bookselling Archives - The Libertarian Labyrinth

Taking Wing: Games We Can’t Win

July 19, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

It is often said, in justification of the opportunities for monopoly, which our present business arrangements afford, that it is an encouragement to enterprise; and, that without such encouragement, all men would become drones and idlers.—Joshua King Ingalls, “Competition.” The model of competition that presently has us in its grip really comes pretty close to to that “inhuman struggle for the mastery, which characterizes all grades of business, under existing social conditions,” of which Ingalls complains. Aside from the obvious big-fish-eaten-by-bigger-fish stuff that is playing out in so many areas of business, at the level of the firm, one of […]

Taking Wing: Dead end streets

July 6, 2009 Shawn P. Wilbur

Back in December of last year, in the midst of the “conflation” debates, I posted a couple of articles about the retail book industry: “Who benefits most economically from state centralization?” and “there’s nothing wrong with competition.” In them, I talked a bit about the relative merits of the “big-box” and “small-box” models of bookselling, and started to talk about two competing visions of how “competition” can be thought about as an economic good. It’s tempting to relate the two models of competition to Dyer Lum’s distinction between “militant” and “industrial” types: on the one hand, we have the centralists’ […]

Who benefits most economically from state centralization?

December 10, 2008 Shawn P. Wilbur

[ezcol_1third] [Commentary coming soon.] [/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end] The conversation surrounding Roderick Long’s recent article at Cato Unbound, “Corporations versus the Market; or, Whip Conflation Now,” has been pretty remarkable, starting with the fact that it began at Cato. There’s been some sloppy, even, shabby stuff along the way, including some weird speculative stuff about Kevin Carson’s work, and its ability to stand academic criticism. As a recovering academic, I would just like to remind folks that loose talk about whose father’s theory can whip whose theory is the stuff of Wikipedia talk pages and chat rooms: scholars have to bring it […]