europe - meaning ceasing work-intensive costumer support.
The TUI is not all that different by the way, having been more than €4B in the minus, by acquisation of various corps alone, a couple of years ago. To top it all off, TC and TUI have been adviced by the same conceling group all the time, being main competitors.
From all this, it is apparent, that the main actors seem to indeed regard the economy as some sort of monopoly game buying whatever seems profitable, even if that means a huge risk in liquidity - just because if you are not willing to take the risk, someone else is and will render you the looser. If you piece ends up on the most expensive street, you buy it, even if it means you have to take a loan on some of your other streets - you do not really have a choice, cause if you dont buy it, someone else will, and next time you happen to land there, chances are it means ´game over´. Now imagine you wouldnt start monopoly with 30.000 of interest free money, but you´d have to pay a thousand each time you traverse the starting field, as long as you didnt pay back those 30.000 to the bank, instead of getting 4.000 (those were the numbers in the version i used to play as a kid). Things would get pretty tight pretty fast, as you can imagine.
If capitalism was a game, people would claim, it was bugged to unplayablity, or at least very unbalanced, since in the end everyone will loose (except the bank).
And we all know, that there is a difference between how things ought to work, and how they actually do work. Right now, there is an investigation on its way, about all the major energy suppliers of Europe being secretly in a cartell, since it seems to be that their prices are just too high. I say, why bother with something like that and not instead just make the energy-supply what it ought to be anyways: A matter of the state.
To come back to the comparison of capitalistic competition to sports. This is a somewhat legit comparison IMO, especially if you see, how both change their character when they ´grow´ in size. Both, when really small, are not dominant: The players of the soccer club playing in the county league do it mostly for the fun of playing the game and small enterprises are mainained for sustainance and sense of point in life - competition in both cases is in, no doubt, but it doesnt dominate. When both grow, competetion gets more and more important. The soccer club´s players start dreaming of the big money, once they play in 3rd or 2nd national division and your little enterprise starts looking for things like market-share and vertical/horizontal expansion. Let both grow big enough and competition becomes the dominant factor, even in day-to-day business. All of a sudden, games get rigged (enough examples IRL again, recently) and competitors bought out for mere purpose of closing them down, even if they did deliver something very much appreciated by the audience, yet are just too small to compete (see Microsoft in the 90´s). What do we learn from this: Private enterprises should be kept at a medium size, because at one point potential profits just become too huge for any morale to stand against them. We need limits.
So there is this german woman (forgot her name) who runs a rubber-tire-business (you know, for car´s wheels and such). Just prior to the crises, she grabbed the oppotunity to buy continental (i think it was - excuse me if i mistake A for B here, it doesnt affect the example). She did that at the time, because if she hadnt, someone else would have and it seemed to be a profitable investment. If she didnt buy continental, chances were, that the one buying them would have bought her out in a couple of years as well. She felt she had no real choice (another funny word is ´market-forces´ - like they were comparable in their universal appliance to physical laws). Now desaster strug, car sales plummted and she was, because she had bought continental on credit (of course) in big trouble, immerdiately calling for the gov to bail her out. The whole republic put on a deviois smile, when the gov said ´no´. It´s not like she had shared her profits if the thing had gone alright - so there you go. Competition forced her into her own desaster (and i am ready to bet any ammount of money i posses (about €10
), she would put it exactly the same way). She´d like to ´unbuy´ (e.g. not sell, but undo the purschase) of it now, but unfortunately she doesnt posses a time-machine. The risk was hers to take (along with the potential profit), not that of the society. Those are the rules of capitalism.Arcandor: Expanding like crazy in recent years, they now need €900M and have to sell their unprofitable stuff again. Their original business was being a home-order-shop (lack a better word: Quelle and Karstadt, you recieve a catalogue every quartal and order what you like - they also have houses in major cities from which they directly sell) and only recently they acquired Thomas Cook. Now Thomas Cook is one of the very few examples of a still successfull traditional enterprise - they were actually one of the first travel agency worldwide, being in business for a good 150 years. Of course, again, it was bought on credit and thus, when the crises struck, problems emerged. Arcandor has now announced they want to concentrate in their ´core-business´ - another euphemism, because strangely enough, TC is now part of their ´core-business´. As a side-note they announced they will close about 150 technical support centers in europe - meaning ceasing work-intensive costumer support.
The TUI is not all that different by the way, having been more than €4B in the minus, by acquisation of various corps alone, a couple of years ago. To top it all off, TC and TUI have been adviced by the same conceling group all the time, being main competitors.
From all this, it is apparent, that the main actors seem to indeed regard the economy as some sort of monopoly game buying whatever seems profitable, even if that means a huge risk in liquidity - just because if you are not willing to take the risk, someone else is and will render you the looser. If you piece ends up on the most expensive street, you buy it, even if it means you have to take a loan on some of your other streets - you do not really have a choice, cause if you dont buy it, someone else will, and next time you happen to land there, chances are it means ´game over´. Now imagine you wouldnt start monopoly with 30.000 of interest free money, but you´d have to pay a thousand each time you traverse the starting field, as long as you didnt pay back those 30.000 to the bank, instead of getting 4.000 (those were the numbers in the version i used to play as a kid). Things would get pretty tight pretty fast, as you can imagine.
If capitalism was a game, people would claim, it was bugged to unplayablity, or at least very unbalanced, since in the end everyone will loose (except the bank).
And we all know, that there is a difference between how things ought to work, and how they actually do work. Right now, there is an investigation on its way, about all the major energy suppliers of Europe being secretly in a cartell, since it seems to be that their prices are just too high. I say, why bother with something like that and not instead just make the energy-supply what it ought to be anyways: A matter of the state.
To come back to the comparison of capitalistic competition to sports. This is a somewhat legit comparison IMO, especially if you see, how both change their character when they ´grow´ in size. Both, when really small, are not dominant: The players of the soccer club playing in the county league do it mostly for the fun of playing the game and small enterprises are mainained for sustainance and sense of point in life - competition in both cases is in, no doubt, but it doesnt dominate. When both grow, competetion gets more and more important. The soccer club´s players start dreaming of the big money, once they play in 3rd or 2nd national division and your little enterprise starts looking for things like market-share and vertical/horizontal expansion. Let both grow big enough and competition becomes the dominant factor, even in day-to-day business. All of a sudden, games get rigged (enough examples IRL again, recently) and competitors bought out for mere purpose of closing them down, even if they did deliver something very much appreciated by the audience, yet are just too small to compete (see Microsoft in the 90´s). What do we learn from this: Private enterprises should be kept at a medium size, because at one point potential profits just become too huge for any morale to stand against them. We need limits.
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