Your slogan asks a bigger question than it answers.

First, I think defining a monopoly will prove much more slippery than expected.

Second, within commonly designated monopolies, there are many diverse functions and mini-businesses that more or less run on a large corporate infrastructure. Some functions are quite routine and standardized. But some are much higher risk.

Third, take banking, a popular example/candidate for "too big to fail" nationalization calls:

Short-term loan operations in banks across the country perform the matching of lenders and borrowers very much in a public utility fashion. Its low risk, for example covers the needs of millions of businesses that need to cover payroll over short-term receivable shortages. Easy to nationalize.

But other banking services, especially investment banking, are risky, especially since Glass Steagal removed barriers between investment and commercial (public utility) banking. Performing global financial services to sell or buy in global markets (even on the Internet) seems like a public good, but in fact involves a fairly high degree of risk.

As long as our measures of risk and reward are enumerated in dollars -- that is, in values exchangeable with commodities -- a well-regulated market is the best means of keeping value (price) in touch with reality.

Can you get beyond commodities? How do you measure educational outcomes? Health care outcomes? National Security outcomes? If you were raised in Montreal and moved to New York, you would find you need about double the Canadian income to afford comparable health care, education, leave, and retirement services provided there as public goods.

But the efficiency, or added value, of a public good cannot be measured by its market price, which no one knows beyond the costs of its inputs.

But when risk and reward management are considered in terms of public goods, we really only have political authority with which to influence good vs bad decisions. Yet legislatures, executive branches, and descendant bureaucracies are notoriously cumbersome and often compromised by internal dynamics that become powerful in large agencies.

We need to think this through before calling for nationalization of INVESTMENT banking functions, for example.

It would take better mechanisms than markets that were no less, even more, responsive to both our needs, requirements -- and their consequences on our environment and standard of living. We don't have them yet for many goods that will continue for a long time as commodities.

The level of investment banking a society NEEDS is fundamentally proportional to how much it wants to invest in innovation. How much it can invest depends on how much it has saved. Investment banking is betting on what yields the greatest future return. Its a winners and losers game, that every society MUST play with nature, in one form or another.

I suggest everyone who wants to think seriously about nationalization, pick their favorite candidate industry and construct a narrative that will make sense to most workers, small business, AND to the most innovative segments of the affected population.


cheers

john

Posted by John Case, 06/03/2011 1:49pm (13 years ago)