Again, you're being down voted because you're dishonestly redefining those terms – HN crowd leans heavily capitalist, as you'd expect in a community started by people going to invest or found successful companies.
You weren't advocating for free markets, you are pretending monopolies don't exist except where created by the government. That's simply ahistorical nonsense. Calling people Marxist for quoting Adam Smith would be an amusing troll if you didn't sound like you actually believe it.
> Calling people Marxist for quoting Adam Smith would be an amusing troll if you didn't sound like you actually believe it.
It's not as big of a stretch as it might sound as first; there a number of ways in which Smith was more like Marx than like a modern capitalist (and plenty of ways in which he was far from either, particularly his identification of the feudal landed aristocracy -- explicitly and particularly as opposed to the mercantile/capitalist class -- as the class whose interests were most naturally aligned with the common interest. (Though one who shared Smith's concerns about the mercantile class might see Marx's investment in the proletariat as the only solution given the demonstrated failure of the landed aristocracy, as such, as a viable class in the face of capitalism, so even that view could be seen as less incompatible with Marxism than with modern capitalism.)
To be clear, its ridiculous to call some one a Marxist just because they quote Smith, but not as ridiculous as it might seem from the naive association of Smith with capitalism and Marx with its opposition.
For clarity: all of the comments citing Adam Smith actually showed up later, after I had made a comment about Marx. So the Marx comment was not in response to Adam Smith quotes.
Even ignoring the question using a heavily-biased resource, that page would not need to mention “government-sanctioned monopolies” if there were in fact no other kind.
The definition of "monopoly" in terms of government sanction is very common (its one of two common legal definitions); of course, the other common legal definition (and the more common economic definition) is "
the ownership or control of so large a part of the market- supply or output of a given commodity as to stitle competition, restrict the freedom of commerce, and give the monopolist control over prices." [1]
There's obviously a pretty fundamental problem with any discussion of economics which limits itself to the former kind of monopoly and fails to at least discuss the latter kind (even if it uses a different name for it for some reason). And there's equally obviously a problem with any discussion of monopoly in economics which ignores that the use of the term in economics usually means the latter, not the former (while in law, "monopoly" without other qualifications in certain contexts does mean the former, though in other contexts -- e.g., anti-trust, it means the latter.)
"A monopoly is a grant of special privilege by the State, reserving a certain area of production to one particular individual or group." in bold in the middle of the page.
If I can't quote a university that advocates for the Austrian view without you labeling it bias, there's no point to this discussion.
You accused me of redefining monopoly. I point to an entire school of economics that defines monopoly as I defined it. You dismiss it as bias.
You weren't advocating for free markets, you are pretending monopolies don't exist except where created by the government. That's simply ahistorical nonsense. Calling people Marxist for quoting Adam Smith would be an amusing troll if you didn't sound like you actually believe it.