Blog Mirror. Samuelson, Philippon and Chesterton

Has America gone soft on competition?

So asks Washington Post columnist Robert J. Samuelson.

He doesn't really answer the question, as this is really a review of a book by Thomas Philippon which suggests that what Chesteron noted long ago, that the problem with capitalism isn't too many capitalist, but too few.

Philippon, who is French, isn't new to these views.  He recently published on them himself in The Atlantic, where he started his comments off with:

When I arrived in the United States from France in 1999, I felt like I was entering the land of free markets. Nearly everything—from laptops to internet service to plane tickets—was cheaper here than in Europe. 

Twenty years later, this is no longer the case. Internet service, cellphone plans, and plane tickets are now much cheaper in Europe and Asia than in the United States, and the price differences are staggering. In 2018, according to data gathered by the comparison site Cable, the average monthly cost of a broadband internet connection was $29 in Italy, $31 in France, $32 in South Korea, and $37 in Germany and Japan. The same connection cost $68 in the United States, putting the country on par with Madagascar, Honduras, and Swaziland. American households spend about $100 a month on cellphone services, the Consumer Expenditure Survey from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates. Households in France and Germany pay less than half of that, according to the economists Mara Faccio and Luigi Zingales.

What's going on?

Well, according to Philippon, big corporations have worked to establish themselves as monopolies and have created administrative barriers to competition.  This is hardly a new thesis, distributist have been stating this for a century.

Philippon, whom Samuelson doesn't fully endorse, makes direct and interesting comparisons with his region of origin, Europe, which since the 1990s has done things to foster competition.  He argues we aren't.

There's more than a little irony in what he notes in that Philippon is the second French born economist in recent years to come in and make arguments, in the form of "capitalism", that are Distributist in nature.  Of course, Distributism is a form of capitalism, something that even some of its loose adherents don't always appreciate, and its unfortunate name attracts the like of those who'd like to appropriate it in the name of their wackadoodle nut job concepts such as Proudhonism, which its early lights such as Chesterton and Belloc would have found blisteringly laughable (as likely would have Proudhon as well, if he took time out from provoking arguments at French cafes).

Anyhow, as Philippon implicitly notes, a nation founded on agrarian concepts and a natural Distributist economy early on, and which gave us such early legislative acts as the Sherman Anti Trust Act, can't seem to find that anymore.  Competition is accordingly suffering, he maintains.

So, on this Mid Week At Work, some essays and essayist to consider. . . something new, which turns out to be something old.