Mercados e concorrência

Aquilo que Eliot Spitzer e Mark Thoma nos dizem sobre o modo como, efectivamente, para além da invocação ideológica, se respeitava e queria a concorrência, nos tempos antes da crise, nos EUA, é verdade, explica parte do que se está a passar, e não pode ser esquecido (ver aqui e aqui o que se disse sobre este assunto e sobre Adam Smith), porque, é claro, os inimigos do mercado não são só aqueles que lucraram com a mitificação do poder desse próprio mercado. E esses outros inimigos do mercado e da concorrência, não são só a extrema-esquerda, os comunistas e os socialistas-românticos.

Reproduzimos abaixo dois excertos do Economist's View: "How Cronyism and Rent-Seeking Replaced 'Creative Destruction'":

1. 
   
   
   America's Fear of Competition, by Eliot Spitzer, Commentary, Slate:
   
   "Although everybody claims to love the market, nobody really likes the rough-and-tumble of competition that produces the essential "creative destruction" of capitalism. At bottom, this abhorrence of competition and change are the common theme that binds together the near death of the American car industry, the collapse of the credit market, the implosion of the housing market, the SEC's disastrous negligence, the Madoff Ponzi scheme, and the other economic catastrophes of recent months."



2. 
   
   
   Mark Thoma comenta o artigo de Eliot Spitzer:
   
   
   
   
   

   "Congress and the executive branch have, to a considerable extent, been devoted to business interests in recent years. In essence the argument is that what's good for business is good not just for America, but for the whole world. The ideological basis for this approach is that the interests of business and of greater society always coincide so that maximizing business interests maximizes social benefits at the same time, and that a hands off approach from government is the best way to allow those coincident interests to express themselves.
   
   

   Unfortunately, however, this ideological foundation incorporated a flawed understanding of the interaction between market structure and social benefits, particularly the ability of markets to self-correct when the market structures deviate from the socially optimal structure. The result of this, particularly as it came to be applied in the political arena, contributed to the existence of cronyism, rent-seeking, institutions that became too big, interconnected, and too powerful to fail, and other problems. Political power combined with rigid ideology built upon a false premise - the doctrine of immediate self-correction by markets - gave us a result that was far from the competitive ideal presented in textbooks, a world that was far from the ideal competitive model that produces such large benefits for society."