Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree)

I wonder how they’d rate my answer that First World workers working for American companies right here are being exploited…

Fuck them. “Our poll shows that leftists don’t agree with right-wing economic orthodoxies.” Geez, thanks Sherlock. If somebody actually paid for that research, doesn’t that show the bankruptcy of free market theories?

(Actually it wouldn’t… this guy is providing a product that has very high demand, which is providing bullshit rationalizations for the behavior of the powerful. There’s always a good market for that product.)

this poll seems to show that liberals are better at understanding the total cost of an activity.  For example not requiring doctors to be licensed might make medical care cheaper but by the time you fixed all the mistakes it would probably cost a lot more.  Somehow conservatives have decided that short term thinking is really smart.  Kind of makes you ill

Man, am I unenlightened. I’ve gotta become more conservative if I want douchebags to agree with me.

<blockquote>In this case, percentage of conservatives answering incorrectly was 22.3%, very conservatives 17.6% and libertarians 15.7%. But the percentage of progressive/very liberals answering incorrectly was 67.6% and liberals 60.1%. The pattern was not an anomaly.</blockquote?

How the hell does one have an “incorrect” answer in an opinion poll?

You have an answer that is not the same as the person doing the “analysis” but that sure as hell does not make it an incorrect answer.

Teh stoopid it burnzz.

Says the idjit who forgot his close blockquote.

“Man, am I unenlightened.  I’ve gotta become more conservative if I want douchebags to agree with me.”

New bumper sticker: Love America: Become a Douchebag…

Repeat after me:  Economics is a pilosophy, not a science.

And when Smarty-smartpants like Klein tell you you’re wrong, ask them where is their control group or double blind experiments, or what placibos were used, or how they isolated their data, or….

Just have time to skim, so sorry if I’m being redundant. 

THere’s also the question of short term versus long term affordability.  Regulations such as “every home built must have two shade trees planted in its parkway will certainly add to the cost at start, but may well lower the cost of A/C over the life of the house, therefore making it more affordable in the long run.  The same for many such green initiatives like less water toilets, better insulation, solar panels/residential wind turbines, etc.

And affordable to whom?  The individual purchaser, or the community as a whole? Other requirements may also make that area more desirable - impact fees for school building reduce future taxes, ditto for better drainage.  Requiring sidewalks may add to the initial price, but having a walkable neighborhood is something lots of peopel will pay a premium for.  Same for non-grid pattern subdivision.  And right now, as I’m looking at 2+ inches of rain coming, those overbuilt drainage and detention/retention pond requirements developers love to moan about are looking pretty good - not only to the people in the new subdivision, but also to the neighbors downstream.

ANd how many stupid points does Kelin get for not knowing the differnece between an opinion poll and research?

I agree with John @ 2 and phylosopher @8.  Liberals tend to see nuance, so anyone who judges agreeing with Conservative talking points as being correct and smart is going to think they are wrong/dumb.  But that just goes back to those words not meaning what they think thethose words mean.  Seriously, being able to see the big picture, the implications, the pro and the con is the smart stance; not the dumb one.

This polls fails to take into account other outcomes that are not financial.  For example, completely free trade might technically increase employments, but it would degrade the meaning of employment to be nearly useless.  Sure, we could go back to the turn of the 20th century, when people technically had jobs but those jobs were dangerous and deadly and paid so low that they couldn’t support a family unless 5 members had an income.  So maybe everyone would be technically employed, but overall there would be more people who couldn’t afford to buy basic necessities.

And allowing unlicensed professionals might make services cheaper, but you’d be getting inferior or useless services so they’d be a waste of your money.  You could get an unlicensed contractor to fix your roof for just a small fee, but then it would leak a month later and you’d spend more money getting someone else to fix it again.

For what it’s worth their treatment of the numbers are fair. Their numbers are rubbish, though, for reasons already mentioned. As they say, crap in, crap out. I still get infuriated when people stand behind statistics like it’s a mathematical shield protecting them from criticism when their data is just rotten. It besmirches those scientific statisticians amongst us.

Repeat after me:  Economics is a pilosophy, not a science.

Well, actually economics involves lots and lots of science. It’s just a lot of it is bad science.

