Hugo

Why? Demonstrate how or your point is null and void. Why? Demonstrate how or your point is null and void. Your lack of argument either says that you don't know how to defend your views or you don't consider them worth defending. Either way, pretty damning. You may have a mass of material, but I bet you haven't read any of it. Wasn't it you who once bragged of having a personal library that would take a fast reader several decades to read, non-stop? It took me a minute to refute your claims on Orwell, and your only response is "Well I know all about Orwell." Unfortunately, your actual arguments prove the exact opposite: you haven't the faintest clue what you're babbling on about. I'm familiar with Galbraith. I also know that Galbraith has no recognition from his peers and no following, unlike genuine economists such as Keynes, Marx, Friedman or von Mises. Galbraith is interesting in a know-nothing-popularist way, like Hillary Clinton. This is why laymen like him, and economists ridicule him. Why? Demonstrate how or your point is null and void.

Apparently, he changed it in 1944, if not before. Sorry to burst your bubble. Yes, it is. Collectivism is another name for socialism, i.e. the subjugation of the individual to the collective, the pursuit of collective goals, and the planning of most if not all aspects of both individual and civic life. He spoke out against collectivism. I have the quotation upstairs somewhere, I will get it for you tomorrow. It was an official comment made in response to Hayek's Road to Serfdom in which he demonstrates that Nazism and Communism are two sides of the same coin, and walking down the road of planned economics leads us there. I advise you to read it. I know you'll tell me some excuse as to why you won't, but since I have read Marx, and Lenin, and Mao, and Galbraith, and Keynes, that just demonstrates that you are the one who is prejudiced, uninformed and ignorant. The totalitarian aspect is the only aspect worthy of consideration. When you consider that both require the subjugation of all individuals to a leader, they will necessarily follow the direction of that leader on all matters, political, social, economic. In this way they are exactly the same. They may differ a little in terms of overall policy, but no more than rival camps of socialism usually do (e.g. Mensheviks/Bolsheviks, Kruschevites/Maoists, Vietnamese/Khmer Rouge). The opposition between Nazism and Communism is the same as the vicious hatred that different sects of communists have for one another. You told me that services do not follow supply and demand. Plumbing, dentistry and IT consultancy are services, and they do follow supply and demand. You were wrong. Translation: you have no evidence, never had any evidence and won't try to get any evidence. After all, facts might interfere with your blinkered view of the world. How is this relevant? This is statism, paternalism and interventionism, all of which I decry. I don't know what your point is. I suspect you don't either.

So, to clarify: you are complaining about something, but you have no ideas on how and no intention to improve the situation. I ask what your point was in bringing that up, then. Paternalists lust after power. Those who seek to replace co-operation with coercion lust after power. Those who seek to control advertising (which, without violence, cannot be described as anything more than "persuasion") have a lust for power. Some of them probably believe that that power will never be abused. They are the more stupid ones. Sure! How could it not? Rain and snow are external stimuli for me to build a house. It is completely impossible to isolate an individual from external stimuli, and the virtually infinite combinations of stimuli combined with the variety of individuals themselves makes it impossible to predict the effects with anything approaching accuracy, on any more than an individual basis. Since these judgements are best made at the individual level, I say that 'regulation' of the media, such as it occurs, is best done at that level. That means by family and parents, not by the state, which is fumbling in the dark in these matters.

