Someone defends the small newspaper's coercive actions
After reading my post, Tumblr user Squashed defended the little guy with the following point:
A giant media conglomerate owns a bunch of newspapers. One of those competes with an independent newspaper. The media conglomerate decides it wants the independent newspaper to go away. (So far so good. Capitalism encourages competition.) Then the media conglomerate does something illegal. It cuts the ad costs its competing newspaper to below the cost of producing the newspaper. It uses profits from the other papers to keep the paper losing money afloat. As soon as the little paper went under, it would have jacked the ad cost up higher than it had ever been because there was no longer any competition in the market. This is illegal.
I’m not disputing the fact that the big company broke the law; I am disputing the law itself. A moral action can be illegal if the law itself is immoral.
A company — even a big corporation — should be entitled to its property just like anyone else. This will sometimes result in cunning business practices making it difficult for the little guy to compete directly. If you say this requires government intervention, then you are condoning the same principle that funds Halliburton’s Iraq project and that poisons our food supply through federal corn subsidies. You believe that government does not have enough control over its citizens as it currently does.
If the government has the authority to handicap this big corporation, it has the authority to help any other big corporation. Hence, our present day crippled economy, where unethical businesses make back room deals with unethical politicians, funneling uncountable dollars into their bank accounts and stifiling untold innovation.
You can’t have it both ways; either the government can intervene with any private business, or it cannot. The former is always arbitrary and unjust (though it sometimes produces a heartwarming story about a little guy).
Imagine owning your own company, and being at the whim of any judge who sympathizes with an underdog competitor. Look past the details of this particular case, and examine the underlying principles. Would you agree with the judge’s decision? Reblog your answer.
The freedom to run your own business as you please is protected - as long as your methods of conducting business do not interfere with other’s rights to run their own business simillarly. The Gov’t must be able to interfere in a monopoly situation, this stimulates a growth in the industry. Whenever a business assumes or looks to assume total control over a marketplace it should be challenged, and the justification of “we have more than you, so we always will” should not be ignored, if it is - everybody involved loses. Since the government has to manage the economy- they must take on the responsibility of keeping the playing field even, otherwise progress is stunted. Of course we all know that government usually does the opposite, but that’s an issue of corruption and not management.