Also, this isn’t exactly an opinion poll. It’s a poll measuring knowledge. And yes, every one of those questions is something that carries a right or wrong answer on an economics test. They have a right or wrong answer based on the model that one’s studying. Of course, every one of those models comes with the giant assumption of *all other things held constant.*

The problem is, of course, that all other things are never held constant in the real world, and in fact, the real world has a shitload of factors that are not included in the models. The big problem is that too many economists prefer the model to reality.

Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree).

I suppose this is the “sweatshops are better than nothing” argument at work. Thing is, even if working at a US-owned sweatshop is better than earning nothing, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are not being exploited.

It also ignores the fact that neoliberal ecnomic programs are often what create the dependence on sweatshops for income in the first place. False dilemma I guess.

Bingo to @AJB #14. The sweatshops become the best option after they take away your farm or break up the subsistence village you were raised in.

I still get infuriated when people stand behind statistics like it’s a mathematical shield protecting them from criticism when their data is just rotten. It besmirches those scientific statisticians amongst us.

A solid grasp of math is the new literacy. Not to say there isn’t still a lot of ground to be gained in the fight against illiteracy. But math knowledge (statistics, for one) as a skill trails far behind literacy in the number of people who have it, and in this ‘information’ era (really, getting more data thrown at us than we can do anything with… not information) the best way to get bamboozled is to be fed bad math and be told that it proves what the interlocutor wants to prove.

Bingo to @AJB #14. The sweatshops become the best option after they take away your farm or break up the subsistence village you were raised in.

It takes a lot of nerve for ‘free market’ advocates to consider government policies of forced displacement of peasants at gunpoint, or the militarized ‘free trade zones’ where labor organizers get shot by ‘paramilitaries’ who don’t even take the time to change out of official army uniforms, as examples of free trade. The only people who are free in this trade are the people sitting back home in the USA raking in the money.

The sweatshops become the best option after they take away your farm or break up the subsistence village you were raised in.

Or when your family has ten children and the subsistence-level farm can’t be divided amongst that many people.

Repeat after me:  Economics is a pilosophy (sic), not a science.

Um, no.  Economics is a social science.  There are multiple theories of thought within that science, such as those of the Chicago School vs. Keynes.  But a science it remains.

There may be debates as to the relative economic impacts of rent control, minimum wage, or free trade, but there are “right” answers to most of the questions in that survey.  Rent control does lead to housing shortages.  The minimum wage does lead to lower employment than if employers could just pay whatever or force people to work for free.  (We’d have 100 percent employment under slavery.)  And free trade does not lead to more unemployment in the aggregate (although obviously certain regions, i.e. Detroit/Michigan, can be devastated in the short run).  What’s up for debate is whether the alternatives are better, socially and economically speaking.

Also, don’t confuse capitalism with economics.  Capitalism is a philosophy/theory of how to best organize an economy, but socialism and communism are also economic theories.

@15

Are there more polls which consist entirely of “economic catchphrasing”, without contrasting the results
with reality, since the ~70s or ~80s? Because I seem to notice many more stories about the economy
based on what ignorants think, as if there is no such thing as economic knowledge. (My mileage may vary; correct as needed.)

PS

I never knew about GMU’s Economics Dept until their hoops team made the final four. Then one of their profs referred to the team, as well as his own department, as unheralded, gritty non-conformists who were passed over and had to do things differently to prove themselves. (Warning!)

Then he joked about competing against a team of “socialists” at some other, more fancied school of
economics. Presumably not Wharton nor UChicago, but I don’t think he meant the Soviet Union (sic) or Communist China.

Talk about yer right-wingers’ Science/Persecution Complex: Some is to the left of meeee, so they’re
socialists!!! Nope, that’ll never get in the way of fancy book thinkin’.

The next time I encounter a conservative who is either intelligent of intellectually honest will be the first time. Klein is obviously not going to end that streak.

Oh, sure, if you mandate affordable housing than more people can afford housing, but rich folks will have to pay more for their condominiums, and we all know that outweighs any benefit to the rest of us.

4) A company with the largest market share is a monopoly (unenlightened answer: agree).