You mean economic crash? These anomalies are created by government intervention in the economy, specifically, inflation and the malinvestment it creates. Irregularities such as this in a genuinely free market are very small, but the effect of inflationary monetary policy is to make a million of them happen at the same time. No, it isn't possible. Thank you. Now, I want to hear your concept of theft and slavery, please. Apparently you have the "correct" ones. Let's hear them. Which nations, please? Give some examples. The vast majority of technological advances in human history were made for profit. Technological advance in a planned economy is stagnant - the USSR was legendary in its backwardness and most of its advanced technology was stolen from the USA. So you are telling me that it is a huge, huge coincidence that industries in a free market consistently deliver cheaper and better products over time, whereas those under state control don't? Anecdotal evidence, invalid. Anecdotal evidence, invalid. Cite a study to back this up. Find me the "crisis" in car repair, dentistry, veterinary services, IT consultancy, etc. Can't? Oh dear. I can find you the "crisis" in healthcare. It's been going on for decades. As for a source on who claims that free-market services provide ever-higher quality at ever-lower prices, you can start with the Nobel laureate economists F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman. People choose to die rather than be healthy all the time. They're called smokers. What you are telling us is that your desires should be more important than those of other people, and your view that healthcare must be of primary importance should be enforced upon them by making them pay taxes for healthcare you have no evidence that they actually want. Good. Get lost, then. What about dentistry? Plumbing? These do not respond to supply and demand? I beg to differ! Right now, the wages of electricians are being driven through the roof because demand is far in excess of supply. The wages of IT consultants are being driven down because supply exceeds demand. It is very, very easy to prove your point wrong. Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek disagrees with you. Note that the ranks of Nazis were full of former Communists, and that a lot of the philosophers considered key to the Nazis were also beloved of the Communists. Their policies are almost identical - complete state control of the economy, abrogation of all individual rights, the right of the state to use violence on its own citizens, etc. They're two sides of the same coin. Was that before or after he said that he agreed with Hayek's observation that Nazism and collectivism (socialism) were indistinguishable, in 1944? Again: what factors? Where did I mention Marxism? There's no such thing as a social contract, because a contract is between clearly identified parties with clearly identified terms. The so-called social contract has neither. Social contract theory has already been debunked over a hundred years ago, by Lysander Spooner. Get reading! If it isn't a contract (which it is not, check the dictionary), what is it?

What is your point - that large, well-established corporations don't try to make the most money for the least investment because they are not entrepreneurs? If you are going to declare that you are smarter than other people and your want-needs should therefore supersede theirs (e.g. you don't think they'll make the 'right' choices in their purchases, so you want to restrict the information available to them), then at some point your goals are going to come into conflict with theirs. After all, you need no persuasion to get people to do what they want to do, only what they don't want to. At that point, you can either back down (which makes you a pretty lousy paternalist), or you can use force to make them comply (gas chambers).

If you want a proposal on how the problem can be fixed in the narrower field of health care, I'll borrow Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedmans idea. Basically, the whole healthcare delivery system is auctioned off to private enterprise. Then the government issues vouchers to citizens, paid for from tax money, which they can redeem for healthcare. Standard vouchers for things which are regular, like checkups, eyeglasses, prescriptions etc. and extraordinary claims for unforeseen needs. This system does have a few problems, namely, those giving out the vouchers are not spending their own money and therefore don't have any incentive to ensure that the money is being wisely spent, or spent at all. Phoney claims might well abound. The voucher system also does not truly create a price mechanism between consumer and provider. Therefore, the vouchers will need to be phased out over time. But the voucher system at least starts out on the road to free-market healthcare. The next step is that each year, the government should announce that it will cut certain services or departments from the voucher programme. It would have to announce this in advance so that insurance companies could be ready to pick up the slack. It would also have to be careful to see that it does not, with interventionist policies, make a complete mockery of the insurance industry as it has already with auto insurance. At the same time, it would also have to cut taxes that were previously going towards vouchers for the axed services (it is unlikely that any present government would do this, rather, it would see the money as a windfall and invest it elsewhere), so that people who were receiving vouchers can buy insurance instead. The problem here is that it is unlikely that the tax cuts would actually benefit the same people who end up paying more. To work, this would almost certainly have to be accompanied by a complete shake-up of the tax system, by removing all exemptions and exceptions, abolishing the regressive sales tax, and imposing a flat income tax. It would also probably have to be accompanied by tax and budget cuts elsewhere, since all tax income is currently pooled before being spent. The government would also have to stop fixing prices and wages within the healthcare system since these defeat market mechanisms. Eventually, given political will and honesty, this system would deliver us to a completely free-market healthcare system that would, as in every other free market, give us faster progress, steadily falling prices and steadily rising quality. Is this feasible? I would say so, and Milton agrees with me. However, it would not happen because of the political climate. The ignorance surrounding healthcare is staggering. Even on this forum (where people are generally better-informed than the public at large), most people have confused the US healthcare system with a free market - a huge and glaring error! Until this ignorance is rectified it seems unlikely that such a scheme would pass, and unfortunately the government (who benefits from the current mess) is unlikely to encourage the ending of such ignorance. Indeed, the ignorance is likely to get worse, as in Canada the government controls the education system as well as several of the nations most prominent media services. The ignorance ratio is the same in the free market media as it is in the populace at large, sadly, so unless one listens to the Dreaded Fascist Fraser Institute the same tired old claptrap will be trotted out ad infinitum. Even if some government could get the process started, there is no guarantee that the NDP might not get in power and completely undo everything - and a second time around, it might not work at all, since if entrepreneurs buy healthcare services and then have the government confiscate them later, they are unlikely to be suckered in again! Of course, when taxes approach 90% of income and the government has assimilated most of the economy (with healthcare being the biggest slice of that) it might dawn on people that this is not the way to do things. But by then it will probably be too late, short of mass armed revolt.

