Yes, it is a false dichotomy, and politics are in fact much more complicated than that.

Yep. The real battle is wealthies vs poors.

Everything else is just propaganda.

The term "wage slave" is a cop-out. People -- all of us -- are stomach-slaves, not wage-slaves.

I'm so glad that you mentioned railroads because there is a great book, Railroads and Regulation by Gabriel Kolko about the capitalist anti-competiton regulation of the railroad industry that caused their concentration. If you wanna read about it, an essay about it is called "Big Business and the Rise of American Statism" inside of Markets Not Capitalism (freely available online). I'll summarize what it says tho:

Every time big railroad magnates tried to form a cartel to fix prices, a smaller competitor would lower rates and steal all the customers; freight rates went wayy down in this time period. The big railroad owners (like JP Morgan's clients) lobbied for the ICC not to regulate them, but to regulate their competitors. They wanted the government to make price-cutting illegal (calling it rebates or discrimination).

Regarding sanitary packages, the essay _also addresses this_: the big Chicago meatpackers supported regulations because the compliance costs were so high they drove small local butchers and slaughterhouses out of business. The "sanitary" laws were a weapon to kill local competition, not a way to keep food safe

Oops I forgot to respond to the other things you mentioned. That list of removed obstacles is technically correct, but it misses that those things were mostly subsidized

1. Regarding transportation, the interstate highway system and the containerization infrastructure (ports, dredging, naval security) were massive state subsidies to long-distance distribution. If Walmart had to pay the full property tax and maintenance cost of every mile of road their trucks used, their economies of scale would evaporate instantly. The state artificially lowered the cost of long distance shipping below the cost of local production. That isn't efficiency, but the taxpayer subsidizing the inefficiency of moving a toothbrush 3,000 miles. (Carson called these "diseconomies of scale")

2. The Uneeda Biscuit era of mass production created a crisis in that high fixed costs meant factories had to run 24/7 to be profitable, they couldn't wait for orders but had to force product onto the market. This required the state to intervene again via imperialism and arguably the creation of a consumer culture to absorb the surplus in the form of advertising and other means.

3. Computers are the most ironic part; Computers and CNC tools actually destroyed the rationale for the large factory, made it possible for a garage shop to produce with the same precision as a General Motors plant ("Homebrew Industrial Revolution" book by Kevin Carson again which in my mind is not one of his most defensible but it's still interesting).

I would argue that IP was the main reason that small shops didn't take over. As physical capital costs dropped, the state ramped up IP laws (patents/copyrights) to protect corporate hierarchies from the decentralization computers should have caused. I think that Big Tech isn't Big because of hardware efficiency but because of the state-enforced monopoly on information

Gets a nod though:

>“freed markets” would naturally tend toward far less concentration of wealth – a world of small firms, worker cooperatives, self-employed artisans, and peer-to-peer production.

And quoting Proudhon

>Property is freedom

Imho insurance networks are also politically agnostic:

  to each according to his need, from each according to his ability

How is control over production not part of the market?

State control over production means instead of letting the free market decide what’s worth producing, the central planners believe they know better than the market (and the 2nd, 3rd order effects) what to produce and how to allocate and price resources and production. It very much removes or diminishes the “market”.

The 38% of Stanford students that claim to be disabled is an ample illustration:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46150715

> someone needs to be getting less for doing more, so that someone else doing less can have more

This is true of all societies, not just socialist ones. In capitalism, it's called philanthropy and charity. The underlying social contract is noblesse oblige, that the right to enjoy the trappings of wealth comes with an obligation to ensure that the poor are reasonably taken care of.

The real difference that socialism poses is not that it should happen at all, but that it should happen by force with the power of the State, due to the wealthy as a class no longer making the independent free choice of discharging such obligations.

I think what they’re getting at with this is that markets can exist without some of nastier parts of capitalism (e.g. a co-op operates in a market economy) but so much of the prevailing wisdom (both positive and negative) about capitalism equates markets with capital’s power-distribution function.

Marginalism just means that the specific, concrete good or thing as the object of choice is the object of people's action and therefore valuation. Marginalism does not require having a market price, but quantitative calculations of accounting magnitudes, like profits, losses, cost, revenue, do require market prices.

I don't know if I totally understand these theories but I think modern market anarchists would say that a "freed" (anti-capitalist) market does use prices, and further strips rent/interest/privilege to make those prices accurately reflect subjective cost of labor as well. A freed market would still need commons rules, democratic decisions, norms, hard constraints, which isn't a contradiction in the system. I've seen Carson synthesize marginalism and LTV, that marginal utility decides price in more short term and competition drives cost to labor over the long term, as under the distorting effects of capitalism, these two are further apart than they need be.

> Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body.

Is this not the case with capitalism, right now? Except with political influence being led with money? The people with power, control, and political influence right now are absolutely not functioning in favour of the body.

> Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits.

I'm so glad that you're equating me, and people like me, who the system repeatedly failed over and over, and who could be functional if I was able to afford even a minimum of help and support for my situation, to cells being shed in a body. This doesn't feel dehumanising at all.

The fact of the matter is that there is a very Gattaca-like system that exists right now in the world. It brands you valid or invalid based on values like inherited wealth, social class, race, mental health, etc. People who are branded as "invalid" are an underclass who could be functional, and contribute to society, and perhaps already are contributing to society in ways that are not accounted for in pure economic value (For example, I have talked a great many number of people out of suicide over the last ten years), and yet none of the support given to "valids" is given, and when it is, it is a bureaucratic fight to get it (I personally am thinking about a friend who is currently working as a graphic designer, who had a long period of disability and had to fight for support through the court system. Not because it was an abnormal case, but because the disability support system is set up to automatically deny support, and the system (as any caseworker will tell you) relies on the vast majority either dying or giving up, rather than suing them).

To put it mildly, this feels like a leaky metaphor. I won't say the rest of what came into my mind, to keep things civil.

Ahh yes, yet another vehicle to move public money to the private markets, continuing to prop them up for the current retirees.