In a plurality, maybe they aren’t.  If they control 51% of the market or more they are effectively a monopoly.  That’s just simple math and a basic understanding of the concept of monopoly.  How can the “unenlightened” answer be agree? 

6) Free trade leads to unemployment (unenlightened answer: agree).

Where? In third world countries it sure is booming, here in the US we’re struggling with a service economy so when the economy dips the jobs are cut back so hard that the recovery takes far longer. 

2) Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (unenlightened answer: disagree).

This is possibly my favorite one of the bunch.  This is a provable answer.  We take real wages (wages after inflation) and compare it back to 1980 and now in 2010.  Turns out we live far worse than our parents did.  In fact we’ve been on this slow decline since the early 1970s when the importation of foreign goods caused our wages to stagnate but gave us cheap goods as a consolation.  I use real wages instead of a GDP or per capita basis because that is the most accurate assessment of our living standard without taking into account for the various factors that are regional or too widely varied to be accounted for with simple math.  Most conservatives/libertarians insist that because our per capita is roughly fifth or sixth best in the world we’re living better.  It just simply isn’t true, technological advancements are going to take place to raise the standard of living, more income allows us more economic freedom; we haven’t had more income since almost 1972.  Eventually this system will implode causing the US to fall into third world status or we’ll have to start making things on our own again. 

This whole opinion poll makes me want to drive down to George Mason and severely pummel this man.  The argument that liberals at a 60% clip disagree with conservative theorem seems to suggest we’re fairly good at being socialists.  Seems like that is about the same numbers we’ve maintained in the post-modern era on economics in the democrat/liberal wing.  This poll just disgusts me for the fact that he implicates there are “right” and “wrong” answers when economists don’t even agree on most of those points.

The free trade game is rigged for the owners.  You want to pick up your auto plant and move it to some place where you can pay poverty wages and no benefits?  Hey, go ahead!  You want to move your family to a place where you can work in an auto plant, even at the ridiculously low wages offered?  Too bad, so sad.  You’d have to get sponsored for a visa and a work permit, and by the way the government around the new plant location says it’s ok for the owner not to hire you because of your dangerous associations (ie. former UAW membership).  And even if you can come here and get a job, you’ll be thousands of miles from your friends and family, your kids will fall behind in school while catching up on the new language, and your spouse will be forbidden to work because only you have permission to work.

@22 - Come on now, GDP is the only real way to measure prosperity.  Conservative economic principles tell us so.  Never you mind that any real growth in GDP has been siphoned off the top by the very rich, leaving the rest of us stagnant.  GDP has grown!

But not all economists think like Klein. Would he call Paul Krugman dumb?

How many of us, when faced with a poll with really stupid, push-poll questions, give the ‘wrong’ answers in defiance of being manipulated? I know I would be likely to.

There is a term in economics called externalities which refer to the costs of a product or service that are not reflected in the price.

Daniel Klein would be well advised to read about them.  I learned about them in an intro to economics course.

Would he call Paul Krugman dumb?

Yes, he would.  SATSQ.

There is a term in economics called externalities which refer to the costs of a product or service that are not reflected in the price.

Whenever you hear a wingnut mention “basic economics” or “economics 101” you can be damn sure that what they mean is that you’re not ignoring externalities.

I don’t think a one of them has ever taken Econ 110 much less any 200-level classes.

I’ve noticed in arguments that both left and right believers have a lot of economics misconceptions, but that hard left people really do have a lot of fundamental misconceptions, not about policy issues or questions of opinions, but about how things happen and why people do what they do.

But this survey is rubbish. These are opinions and vaguenesses wrapped up and presented as though there was a yes or no answer. There isn’t. Like Amanda said, WHAT are you restricting?

Entomologista:

But not all economists think like Klein. Would he call Paul Krugman dumb?

Maybe not lately, since Krugman has a Nobel Prize and the economic downturn has the Chicago School kind of on the run, but historically?  Definitely.  Pissing on Keynesian and Neo-Keynesian economics was for years a point of pride for laissez faire economists like the ones who get WSJ column inches.