My mind is free, and according to Thoreau, that's the most crucial battle in the war.

No, but I know that a jet plane goes faster than any of them. Oh, it did before, and let us all hope it does again, or it'll be a bleak future for us all. I've never worried too much about that. Frankly, our current system of slavery is far too secure because most of the slaves are prepared to fight and die for it. I'm trying to educate people, and if enough slaves realise their plight, they might slip their chains. Basically, if enough people reject the state, it will collapse, because its only recourse is violence, and should it resort to that its true colours become very apparent. The nature of the state is clear when you realise that it threw Henry Thoreau in jail, who was a committed pacifist. Basically, it took a man who had never done any harm to anybody and deprived him of his liberty because he would not give in to its demands. The real danger is that we lapse into endorsement of statism and socialism, as the Germans did in the decades before 1945, and that is indeed where we are headed. But as a pacifist, all I can do is speak out against it, at least while I still can. Why should it make a difference? What are the other factors, exactly? There aren't any that the free market doesn't overcome. Explain to me why Taiwan, with its far smaller population and relative dearth of natural resources, or Hong Kong, with a smaller population and essentially nothing but rock, have become richer and more prosperous than mainland China. I will tell you: free markets. Yeah, like I'm going to believe the Government of Canada on how great the Government of Canada is. Charles Manson thinks Charles Manson shouldn't be in jail either. Free Charles Manson! A dream that is far less elusive than efficient, high-quality public healthcare.

And did you buy the tires? No? Well, then what is your point? That you are smarter than other people and, in your wisdom, should make their choices for them, because they, in their stupidity, might buy these tires? That has been the argument of every tyrant in history. Just open your gas-chambers for business now. Because, as I have said before, it is far easier to find out what consumers really want and try to make it for them, than to make something they really don't want and try to brainwash them into buying it. And that is what entrepreneurship is all about: making the most money for the least investment (effort).

What hard data? All this "hard data" is basically just comparing various statist, socialist methodologies to one another. The US isn't all that capitalist. The US Government is running over one-third of the US economy. The two biggest Federal expenditures are Healthcare and Social Security. Do you get the point yet? Link to OECD data This is completely irrelevant to the debate. The fact that it is extremely hard - if not impossible - to find a purely free market in any nation these days does not stop me advocating one. OK, so not a totally free market. Nevertheless, freer than here, and more effective too. It would work better if they stopped price-fixing. Price fixing basically hinders the mechanism that relates supply to demand. With the price mechanism, the economy tends towards an equilibrium of peak efficiency. Without it, it becomes inefficient. The more supply and demand are divorced, the more inefficient it becomes, until you approach the Soviet system where the economy was basically paralyzed by wasteage. Why bother? The current system is broken and cannot be fixed. The only solution is to abandon it and I do nobody any service by pretending that that is not the case!

