> On Saturday 16 April 2005 09:33 am, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> tully wrote:
>>> Free market chaos from mom and pop markets?
>>
>> In the macroeconomic sense, yes. That's one of the reasons the 19th
>> century economy was so unstable. When there are a lot of small
>> actors, there are more links between firms, meaning more opportunity
>> for something to go wrong - a missed payment, for example, that can
>> cascade through the system. And less financial strength among the
>> small individual actors increases the likelihood that something can
>> go wrong. Large firms internalize a lot of these relations, meaning
>> less possibility of something going wrong.
>
> But isn't this more than offset by the problems that result when a big
> operation does make (or experience) a change? Don't those
> repercussions have the potential for far greater devastation because
> of the wider ties that are established to a single point? Wouldn't a
> distributed set of ties to smaller more redundant operations have the
> ability to pick of the slack, to act as a buffer to such massive
> changes to the status quo?
Weren't you talking about chaos? This isn't chaos--it's planned economic violence by the haves against the have-nots, Nothing chaotic about it at all--just evil.
Writing from the pleasant banks of that old dark satanic mill stream,
John A