Well, in my experience, the way "free competition" is conceptualized is itself influenced by ethnicity. I look upon "free competition" in a different way from Jerry, because in the 1980s and early 1990s I personally experienced the effects of the most extreme neoliberal reforms of any OECD country in the world, in New Zealand - reforms carried out with the slogan "let the market pick the winners".
There was indeed "free competition", achieved through massive rounds of deregulation, but a lot of businesses were either wiped out, or taken over by large corporations, many of them foreign corporations. The neoliberals shrugged their shoulders; they argued, that if a business did not make a profit, it did not deserve to exist.
Nowadays New Zealand ranks at the top of "business friendly" countries, and in the "competitiveness index" ranks next to South Korea. The irony though is, that average wages are now higher in New Zealand's state sector than in the private sector, and New Zealand modal real wages are between a quarter and a third lower than in Australia.
New Zealand has, so far, enacted free trade agreements with Australia, Brunei, Chile, China, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and Hong Kong. It is in the process of negotiating free trade agreements with Japan, USA, Peru, Vietnam, South Korea, Gulf Cooperation Council, India, Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus.
This dynamic is inexplicable by those who, like Jerry, argue that free competition is simply a "myth". If free competition was a myth, businesses would not go broke in a deregulated environment. Fact is that they do, because they are outcompeted in the market by other businesses.
That is not to say, that the amount of "freeness" created by free trade agreements has not been criticized - see e.g. http://web.me.com/jane_kelsey/Jane/No_Ordinary_Deal.html and http://canterbury.cyberplace.org.nz/community/CAFCA/. But it certainly supports Marx 's contention that "free competition is the real development of capital".
J.
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Received on Mon Apr 18 10:19:28 2011
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