What the heck did I just say??? I would say to you that, before you attack my argument, you ought to make sure you've read it first.

Where have I done this? Please refer specifically to the instances in question. What information? You did not cite a single authoritative source, study, experiment, book, website, TV programme, oracle, gypsy seer, beheaded chickens entrails, anything! For all we know you pulled all this "information" out of your Magic Socialist 8-Ball. And until I have any evidence to the contrary I will treat it as such.

Do too. Oh, and to pre-empt your learned, scholarly rebuttal: Do too times infinity, period, with brass knobs on and no returns forever until the end of time, my dad can beat up your dad, and roses are red, violets are blue, I'm laughing like heck 'cause I'm smarter than you. Oh, and BTW, I'm rubber and you are glue. Anything else, Socrates? Or would you prefer to actually post a response appropriate for somebody with a mental age over 8?

Bump

Then by all means, take the challenge. Should be easy, if this is just 'dogma.'

Anarchocapitalism. The people rule themselves. Next!

So many fallacies, so little time. A perfectly reasonable hatred of taxation. Taxation is theft, and I regard hatred of taxation as hatred of theft. When we embrace taxation as a society we have become a society of thieves. Again, I ask anyone to take up the challenge of defining taxation in such a way that does not also describe high-minded theft. First I will demonstrate how this is self-contradictory. If what Eureka says is true, then we should hand the entire economy over to public hands, because they are cheaper, and who wants to pay more? We need only look at the dismal poverty of nations that have actually done this to see that it is a nonsense. Secondly, the point is just plain wrong. Public delivery is never, ever cheaper because it lacks an economic mechanism for linking supply to demand. The huge gap between supply and demand in public enterprise leads to chronic inefficiency, which manifests itself as increased cost to the consumer. This is wrong. My family lives in the UK, and power and water are now more reliable and cheaper there than they were when nationalised. I would like to see some proof that it was the private owners who had allowed deterioration, and not the public bureaucrats, as they did with Ontario Hydro, Hydro Quebec, the army, etc. etc. I would also like you to show me that the power market is truly free, as opposed to being a cartel backed by the government. The fact that government defines geographical areas of monopoly is enough to dispel this myth. It is very disingenuous to pretend that socialism is capitalism and then use the failures of that socialism to decry capitalism. This is self-contradictory. "Public everything would be cheaper. It would not be cheaper." Why not? Competition in the private sector has led to cheaper and better food, cars, televisions, computers, shoes, clothes, household appliances, wall-to-wall carpeting, exotic pets, you name it. Find me an example where competition in a free market did not lead to lower prices and/or better quality goods or services. No, healthcare is a service, like plumbing, veterinary care, dentistry, roofing, car repair, IT consultancy, etc. And in all those fields the free market has successfully delivered better quality at less cost over time. So savings in the free market have never been obtained with, for example, new technology? All inventions from the spinning jenny to computerised inventorying systems have had absolutely no impact on prices? Government is unlike any enterprise since it is the exercise of arbitrary and coercive power. Business is the exercise of trade and co-operation. You cannot compare the two. Ever. Business practices are suitable for everything. The law of scarcity dictates that we cannot possibly have all the healthcare we want. Human preferences dictate that we wouldn't want it anyway. The free market simply lets people choose what healthcare they want, rather than allowing bureaucrats and politicians to choose for them. Yes, that's right. And all you left wingers just want to round up people and shoot them, like Lenin or Mao. The US healthcare system is just another example of how state-run business doesn't work. Canada and the US are two different ways for government to try and run healthcare, and both have (unsurprisingly) failed. Compare to Singapore, where a total lack of public healthcare has not stopped the populace from having an average lifespan in excess of both the USA and Canada. Private sector inefficiencies? Don't make me laugh. Was the Soviet Union efficient? It should have been - no private sector there! The difference is that inefficiencies in the private sector are ultimately borne by investors, who choose to bear them of their own free will. Inefficiencies in the public sector are borne of everyone, usually against their will.