I like the concept of this poll, anyway.  Daniel Klein has proven that conservatives are more willing to accept at face value painfully glib Econ 101 generalities, as long as they are technically true.  So what he was really testing for was the inability to understand nuance, which he assigned as “correct” for the purposes of the poll.  I mean, “Mandatory licensing of professional services increases the prices of those services” is a true statement which also happens to be incomparably stupid.  A sensible person would refuse to answer that with a simple “agree/disagree,” and when the pollster tried to force them, they would probably disagree not because they thought the statement was false, but because they didn’t accept the validity of the binary choice.

So I’d say this was actually a test to see how willing people were to ignore complexities and give rote answers to unrealistic questions.  I don’t see how this is evidence that conservatives are “enlightened,” but I do think it gets at an important issue.

This Daniel Klein piece was discussed on Volokh last month.  Thoroughly trashed by the commenters here, and further undermined by Ilya Somin (and commenters) here.  Not that any of this will stop the Right-Wing Noise Machine from quoting it as gospel for years to come.

Reposted from the Volokh discussion:

Monkeyesq says:
Their survey seemed to take the following form:
1. Pick 8 liberal positions that have a questionable economic basis;
2. Ask people whether they “agree” or “disagree” with the statements;
3. Find that liberals are more likely to support liberal positions;
4. Claim that liberals don’t understand economics.
I’m sure that you could conduct a similar experiment and get opposite results with a little work.

I would start my own egregiously-skewed and totally unscientific partisan bullshit poll with the question:
“Do tax cuts lead to increased government revenues?”

The commenters on the WSJ article are debating whether we should bring back property qualifications to vote.

“Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (unenlightened answer: disagree).”

for whom?! unless you’re quite wealthy, your living standard has gone straight downhill: prices for everything importand from healthcare to education have gone way up, wages have either stagnated or shrunk, savings have disappeared…

....

oooh, I see. You mean people have more stuff than they used to. Yeah, that doesn’t count.

I agree with John @ 2 and phylosopher @8.  Liberals tend to see nuance, so anyone who judges agreeing with Conservative talking points as being correct and smart is going to think they are wrong/dumb.

reminds me of the creation vs evolution debates when the creationists claim that “goddidit” is more parsimonious simply because it’s shorter than whatever the real explanation is. or that anecdote from the Atheist Convention in australia earlier this year, when a creobot asked Dawkins about where DNA comes from; she got a detailed answer, and then mumbled to her neighbor “he doesn’t know”, because the answer didn’t fit on a bumper sticker.

A solid grasp of math is the new literacy. Not to say there isn’t still a lot of ground to be gained in the fight against illiteracy. But math knowledge (statistics, for one) as a skill trails far behind literacy in the number of people who have it, and in this ‘information’ era (really, getting more data thrown at us than we can do anything with… not information) the best way to get bamboozled is to be fed bad math and be told that it proves what the interlocutor wants to prove.

I agree 110%!

Seriously though, innumeracy is rampant and dangerous; it’s the biggest problem with a lot of AGW denial (but Co2 is such a small percentage of the atmosphere, how can it make a difference?!), and with things like people not understanding why the mammogram recommendations were changed (i.e. because in real numbers, they produced more false alarms, but saved very few lives), because the way it was expressed in percentages made it look like they saved as many lives as it produced false alarms. There was an excellent article about that in Skeptic not too long ago, but being mildly innumerate myself, I forgot the details.

Maybe not lately, since Krugman has a Nobel Prize

No, no, no, no - he doesn’t.  There is no goddamned Nobel Prize for economics.

There’s a prize, offered by the central bank of Sweden, riding on the coattails of the Nobel Prize, and designed to make economics look more respectable - that’s what he has. 

You can offer an EvanSchenck Prize in Scientological Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, but that doesn’t make the recipients Nobel Prize winners either.  The Swedish bank just managed to get the same people to administer the prize, and then they changed the rules to prevent anyone else from copying their idea.

Rent control does lead to housing shortages.

Not necessarily, which is the problem.  The free market leads to housing shortages; it cannot perform unless some people are priced out of the market and some units are left empty.  Rent control nearly guarantees that less units are left officially empty, not that more or less people are short a home.

The minimum wage does lead to lower employment than if employers could just pay whatever or force people to work for free.

No.  Employers can only pay when what they do produces income.  In our economy, when a person makes minimum wage, they can participate in the economy, which increases demand, and allows employers to continue employing people.

