Bribery - To bribe someone means to trade economic power for coercive power. The goal of libertarianism is to limit force towards attaining justice. With a solid ground-work of property rights, identifying bribery and corruption would be easy, because the coercive powers used would be indefensible to customers. No one would bribe a powerful PDA to use emminent domain, for instance, because it potentially risks losing a large portion of their customer base and opening them up to forceful resistance (to attain justice) by competitors, driving up costs, either in penalties or defense, to both the briber and the corrupt PDA.
The bribery you talk about is wildly occurring today at the federal government level. Violent force is used to prevent the market from operating freely, to the benefit of special interests who lobby government. Increasing government funding or oversight committees will not solve this problem. The real problem is that government’s authority is not challenged. If government were not able to make men rich with public funds or regulatory power, no one would be bribing them. Too often people blame the lobbyists and big business, but they are not the ones using force unjustly. If such powers were decentralized and reserved to the states, corruption would cause the productive to seek greener pastures. If geographical monopolies of force were entirely eliminated, the transaction costs of resisting unjust government would be much, much further decreased.
Economies of scale - the best means of creating economy of scale is by increasing capital designed to mass produce. however, the greater the economy of scale demanded, the more sensative capital investment will be. there is a longer period before the investment can produce a consumer product. if there is not enough consumer demand for the product, the investment will be unprofitable. and if the company is vertically-oriented (produces a good through mutliple stages of capital) with specialized capital, there may be no market mechanisms to know which stages are being profitably run and which are not, which means inefficiency.
beyond a certain degree, in a free market, there is no economy of scale. there is in fact the opposite.
now look at the non-free market of government intervention. there’s regressive regulatory compliance costs, and the legal or lobbyist costs surrounding them. there’s tax structure, which promotes reinvestment, constant growth, and acquisitions, rather than specialization and high dividend payouts. there’s corporate welfare. there’s the vital industries heavily regulated by the government - such as medicine, media, agriculture, and banking that tie into almost all others. finally there’s big labor’s legal privileges. what is the average cost of incorporation?
and once you get to globalism, you find manufacturing processes that span multiple countries, not because this is more efficient in a free market, but because large-scale companies can exploit the various inconsistencies in government policies throughout these nations.
The freest and most technologically intense sector is the information technology sector. This is the sector with the largest competition, especially in hardware where IP law isn’t being abused.