I would suggest that when your son is old enough to have his own income, mature enough to hold down a job, and independent enough to take himself down to the store to buy these games, he's mature enough to play them. If he isn't buying these games with his own income, that means you're supplying them or allowing them to be supplied to him. Either way, you are the enabler. Did this "deranged friend" break into your house and force your son to play this videogame? Or did you allow him in as a guest? We see this with everything. Once upon a time the bikini was supposed to be the downfall of our society. Clark Gable spoke an absolutely shocking line in Gone With The Wind that had people outraged, calling for the film to be banned, that it was a bad influence on youth, etc. A hundred years ago, a woman exposing her ankle in public would be a shocking display of public indecency sure to incite lewd acts, rape and so forth. But we have bikinis, and miniskirts, and swearing, and we also seem to have less social problems than the Victorians did. In fact, it seems that the more women look like sex objects, the less they are treated like sex objects. Victorians would not allow women to work or vote. They didn't even grant them legal personhood. The joke that women only have legs to walk from the kitchen to the bedroom was literally true back then. And not only do we have less violent crime than Victorians, we also spend a lot less time going overseas to murder and enslave people with spears and different-coloured skin. Actually, countless studies have shown that advertising is primarily informative. It doesn't make sense to try and "brainwash" people since attempting to convince people that they want something they really don't is a far larger gamble in business than trying to find out what they really want, and then making it. We used to be a lot more violent. Not only did we have more crime in the past, we used the death penalty a lot more. Go back three or more centuries and you find the death penalty being used for almost everything - in England, you could be hanged for impersonating a veteran or loitering on London Bridge. It is also a fact that Western nations, who are freer with speech and press and allow these things you decry, are a lot less warlike and oppressive than other nations where censorship is prevalent. Yes, and two hundred years ago boys of that age (and not much older) would be able to join the army and shoot foreigners. Fegin's gang of cutthroat robber children in Oliver Twist was not a wild fantasy.

