Sources of market power

Market power arises from two sources: violence which avoids competition from other market participant and the favor of the people with which the market powerful trades. There is no third source whatsoever.

Generation F: how common life will be in 2050

The problem:
Sexual maturity arrives at, say, 15 years old, but productive maturity arrives only after college graduation at, say, 25 (I'm thinking of post-degree). Those 10 years are years in which people want to have sex but feel that cannot afford to form a family. The  consequence is that by the time productive maturity arrives anti-family practices and then values have been consolidated. Plus, this enforces hedonism which in advance calls for selfish fun after productive maturity by renouncing to form a family, and to see having a wife and children as a sacrifice rather than an achievement.

The consequence of the problem:This will pressure to a more and more selfish, superficial life, to more vice, crime and degradation (particularly sexual degradation), to a dystopia, to general unhappiness.

The solution:
A scheme through which companies will hire people since 15 (sexual maturity) and technical education will be an in-house or at least very specific, long-term process. Education companies will sell to the companies, not to the students. Worker-students will learn in their job time, making a fuller use of new informatics technologies, professors will go to the company, university campus as we know them today will either disappear altogether or transform themselves into research companies. Study subjects will be very different for different people. It will be the end of one-fits-all curricula. Education will be paid by companies on condition of employee loyalty. Technical study will be more of a life-time slow process. Humanities or moral or religious education will be a private weekend activity. Work time will be short, maybe six or seven hours for men and even less for women (at least during pregnancy or lactation).

The consequence of the solution:
Since productivity will continue to be higher and higher, people will be able to afford big families, a lot of children will be the most conspicuous mark of status. Since families will become the most important life project again, companies will have to adapt to this. Companies will have their own day care for children and maybe the old. Maybe both husbands working for the same company or nearby companies will be very common. Companies will have their own schools and high schools, and will try to engage those young people into the next generation of worker-students. Companies will be less and less about producing a determined good and more and more about satisfying needs with the ultimate goods whatsoever in which the have some competitive advantage.

Capitalism and socialism

Capitalism can completely dispense of socialism, but socialism is going to always somehow be dependent on certain capitalist tenets and institutions.

A true capitalist

A true capitalist is devoted to make money not to make politics.

Governance versus profit

No failure in corporate governance disproves the apodictic axiom of aiming at profit maximizing in every and all properly defined firm or entreprenurial project. What a failure in corporate governance demonstrates is merely the coexistence within the company of several differenciated firms, at least one of which exerts what from the ownership's point of view of the other firms is seen as coercion. This coercion, just to be clear, is different from market competition.

A proposal for market-led higher education

A proposal for several distinct but related industries, in principle decentralized:

Classroom rental. Or rather classroom, laboratory, or any other room (and tools) for teaching. A possible business model consists in auctioning classrooms for a definite period of time. So, the first rental company determines the length of terms, be semesters, thirds, quarters, etc. I guess that the auctioning would be directed towards teachers directly. Such aspects as classroom quality, building location, and period length would be a good contested by the firms serving the market, and this good would be separated from other industries such as teaching and certification. They could also, as a byproduct, sell curriculum prospects of registered students to the curriculum companies.

Teaching proper. The teacher would produce content for the courses and pedagogical ways of teaching. He would design syllabi, choose books if any, would arrange exercises as teaching tools, and would choose the number of classes to teach per week. The business model would consist in announcing the course, gain prestige, and charge students which attend the course, although of course class tasting could occur. Alternatively or supplementally, a patron could sponsor fully or partially a chair, so that would-be teachers could compete for that chair (maybe through ways arranged by the sponsor himself). For a new, innovative course or a new teacher, some sort of angel investment or joint venture could be advisable. Indeed, the teaching industry could be split between pure teaching and course design, although the common knowledge required would probably imply at least a moderate vertical integration among these two industries.

Curriculum. Specialized companies would work making research among potential employers of professionals on the one hand and offered courses (and the course design industry) on the other, so as to create a list of courses (a curriculum) ideal for distinct employers. These "curriculum companies" could also analyze which curricula are more demanded in the market, which are fashion and which ones outdated. They could also have statistics of how much students are enrolled under (at least stated) curricula. Employers could pay for the curriculum company to design curricula tailored at different levels for such employers or otherwise to know fashionable or otherwise successful curricula given market demand. They could even know potential supply of such curricula currently and for the foreseeable future. Curriculum companies could also sell advise services to new students so as for these to know the best prospects of curriculum ranked by employability or other variable.

Certification. Besides the mere course attendance, students could buy the service of course-attendance certification. They could also buy the service of course evaluation. This would create a specialized industry of individual course certification as well as of complete curriculum accomplishment.

