Quote from: Rassah on October 11, 2011, 07:38:29 PM

If a company has a monopoly on oil, people can substitute by switching to natural gas, ethanol, or electric.

We've got more than 6 billion people on the planet and no one has destroyed the oil monopoly yet. Odds are we'll all be dead before it's broken. It's not the government keeping down the electric car, it's the "free market" producing products that fit right into oil's plan. Demand for plastics aren't disappearing anytime soon, and hybrids killed electric cars off.

"The man with the visible hand" isn't trying to stop clean energy sources from gaining a foothold. There was no guy who made a car that got 120 MPG but got hushed up by the government. Clean energy gets you a tax break the oil monopolies don't get, and polluters have to buy carbon credits. Ethanol? Weren't some free-marketers complaining about corn subsidies earlier? As for natural gas, I'm fairly sure you know exactly which companies have the infrastructure to extract and transport it better than any others. Gasoline is heavily taxed, and even required to go through additional purification processes to be used in our vehicles. Despite what some people believe, there's no magic magnetic source of energy waiting for an angelic BTC investor to pick it up. I'd hate to see how poorly these substitutes would do without the massive assistance they're getting from the government as they are now.

In a real free market, the oil monopoly would end when they ran out of oil or kill off all ocean life (and the rest of the world) with another BP leak they can't stop (Where's the free market obligation for them to stop the leak anyway? The consumers haven't punished BP at all, only the government has).

I'd say the biggest mistake/ignorance I see here is people assuming the "free market" is a giant reset button. This isn't like starting a new game of Civilization or playing EVE on a clean server. The same people who own all the land/wealth/means of production now will own all the land/wealth/means of production even if every single government was abolished this second. I'm sure you'd want to call a "do over" and let everyone grab what they wanted (and your free-market children would ask for exactly the same thing), but that's not happening. You'd still be the 99% with 1%, and they'd still be the 1% with 99%. 100 years from now, they'd be the 1% with 99.9%. I'm sure everyone here thinks they've got the skills, expertise, or talent to be in that 1%, but I'd say about...1% of you are right about that.

Incidentally, placing 24th out of 26 isn't being in the top 1%. It's not the top 50% either.

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