They don't. And statists such as yourself don't understand that it is immoral for anyone to make decisions for everyone. The only decisions for a person should be made by that person, and capitalism is the only system that makes that possible or even approaches it. Yes, and consumers pay as little as possible for a product. What a crime! Of course, you can pay workers more, but then your products cost more, and real incomes drop anyway. It's a seesaw, but you're pretending that you can remove the fulcrum. Sorry, but you can't. Furthermore, your answer omits something vital. Businesses don't pay workers enough so that they can get by, they pay the going wage rate for that type of work. You pretend that only businesses set wage rates. This isn't true. Wage rates are in effect negotiated between employers and employees. If you don't believe this, try offering to pay your dentist minimum wage for his work and see what happens. Wrong. Democracy is not freedom at all, it is the opposite. Don't believe me? There are people in jail right now, in our democracy, for doing things with their own money and their own bodies that the state disapproves of. There are people in jail for freely entering into contracts with others, who also entered of their own free will. There are people in jail for speaking their minds on sensitive issues. There are people in jail because they did not want the state to steal their property. There are people in jail whose "crimes" had absolutely no identifiable victims. It goes on, and it always will, because democracy does not grant freedom. It grants some people power over others. Democracy also does not grant equality, but even if it did, why should it? We are not all equal. Some are smart, some are stupid, some are handsome, some ugly. If you are in favour of equality, then you should advocate lobotomy for all those more intelligent than the stupidest in our society, scarring and disfiguration for all those better-looking than the ugliest in our society. You heard. If citizens are pitched against each other, how could capitalism create "powerful multi-national corporations"? In other words, if capitalism makes every man for himself and creates a war of all against all, why is it that tens of thousands of people co-operate with each other for common goals every single day under the capitalist system? Are they? Perhaps you'll show me the corporate armies that exceed the strength of the US military. Perhaps you'll show me the right to confiscate property and imprison people granted to corporations. What harm? Do you think that only corporations have done harm to society, and the state never has? False. Read up on it. It doesn't even make sense - the only point in a "capitalist" raising his wages so that workers can buy more is if he can force them to buy only his products, and not his competitors. How can people who work for you of their own free will be exploited? The only exploited workers live in communist countries, where they are enslaved by the state. Sure, if you don't work you don't get money - but if consumers don't buy your products, you go out of business, too. So it simply isn't true that capitalists run the whole thing. They are dictated to by the consumers. Everyone who has insurance or a savings account - even a chequing account that carries a balance - is a capitalist, by the Marxist definition. The proletariat is dead. Why do that, when we can blame it on people, torture and execute them en masse, like communist regimes always do? I don't care. I don't advocate democracy and I won't defend a system I don't believe in. Current "capitalist" systems are actually more mercantilist than capitalist. Even in "pure" capitalism there are many different schools: Chicagoite (e.g. Milton Friedman), Austrian (e.g. Karl Menger, Ayn Rand), Smithian (e.g. Adam Smith), Rothbardian (e.g. Murray Rothbard, David Friedman), etc. Capitalism is a concept. It's not an acting agent and cannot allocate anything. Under capitalism, economic production is allocated by people, citizens, workers, consumers. Under communism, economic production is allocated by bureaucrats.

At least since then. And you have told me that ROE is the best way of measuring profitability. Yes, I do. And it is not hard to find a definition of mass-marketing: American Heritage Dictionary I think it fair to say that niche-market products are of intentionally limited marketability, whereas mass-market products aren't. Niche markets have built-in exclusivity. In your examples already provided, you have already demonstrated that you know full well the difference between niche and mass markets. So your request for clarification now is strange. It's not your point at all! It's the exact opposite of your point! You have been trying to tell me that niche market enterprises are more profitable, and you think the fact that a mass-market enterprise made far larger profits in a predominantly niche-market industry proves this? What in blazes are you going on about? That's backwards too. Henry Ford developed a low-cost advantage because he wanted the mass market. You pretend that the two are causally connected in a different way. In effect, the mass-market automobile industry created the need for Fords mass production and other cost-cutting measures. Other companies didn't want a mass market and didn't bother with them, until Fords example showed them the greater profits they could make. You're also misinterpreting the evidence, which is pretty sloppy on your part since I already stated the correct interpretation of it in my last post. It was not the case that Fords highest absolute profit was when they were the only mass-market car firm. It was the case that their profits were at their highest point relative to their competitors at that time. Rubbish. I've already proven that it is the mass-marketing enterprises that produce the highest margins. You've offered no refutation. I didn't realise the answer you required was so ridiculously vague. In that case, I can indeed answer it: you should put your next $10 in mass market industries.

So you're a bad parent. My kids have consoles and a computer and they all sit in the rec room. They don't play if neither my wife nor I are there to observe them. What you are doing is taking your failure as a parent and blaming it on the videogames industry. Take an analogy. Let's say you left a bottle of 200 aspirin open on a table. Your kid happened upon them and took them all, and died. Now, aspirin is dangerous, especially in that quantity. But is it the fault of the drug company that your kid died? Or is it your fault?