(We’d have 100 percent employment under slavery.)

No.  Slavery requires the job actually pay food and shelter; which is still a type of minimum wage.  Some number of people would still be without jobs, because the ability of an employer (or in this case master) to pay for employees (or slaves) is limited.  And slaves cannot contribute to demand, so their consumption is an overall drain on their production.

Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago (unenlightened answer: disagree).

Well, I have a phone I can take anywhere, an encyclopedia at my fingertips, but fruits, veggies, medicine, and housing cost many times what they did when I was a child.  I don’t care that cola and tainted meat are super cheap.  We just bought a house at 250% the price it would have gone for when I was a child (probably an increase more than that) and it sold for 200% the price we bought it for two years ago.  We were lucky.  Having a Playstation 3 isn’t a ‘better’ quality of life than having an Atari 2600 when either are mainstream devices, even if one is ‘better’ than the other in sheer ability - they both are interactive entertainment of their era.

(Not to mention I can no longer have fresh, local fish every week.  It’s just not only too costly, it’s impossible - the fish aren’t there or poisoned.  Isn’t that a degradation of my quality of life?)

I’ve noticed in arguments that both left and right believers have a lot of economics misconceptions, but that hard left people really do have a lot of fundamental misconceptions, not about policy issues or questions of opinions, but about how things happen and why people do what they do.

Since we had Alan Greenspan testifying in front of Congress that he was flabbergasted to discover that businesses do not always act in their own self-interest but will do things to gain short-term profits that hurt them in the long run, I think there are a heck of a lot of fundamental misconceptions about human nature on the right as well.  They just haven’t been disproven quite as thoroughly (yet) as, say, Communism has been on the left.

Phoenician:
My mistake.  I was remembering from the profile the New Yorker did of Krugman last March, in which they repeatedly (and evidently erroneously) referred to him winning the Nobel Prize:
The Deflationist

Not being overly familiar with the politics of the Nobel committee I took this at face value.

Overall, the standard of living is higher today than it was 30 years ago

Even by fairly narrow economic standards, whether the answer to this question is yes or no depends heavily on what metric you use; both answers are defensible and which is the correct measure is a value-judgement with is orthogonal to economics.  Real median household income has risen very modestly (10%) over the past 30 years, real hourly wages for about 5% or so.  If one focuses on the mean rather than the median, then there’s a noticeable jump—- real GDP per capita has risen about 70% in the past 30 years.

Nate Silver did a short take-down of this study over at 538:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/06/are-you-smarter-than-george-mason.html

Ugh. I just read some of the comments on the WSJ article.  99% of those assholes spouting off on how incredibly stupid lefties are for not knowing these economic “facts” have obviously never taken an economics class beyond basic intro to micro and macro. They got just enough from those intro classes to support their biases, and they run with it, and they conveniently forget the bits that conflict with their ideology.

Pretty much every one of those questions up there is actually complicated enough that it could merit a full semester (or years) worth of study. They all involve questions of externalities, not to mention the problems of definitions and what’s the best way to measure things like standard of living.

So really, I could make the argument that what this guys “study” actually shows is that conservatives are most willing to have a limited understanding and accept simplistic explanations from authority, while progressives are more likely to embrace a more nuanced approach and more willing to challenge conventional thinking.

Not necessarily, which is the problem.  The free market leads to housing shortages; it cannot perform unless some people are priced out of the market and some units are left empty.  Rent control nearly guarantees that less units are left officially empty, not that more or less people are short a home.

There have been very conclusive studies of housing situations in cities where rent control is in force that makes it clear that rent control does reduce housing stock, and I don’t just mean empty units.  When landlords face getting less money for renting their properties, they choose to sell rather than rent and developers choose not to build more units.  And housing shortages don’t mean people wind up homeless.  They either have to crowd into properties that they maybe would prefer to occupy alone, they have to seek housing elsewhere, or they have to spend huge amounts of money or time competing for a place to live.  New Yorkers are known to pay brokers thousands of dollars to secure rent-controlled apartments, and, of course, there’s outright bribery.

For the record, I support rent control for reasons that have nothing to do with economics.  I feel housing shortages are an unfortunate but manageable consequence for something that’s a social good.