This decentralization of the different industries which make higher education, would create competition among the different parts of higher education so that the student can get the best of each. It would also create room for innovation (for instance in course or curriculum designing) which, however, if failing, wouldn't attempt against the whole process of higher education. It would also create a closer relation between higher education programs and employers requirements. It would allow for smooth evolution of career curricula. Last but not least, it would allow that compromised professionals could deep and update their higher education as much as they want. Market has proved more effective than central planning in virtually every human activity. Higher education seems to be not the exception.

On the side of the worker

The most effective way to put a (definite) end to institutional unemployment and galloping inflation is to convince workers to accept that nominal wages can diminish at times and that avoiding the proscription of such declines is ultimately beneficial for they themselves. The elaboration and polish of an explanation as clear and simple as possible, prepared not for the academician but for the masses of workers is probably one of the most important tasks of economics.

Market and freedom

The only condition for a market is freedom to exchange.

Worker and employer: two strong parties

Frequently, the relation between worker and employer is seen as that of a weak party (the worker, of course) facing a strong one (the abusive employer).

In many cases, this is a very misleading picture. Indeed, a more accurate way of describing the relative power of these parties is that of a strong one (the employer) facing an as well strong one (the worker who can dismiss his employer as a new opportunity appears).

The best way of protecting an employer is allowing free competition among firms, a very important part of which is competition for employees.

When the worker is devoid of his power by erecting barriers to entry of competition, then you do have a weak party facing a strong one. This way, abuse turns unavoidable. Passing legislation to supposedly protect the artificially weakened party, too often results in no more than smuggling abuse.

The first battlefront for unions truly moved by the interest of the worker should be tearing down barriers to entry of competition. Owners of firms privileged by protectionism can well lose a substantial portion of profits due to this, but industrious workers have nothing to lose but their chains.

And bear in mind that to expect from an employer unleashed from competition to remain kind to the worker is naivety, pure and huge.

Michael Moore as an equilibrating force of the market

As someone who doesn't understand enough the complexities of the market as to feel himself able to scholarly criticizing it, I can't but feel a deep suspicion of Michael Moore's superficial critiques to the market order.

Nevertheless, I feel obliged to split Moore's criticism to the market system from his complaints to specific companies.

I think that "Moore, The Company Critic" is a way of broadly transmitting information valuable for exchange decisions. In this sense, Moore is a particularly valuable piece in the intricate information complex which we use to call the market.

Gini as an envy coefficient

Gini coefficient of incomes can be interpreted as a measure of envy.

If it's high, people don't ask if there are some lazier and others more diligent. It's bad anyway because some earn more than others.

If it've risen, it doesn't matter if that occurred because some went farewell or the arriving of wealthy people. It' bad anyway because some earn more now than others.

In usual interpretations of the Gini coefficient, it doesn't matter poverty, it doesn't matter effort. The one thing it matters is inequality. And the more inequality there is the worse. What can be that but pure and blatant envy?

Le marché c'est moi

Some people complain about "market cruelty", "wild capitalism" and such terms.

As aesthetic judgements, this sort of terms can't be described as objetively wrong, but when using them we shouldn't forget that every time we buy a cheaper good leaving the producer of a more expensive one without a gain, every time we "betray" the firm we worked in by moving to another which pays us better, and in sum every single time we choose an option necessarily leaving others, we become part of that very cruelty and wilderness we are complaining of.

Six questions to an anarcho-capitalist

1. Are you a constructivist?

2. Why, at the beginning of society, did emerge proto-state governed arrangements instead of something akin to anarcho-capitalism?

3. Why are governments omni-present in every single society but haven't there ever existed a sustained case of anarcho-capitalism?

4. Does have anarcho-capitalism to be triggered through legal reforms, an anarcho-capitalist revolution, or should we just wait for it to spontaneously happen?

5. What, in case of anarcho-capitalism being attained, would prevent from state to emerge once again?

6. Is not the one logical fate of an anarcho-capitalist society that one particular firm of services or police begins to gain power, being by that very feature more demanded so increasing its power, until it becomes alone, turning itself in a usual government?

Market unionism

The worst unionists' error is not being conversant with praxeology. It's understandable that, due to its historic development, unions discourse are mostly based on marxism, but if unionism is to survive it has to urgently turn into market unionism.

Market unionism would be more motley. Free employees associations to fight for collective gains vis-à-vis employers are expected to be so diverse according to particular institutions that although some of those assoctiations would be more similar to current unions, others would be akin to Costa Rican asociaciones solidaristas, shareholders boards or not paradigms not thought of up to now.

I don't know if employees associated under unions would someday stop fighting for barriers against entry, but even so, unionist leaders should pay more attention to the science of praxeology in order to understand the world better and by this being more able to design strategies.