"Consumers are poor substitutes for citizens." Benjamin Barber
"In a nutshell, the governing impulse of the consumer is "I want". The governing impulse of the citizen is "we need".
Mutual respect does not imply uncertainty or skepticism about the good; it implies, instead, a certain higher-order good, a vision of the citizen as an active searcher for what has worth, whose sincere engagement in that search should be allowed to unfold in freedom, even if it should lead to what seems to be error -- unless it inflicts manifest harm on others." (Martha Nussbaum, in Ethics of Consumption)
In Republic.com and Republic.com 2.0, Cass Sunstein distinguishes between "consumer sovereignty" and "political sovereignty". For Sunstein, consumer sovereignty takes preferences and priorities as given, as matters of personal taste that are neither amenable to, nor in need of, public justification. The main question for consumer sovereignty is whether consumers are getting what they want, and it often draws on market research to manipulate them into thinking so. If we believe in consumer sovereignty, we are likely to think that freedom consists in the satisfaction of private preferences -- in the absence of restrictions on individual choices. (p.45)
Political sovereignty, by contrast, "does not take individual tastes as fixed or given. It prizes democratic self-government, understood as a requirement of 'government by discussion,' accompanied by reason-giving in the public domain." (p.40) Within the political sphere, decisions have impact beyond the purely individual, and decisions need to take into account the potential impact on others.
Read MoreCritics of contemporary copyright and patent laws as a propertization of ideas, see a second enclosure movement at work today. They see the extension of property rights over ideas, traditional cultures, scientific discoveries, as well current attempts at regulating content on the internet as encroachment on the commons of ideas. The push for longer-lasting rights and the extension of patents and copyrights into new areas is seen as a "land grab" by the powerful, to the detriment of cultural creativity and the contemporary "yeomanry" of independent web publishers. (such as this website).
The granting of patents on the human genome, for example, is indicative of an extension of intellectual property over areas previously thought to be the common heritage of mankind and uncommodifiable. Patents have been taken out on Yoga, on traditional herbal medicines, and away from the cultures that developed these public goods. Critics of this extension of property rights consider ideas and cultures as commons. Furthermore, they point out that ideas are non-rivalrous (as opposed to limited resources such as land). In a rivalrous resource, my use of it competes with yours. (a ham sandwich, for example) In a nonrivalrous resource, my use of it does not inhibit yours. (eg. the alphabet) This is the definition of a public good -- once it's there, everyone can use it) and a pure public good is also one that is non-excludable, that is, it is impossible to exclude any individuals from consuming the good.
Read MoreThe law locks up the man or woman
who steals the goose from off the common
but leaves the greater villain loose
who steals the common from off the goose.
Anonymous
The English enclosure movement, which started in the fifteenth century and went on until the nineteenth, was a process of fencing off common land and turning it into private property. It is a story of consolidation of power by landowners with the help of the state, and was supported by political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke. (Locke held that land became private property by the admixture of labor, which was the unquestionable property of the laborer -- in this case the capitalist.) Critics of that transformation have called it a state-supported "revolution of the rich against the poor" and "a plain enough case of class robbery." (eg. Michael Polanyi, The Great Transformation, E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class.) Following Marx, these historians see the process of enclosure as the forcible expropriation of the agricultural population, and the transformation of their means of labour into capital. (see Karl Marx, Capital, volume 1, chapt. 27).
Economic historians sympathetic to the rise of capitalism have seen the enclosure movement as enabling the transformation of agricultural practice, resulting in increased production for a growing population, the expansion of cities, (and increased rents for the landowners). According to this latter interpretation, the new techniques and investments made possible by privatization offset the ecological instability of the open field system, and put resources to efficient use rather than leading to the inexorable exhaustion of the soil from overuse and underinvestment.
Read More“Monopoly exists when a specific individual or enterprise has sufficient control over a particular product or service to determine significantly the terms on which other individuals shall have access to it.” (Milton Friedman)
Monopoly price refers to the price profitably above cost that a firm with monopoly power can charge. That power is often developed through restraints on trade. "I believe, Sir, that I may with safety take it for granted that the effect of monopoly generally is to make articles scarce, to make them dear, and to make them bad....” Thomas Babington Macaulay, speech to the British Parliament, 1841.
The history of Standard Oil is one of the great stories of monopoly power and its confrontations with antitrust regulation, lawsuits, and “muckraking” journalism. I
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