No.  Employers can only pay when what they do produces income.  In our economy, when a person makes minimum wage, they can participate in the economy, which increases demand, and allows employers to continue employing people.

No.  There are clear connections between minimum wages and (slightly) higher unemployment.  When employers can’t hire someone for $5 a day, they’ll choose not to hire.  But, as I implied, the benefits from slightly higher unemployment are outweighed by the negatives of not having a minimum wage.

This is the problem with liberals ignoring facts like this.  First, the higher unemployment from having a minimum wage is so negligible as to not even be worth bringing up.  Second, the unqualified good from having a minimum wage vastly outweighs the downside.  By pretending that conservatives are flat out wrong when they bring up this point, we lose the opportunity to counter their fact with far better arguments.

keshmeshi:

On unemployment: No. None of the reputable work that’s been done has found a measurable effective of minimum wage increase on unemployment.

And rent control is problematic because (afaik) it’s never been imposed exception in situations where there was already a shortage. So looking at places where there are initially more people wanting apartments than apartments available at the desired prices and saying that rent control leads to a situation where there are ultimately more people wanting apartments than apartments available at the desired prices is kinda tautological. Lack of rent control leads to more units and a concentration of the the perceived shortage among the non-rich, but it doesn’t really end the imbalance between supply and demand unless overbuilding makes the city in question undesirable enough that demand tapers off.

When employers can’t hire someone for $5 a day, they’ll choose not to hire.

That’s only because there is no enforcement of a fixed, mandatory 35 or 40 hours maximum per week, so employers can force employees who are already hired to pick up the slack or join the unemployed.

Technically, minimum wage should only negatively impact employment when the market equillibrium for such jobs is lower than the minimum wage, so really none of the answers are 100% “true” or “false”.

I’m just enjoying the fact that his oh-so-very-scientific study is interpreting data as people being “enlightened” or not. :p That’s the kinda accurate, precise and quantifiable vocab that ends up in Nature articles, you betcha.

As an economics professor at a PhD granting department, this study absolutely infuriates me.  It reduces the interesting complexities and nuances of economic study to a bunch of simple platitudes.  Of those questions, the only unequivocally incorrect answer is the one regarding monopoly, which is by defintion the case where there is only a single producer of a good (now a lot of people use “monoply” as a short-hand for cases where a firm has lots of market power - like Microsoft - but monopoly has a technical definition). 

The rest of them depend crucially on context.  Like the second question about licensing - labeling the response “it increases prices” may be technically true if you simply ignore quality.  If I pay $5 dollars for crap compared to $10 dollars for excellent service, is the price “higher”?  Licensing is a means of addressing asymmetric information, which is a 40 year old Nobel Prize winning idea.  Sorry, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel winning idea.  This “study” is economic hackery at its finest - defining “economic knowledge” as someone’s willingness to believe that externalities, asymmetric information, public goods, non-convexities, market power, and incomplete property rights simply do not exist.

I’m sure that for virtually all WSJ readers (and George Mason professors of economics), their standard of living has indeed increased over the past 30 years.  In fact it has probably increased significantly.

The rest of us, mostly not so much.  World of theory, meet world of reality.

Third World workers working for American companies overseas are being exploited (unenlightened answer: agree).

does “unenlightened” means “fucking speaks English?”

1. to utilize,  esp.  for profit;  turn to practical account
2. to use selfishly for one’s own ends

there’s other stuff, not relevant, regarding the noun, akin to “adventure”

Capitalists can’t very well selflessly promote their workers. they have to extract more value from the finished good than they pay them in wages. By the very nature of capitalism, third world workers are exploited. this is not open to debate.

you can argue if they are excessively exploited, or unfairly exploited. But unless Nike is a profit sharing co-op wherein all proceeds are equitably divided between laborers, suppliers, and salesmen who keep the company running, they’re exploited.

I might be inclined to let the other shit slide as “much of this is technically correct, in a pedantic sense.” but no. you don’t get to have a push poll based on pointing out pedantic knowledge of ideologues and then be WRONG about the pedantic fact.

