"and consumers get forced into dealing with a "firm" that no longer serves the consumer but serves itself. "

Emac, isn't that a false dichotomy by your own argument? In a free market, the firm, like the customer, DOES serve itself. Maybe you meant "but serves only itself."

"In a free market the consumer never has to engage in a transaction with any one company"

I fundamentally disagree with the example of utility companies. People need electricity for example, and the only choice is WHICH of the top 5 energy suppliers you choose. If the companies regulate their prices together then your choice is severely limited.

"@SYnapse - a well written argument, but I really think you need to narrow your scope a bit. Your argument applies well to a select few industries, such as the public sector enterprises that you mentioned at the beginning. The practices that you labeled as fraud and deception toward the end are not fraud and deception as Friedman intended them.

But a lot of what you say is half-true. The natural state for most industries is not to have a monopoly. There is simply too much variation in goods. The iPhone will never be the sole phone out there. For every Blackberry that falls there will be another Samsung that rises with a new product. That said, an oligopoly does seem to be the stable state for many large industries - soft drinks, aerospace, etc - and that corresponds well with the political plutocracy that you mentioned earlier. What you call price fixing and collusion between Asda and Tesco is not intentional. It is merely what rational players in an oligopoly will naturally come to do.

As for your arguments about waste....yeah, I agree it does seem to be a waste for a new variation of the phone or car every year, but that's the nature of the economy we have and a result of faster communication, transportation and production technologies. If there were more profitable ways to use those resources, they would be done though, as said companies would simply outbid Apple (or what have you) for the raw materials, as they have higher margins.

Thanks for the feedback people.

"In a free market the consumer never has to engage in a transaction with any one company, so this point doesn't occur. A consumer only engages in beneficial exchanges.
Government of course can grant a monopoly, like it does to teacher's unions, and consumers get forced into dealing with a "firm" that no longer serves the consumer but serves itself."

Not quite sure where to start with this piece of wisdom. First of all, a union is not a monopoly. A monopoly is where only one firm controls the supply of a particular commodity, and education does not quality as a monopoly, given that there are private schools, charter schools, public schools, homeschooling, etc., not to mention competition between colleges and universities offering the same product.

Consumers deal with monopolies every day. Cable companies and power utilities are the two big ones. Where I live I am only served by one cable company, so if I want cable television, I need to go through Comcast, which is hardly what I would call a "beneficial exchange".

If anything, unions are closer to monopsonies than monopolies. Well, at least at one point

semck, you ignore the part of the statement that says "to the detriment of the consumer."

Synapse, I can choose between utility companies. I'm not forced to deal with one. I can also use solar power as well.

2wl, in American secondardy school education teachers unions possess monolpolies across vast parts of the United States because families have to pay to support those public schools whether or not they attend a private school. This is why teacher's unions fight against school vouchers so vehmently, it would end their monopoly and they would have to compete on the open market.

re: "waste"....lol Good lord, teh overwhelming majority of financial transactions are on "waste", depending on how you define "need".

Most people live in dwelling that are much larger than they "need". They eat more food than they "need". Nobody "needs" TV, the internet, music, art, etc.

It is a blink of the eye in terms of human history where we lived in log cabins, hunted for our food and didn't waste a scrap of it and burned wood we cut down to heat our homes...and survived and thrived as a species. A book was a treasure and high entertainment so you didn't have to listen to pops telling a repeat story around the fire to amuse the family.

So...careful when you start talking about "waste" and such....our entire civilization is made up of waste, depending upon your point of view.

By a blink of an eye in which we didn't waste our food, krellin, do you mean 3 million years? Because if you do you're right.

Cable and utility companies aren't a monopoly where I am, though there are certainly some, like Comcast, that are substantially larger than the others, but the others aren't small local companies by any stretch of the imagination. The best example I can think of off the top of my head would be Google. Maybe Intel is a good example as well. A quick search turned up Netflix as a monopoly as well since Blockbuster folded, but I'm not sure I'm sold on that.

All vouchers do is create two systems of separate and unequal schools. Even charter schools and privates schools are no guarantee of better achievement. All vouchers accomplish is creating a more divisive environment that exacerbates weaknesses and diminishes positive school attributes. Education isn't about competition - its about raising achievement for everybody.

2WL - vouchers provide *choice*. The problem with Liberals is you tend to have this idea that everything must be all or nothing...if a program helps some people, but not all people, it's a bad program and shouldn't exist - thus you dislike vouchers. Well ask the parent that has used vouchers to take a kid out of a poor, destitute and failing school to put them in a better school and give their chile a chance to succeed and I think you will find a different opinion.

You may like to think that "education isn't about competition", but the reality is you are wrong. Even from the concept of what school district attract what teachers, the system is competitive. You're problem is that you live in a world of ideology, instead of reality, and therefore you seek ideological solutions instead of solutions that be that solve 100% of the problems (which solutions do not exist!) instead of fiding solutions that maximize benefits for the most number of people and those greatest in need.

krellin, education isn't a commodity. And like I said before, private schools are no guarantee of achievement. The city of Milwaukee looked at the results of its voucher program this year and found that only 13% of voucher students were proficient in math and 11% proficient in reading, both worse than proficiency numbers for their public school system, in a study done by UWMadison. Private schools just aren't better than public schools. All vouchers do is take public funding and redirect it to private institutions.

I dislike vouchers because I'm an educator and I've seen firsthand how private and charter school "choice" can undermine the overall achievement of a school system. Education isn't about helping a select few, its about helping everyone do better. I know it sounds corny and idealistic, but that should be the goal of every school system. Creating a system of haves and have nots isn't a viable solution.