All of which is true but has no bearing on the discussion. My point is that most companies start roughly equal and where they end up is largely due to their strategies from that point on. 1) Return on equity, return on assets and return on revenues. In all of these criteria the pharmaceutical industry is first on Fortunes profitability list (Fortune does not measure profitability by any other metric). The period is from at least 1999 to the present day. It may well also be true further before that, I didn't bother to research it that far back. 2) Pfizer and Merck are the two most profitable pharmaceutical companies. In November 2001, Pfizer market capitalization stood at $271 billion and Merck at $165 billion. I sense a need to create a distraction thing here. You know the difference between mass-market and niche-market. I'm sure your graduate economics studies covered this. A more interesting point than that: Fords greatest relative growth and profit were made when they were a mass-production company (i.e. mass-marketing) and no other American automobile manufacturer was (source: Wise Research Ltd.). Once other manufacturers embraced Fords techniques, the gap narrowed. It was mass-marketing which enabled Ford to pull ahead of the niche-marketing competition, and mass-marketing enabled that competition (or some of them) to close the gap again. At that time, Ford was indeed more profitable in all metrics than his competitors. This is why his competitors followed suit. And this also answers your question about where the greatest profits came from. No. But why should it? This sounds like a concession. All you need to do now is add that which I have just demonstrated - that mass-market enterprises tend to generate more wealth in relative terms than smaller companies - to this, and you are a Misesian. At least on this particular idea.

Sure - but I think you'll find that the only companies that don't have similar small beginnings are those that are spun off from a large parent company. The most profitable industry is pharmaceuticals, which is dominated by huge mass-marketing companies. The Association for Asian Research finds that the most profitable companies in China (for instance) are found in the fields of real estate, elementary education, book publishing, automobile sales, spectacles, telecommunications and mobile phones, medicine, overseas study intermediaries, and online video games. None of those are really niche-market industries. You may be able to find isolated examples of companies who are making big profits from niches, but the industries that are generating the most profit for both large and small companies are mass-market industries. Now, I don't know where your figures come from. But I looked at Standard and Poor figures as seen in Businessweek, who say that the ten best ROE companies are: UST (consumer products) Moody's (corporate banking and credit) Autozone (consumer products) IMS Health (IT for healthcare companies) Colgate-Palmolive (consumer products) Avon Products (consumer products) Anheuser-Busch (consumer products) Dow Jones (publishing) SLM (education financing) Gilette (consumer products) This is a very different picture from the one your (unnamed) source paints! As I already said, your "logic" rests upon outrageous and downright fraudulent assumptions. Your demonstration rests upon the idea that a company - a typical company - would have a markup of 900%, and when pressed, you could not name one single real-world company that could do such a thing! It seems wherever I look I see the same picture. Mass-marketing gives better returns on initial investment, better ROE, greater dividends, stock growth, etc. Then by that logic, current niche-market companies should be more profitable than current mass-market ones, who have already exhausted their brief high-profit niche-market phase. However, this is absolutely wrong and completely backwards: the niche-market companies make less profit and less return, and mass-market companies begin to make their huge profits and returns once they begin to escape being a niche-market - like Ford, or Sears, or Microsoft. All are making staggeringly larger profits now that they are giants with sales in the tens of millions than when they were small businesses providing a product that most people didn't want or couldn't buy.

