Do you think nobody notices when you just tip the chessboard over onto the floor?

Of course it’s the government that has the power to destroy and always did.

At the high point of the Rule of the Robber Barons, the pinnacle in America of unrestricted business power, the government came in and busted the Trusts into tiny pieces without any noticable resistance at all, never mind armed conflict.

If your theories on power were right, Standard Oil would still be a single company, and when Bill Gates was summoned to the Star Chamber, he would have simply told them to go to hell.

See? Larry Ellison, a rich and somewhat arrogant CEO shown holding a gun, is funny because it actually feeds into the conversation.

I doubt you’ll make the connection between political power-lust and the IRS taking political sides. Others will.

Political power has a long, bloody, and real-world record of the results of this power-lust.

All you have to go on for business tyrannies is science fiction and your imagination.

You’ve been taught your whole life that our wonderful government saved us from corporate tyranny back in the early 1900s.

This is not actually true, but I won’t bother documenting the whole thing.

One data point: when Standard Oil had 4 percent of market share, the price of kerosene was 26 cents a gallon. In 1880, when they had 90 percent of market share, the price was 9 cents a gallon, and ten years later when Standard still had 90 percent, the price was 7 cents a gallon.

By 1907, four years before Standard Oil was broken up, Standard Oil’s market share had fallen to 68 percent. Among other causes, competitors were catching up with the new methods.

The only way for a private company to maintain a predatory monopoly immune from market forces is by government action. History bears that out, too.

Government and its allies have been telling us for years how vitally important it is that government runs everything. You’d think somebody would catch on.

I also note the oddity of living in fear of a monopoly run by businessmen, but longing for monopolies run by politicians. Given the historical record of both categories, this seems downright weird.

The power to dictate what kind of work you must do, how much you can earn, under what conditions, and whether you are even allowed to do it at all.

And they don’t want to pay for the government power needed to administer the courts, police and armies they need to protect their property and clean up their mess.

BY the way, when you quoted my remarks you conveniently stopped at my comments on monopoly. The one freedom the market does not have is freedom from the laws of economics. This is the only restraint which economic power has, competition from other economic power.

But the whole point of economic power is to crush your competition so it can be eliminated. And sooner or later, it is.

“Private power seeks total hegemony. It seeks complete freedom from all taxation and regulation. After all, freedom from expenses and supervision, the capacity to do anything you want, for free is the very definition of power.”

Right there. That may be where the blown fuse is. The sentence “Free is the very definition of power” (given the use of the word “power” in the rest of the comments) practically implodes on itself.

“nobody controls me” equals “I control others?” An inability to think outside the box of “control?”

A test for everyone: Can you think of any major issue or problem where you would consider the idea of solving it with something other than political action is thinkable?

Market competition does not contain private power any more than war between governments leads to a diminuition of government power, or gang warfare leads to a law-abiding community.

By George, I think I’ve got it.