Since we had Alan Greenspan testifying in front of Congress that he was flabbergasted to discover that businesses do not always act in their own self-interest but will do things to gain short-term profits that hurt them in the long run, I think there are a heck of a lot of fundamental misconceptions about human nature on the right as well.  They just haven’t been disproven quite as thoroughly (yet) as, say, Communism has been on the left.

Oh don’t worry. Their day of reckoning is coming. Pity the rest of us will have to live with the consequences.

As has already been pointed out, monopoly has an actual definition and that definition is not a single entity having a majority of the market.  So adding to karpad @52, two of their correct/enlightened answers are flat out wrong.

Or the question itself is nonsense.  Sorry, got ahead of myself there.

This kind of reminds me of… well, every debate I’ve ever had with a libertarian about economics.  I should have learned a long while ago that I will never demonstrate adequate knowledge of economics to them, because that means having read THEIR books (I apparently need to read to be able to quote from all of the Austrian school economists’ books, but they don’t have to even read any Marx - got it) and, on top of that, having come to THEIR conclusions.  Basically, they think that if you’re a lefty (aka, don’t support completely and total deregulation) there’s no way you can know anything about economics.

Since we had Alan Greenspan testifying in front of Congress that he was flabbergasted to discover that businesses do not always act in their own self-interest but will do things to gain short-term profits that hurt them in the long run, I think there are a heck of a lot of fundamental misconceptions about human nature on the right as well.  They just haven’t been disproven quite as thoroughly (yet) as, say, Communism has been on the left.

It’s really ironic that people on the left are painted as idealists who have unceasing trust in human nature, when I’ve noticed a lot more of that on the right.  Look at Rand Paul, claiming we don’t need the Civil Rights Act because people won’t want to shop at racist businesses anyway.  Rand Paul completely ignores the fact that if this was the case there would never have been an issue with segregation anyway, but apparently people were able to sustain the system for nearly a century until the Civil Rights Act was passed outlawing it.  Your average consumer really doesn’t care about the morality behind the product/service they’re buying unless it’s on an over-the-top, impossible-to-ignore scale (e.g., BP and the Gulf oil spill) and most would prefer to just not think about it rather than waste time researching what goes into their bag or on their plate.  That’s why companies that outsource jobs overseas where they can employ children or use obscenely inhumane working conditions, or which factory-farm rather than free-range farming, still make a lot more money than the alternatives.

I’m a left-winger precisely because I don’t have a lot of trust in the average person - in either the consumer, or the business owner.  Because I know better than to blindly trust market forces to weed out the bad guys.  It’s not my idealism, but my cynicism, that has me put more stock in Marx than in Adam Smith.  I don’t think that we can really achieve a just system unless we have a total sea-change in human nature, and I don’t know if that’s necessarily going to ever happen.  I tend to put more trust in elected officials which is why I’d prefer government regulation, but I don’t think either system works perfectly so I’d support a mixed system (one where major industries and ones that affect everyone’s livelihoods - for example, food, health care, education - are controlled by the government, where smaller ones - like say, toys - are left to private businesses but still heavily regulated).

And therein lies the other issue.  Those of us on the left, when we see evidence that maybe communism doesn’t work out as well in practice as it does in theory, will admit that maybe our initial hopes went too far.  People who want a full worker’s revolution have been pushed to the margins for a reason.  But libertarians never have.  And it’s not like they haven’t had their days of reckoning, their proof that a totally de-regulated system doesn’t work: the Great Depression is the most obvious example, but just the fact that child labor, for example, used to be an issue in the U.S., and only stopped being one when we outlawed it (and still is in other countries where it’s not illegal) proves that fact as well.  Yet, libertarians won’t acknowledge that their ideas are the ones at fault, that maybe neither system works in its perfect form.  They deny, deny, point to fake other causes, insist on believing that their system is perfect.  They also deny Nazi Germany was a right-wing system and try to tie them in with communism, as part of this myth that capitalism and totalitarianism are incompatible - ignoring the fact that the Nazis were possibly even more viciously anti-communist than they were anti-Semitic.  Libertarians are firmly divorced from reality, because the only way their ideas have any credibility is through continuing to warp their understanding of reality.  By contrast, people on the left have been forced to face reality and moderate their ideas as a result.