But as a general rule, niche marketing companies do not create more wealth and yield a smaller return on investment. It's possible for a niche marketing company to generate more wealth. It's also possible for a person of age 20 and in good physical shape to have a heart attack and die. It just doesn't happen very often. Um... Fords investment did. He and Enzo Ferrari started in similar circumstances, and Ford ended up as a much larger and more profitable company. Very little difference in the startup capital of either company. Certainly not enough to explain the massive disparity between the two today. As I said before, it is possible for a niche marketing company to be handsomely profitable up to a very fixed ceiling, after which greater investment yields fewer and fewer returns and eventually, losses. Your examples don't disprove that. There's no evidence that any of them could be any more profitable than they are now. There's plenty of evidence that a company of similar size but aimed at the mass market would become far more profitable, as Ford outstripped Ferrari by such a huge margin. How could I pretend it didn't exist if you quoted me? Your failure to do so and your petty excuses merely confirm my initial suspicion: you are resorting to lies to defend the indefensible. Prove it. Why else is Ford so much more profitable both in relative and absolute terms than Ferrari? Mindlessly saying "drivel" is all well and good, but since you can't prove it, all you do is reinforce the idea that it isn't! No. I'm saying that as a general rule, mass-marketing enterprises will create more wealth than niche-marketing ones. I notice that you've conveniently dropped the idea of return on shares, since that which you were arguing before has now swung against you. You also don't seem to understand that what you have said above can be perfectly true and also support the idea that mass-marketing enterprises create more wealth. It's also worth noting that the division of Ford that makes the most profit is their financing and credit services. These services are much easier to sell to a mass market than to a niche, since the rich generally don't require credit services (I doubt that anybody buys a Ferrari on credit - if you have reached the affluence where you can buy a brand-new Ferrari, you are probably giving credit, not accepting it). This also reinforces the notion of the mass-marketing enterprise as the superior profit-generator. Go ahead. But I don't see any evidence from you. You have only provided one citation, which I already debunked. You offered no rebuttal to my objections, so until you do your evidence is worthless in this discussion. What I am seeing from you is more economics-as-religion in the vein of Keynes, Marx or Galbraith - when the facts don't fit the theory, the facts must be wrong. As I said, the empirical evidence against you is overwhelming. The Fords, Waltons, Sears, Gates, Dells, Bransons, and so forth have amassed far greater wealth from their mass-market enterprises than the most successful of the niche-marketers have: the Ferraris, Tiffanys, the four guys who started Sun Microsystems, etc. In fact, when looking at the Forbes Richest People list, those who created the majority of their wealth (rather than inheriting it) are almost all mass-marketers, and the mass-marketers are overwhelmingly richer than the niche-marketers. The top ten richest people in the world only include one man who has not primarily derived his wealth from at least one mass-marketing company: Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud. Which just proves the Misesian point: if you're an entrepreneur, and you want to get rich, better be a mass-marketer.

That is what you are claiming? I thought you were claiming that niche marketing companies create more wealth than mass marketing ones because wealth can only be measured in terms of return on investment. And you didn't even establish that niche-marketing enterprises do make higher returns! Quite the climb-down. Or is it just deceptive evasion? Take a look again. In 2003, Ferrari created $2.6m. In 2004, Ford created $3,470m. Who created the most wealth? In other words, is this equation accurate: 3,740 > 2.6? If we're comparing shares, according to Yahoo! Finance, Fiat SpA (Ferraris parent company) in 2003 paid -2.18 Euros per share. Ford paid 40 cents per share in 2003. Ford shares are $11.46, Fiat sells for $7.2. The last time Fiat made a profit was in 2000, and that gave a return of about 0.05 cents per dollar invested against approximately 10 cents the same dollar of Ford stock would have made in the same year (dividends). So again, Ford is and was really a much better buy. Whose wealth grew more, Henry Fords or Enzo Ferraris? Whose company just made 1,300 times as much profit as the others? And what was the primary difference? I'll tell you: from the outset, Ford was a mass-market company, whereas Ferrari was a niche-market specialist. That isn't what you originally said. Sorry, but I don't believe you. If you have to make fraudulent and outrageous assumptions to illustrate a "flaw" in a theory, that just enhances the credibility of the theory. Show me. Try a real-world example this time. Where? Quote me so doing. Yes. Ford vs. Ferrari being a prime example. At the founding of each company, Ford was a much smarter investment because it was designed as a mass-marketing enterprise. As each company has progressed, this has been borne out. Ford makes huge and generally increasing profits. Ferrari barely keeps itself afloat. Ford is larger in terms of market share and wealth than it was 50 years ago. Ferrari hasn't really progressed all that much. So the mass-marketing enterprise is the better investment, and why? Because you can make more money selling to the masses. Von Mises was right. You are wrong. And that, furthermore, is why you can't find a credible source to concur with your half-baked ideas.