On Sep 9, 9:59 pm, Immortalist yahoo.com> wrote:

Such organizations without the additional power and sanction of the
state, granting them powers they could not acquire in the unimpeded
market itself, are not of any great significance politically - and
actually not economically either. The closest such entities ever came
to actual existence were the attempts to form "Trusts" in the late
19th Cent. with the idea in mind of limiting competition and
preventing prices from continually falling in what - ironically - even
the capitalists of the day called "dog eat dog competition". Except
these "Trusts" never succeeded for very long, whether through internal
disagreements or the inherent power of the competitive market to
render them ineffective. Prices just kept on falling.

Do you know we actually had *deflation* in the latter part of the 19th
Cent.! And this in the era of the so-called "Robber Barons" who
supposedly had the power to charge whatever they wanted and to rape
the public with exorbitant prices. Symbolic of the era, at one point
the "notorious" Commodore Vanderbilt to supposedly drive his
competitors out of business offered free passage on his Hudson River
lines!! Such was the actuality of the market at the time - very
different from the myths perpetrated by its socialist enemies. The so-
called "muckrakers" of the era are now known to have been unbridled
liars, which hasn't stopped those lies from transforming into the
received wisdom of the history of the period.

The fascism/corporatism you are concerned about cannot happen without
the sanction of the state, granting companies powers they would not -
and could not - acquire in the unimpeded market. That granting of
power however has nothing whatever to do with free market ideology and
was just as much opposed by the (true) liberals of the era as outright
socialism - and is just as much opposed by them today.

Fred Weiss