Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism

Selfishness, Greed and Capitalismtends to lead to lower prices. Reducing barriers to entryforces down prices and, all other things being equal, reducesprofit margins. As Harris and Seldon (1959: 48) write,‘ ‘‘perfect” competition is a figment of the imagination, althougha useful one. It is still true that the less imperfecta market, and the more it approaches the “perfect” modelof theory, the better results it might yield in terms of costsand prices.’It is not necessary for a totally free market to exist for thebenefits of competition to be shown empirically, nor doesa fantasy world of perfect competition have to be createdfor the benefits of competition to be felt. And it is emphaticallynot the case that if one pays more than cost price fora product then ‘the whole edifice of neoliberal economicscollapses’, as Richard Murphy claims (Murphy 2011: 45). 1How different this is from state socialism in which thecloser a country gets to the ideal of central planning, theworse the outcomes become (and how ironic that thosewho criticise the free market for its imperfect competitionpropose government monopoly as the solution).1 Economists ‘assume that every business sells every product itmakes at what is called the marginal cost of production. Thatmeans all they want back for the product they sell is the precisecost they incur for making the precise item they have sold. So ifthey sold you, for example, an MP3 download then they not onlyshould but must, if this model of utopia described by neoliberaleconomists is to work, charge you just exactly what it cost them tomake the MP3 download they sold to you. I kid you not: the wholeedifice of neoliberal economics and the mantra so often repeatedthat business is more efficient than government is based on thistype of logic.’ (Murphy 2011: 44–45).24