I'm reading The Creature from Jekyll Island, which a Daily Kos member summarized here. The book is an excellent read but Griffin's ideology has one strange flaw. In Griffin's version of history the march of pure capitalism towards economic freedom for all is time and time again thwarted by the evil forces of socialism. The forces of socialism include some politicians and economists but mostly it is led by very rich heads and owners of very large corporations. That is to say in this book capitalism is defeated time and again by, well, those with capital.
Reading this book is sort of like reading the fascinating history of a sky diver whose parachute is preventing him from enjoying free fall. Obviously the capitalists themselves are using market tricks like cartels, monopolies, etc. to avoid the competition that Griffin wants them to wallow in - a cursory reading of Schumpeter will tell you this is inevitable. What interests me is how so many brilliant men like Griffin have this take on competitive systems...
I was watching Walking with Dinosaurs with my 6 year old so and he was constantly asking what would happen if that T. Rex were in our neighborhood - could we take it? I told him that humans are fiercer than a T. Rex but that wasn't the point of the movie. But for many libertarians and free market ideologues that is exactly the point. Evolution, the original competitive system, created many fierce competitors - each more ruthlessly efficient than the last. Now I'm just as proud of humans as they are but that’s not what happened at all.
The fact is that competitive systems don't find optimal solutions. They collapse to steady state solutions. By definition, when the system hits such a solution it stays in it a long time. For the evolution of predators that steady state solution was the dinosaurs. They were on the planet for hundreds of millions of years and then from Wikipedia Timeline of evolution
The Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (sixth extinction event) wipes out about half of all animal species including all non-avian dinosaurs, probably because of a cooling of the climate precipitated by the giant impact of an asteroid: iridium powder from the asteroid forms a layer that covers the whole Earth. Creation of the Chicxulub Crater (170 km across, now half-submerged off the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico). Without the presence of the giant and diurnal dinosaurs, mammals can increase in diversity and size. Some will later return back to the sea (whales, sirenians, seals) and others will evolve flight (bats). A group of small, nocturnal and arboreal, insect-eating mammals called the Archonta branches into what will be the primates, treeshrews, and bats.
As primitive as the dinosaurs, like giant competition free corporations, are compared to humans without that asteroid they rule the day forever. Evolution only forces a solution, not the best solution, and the same goes for free market forces. Lucky for primates and free market ideologues asteroids abound and one of them peak oil, global warming, global debt will hit and shake things up. But I think a more reasonable approach would have been for everyone to accept the necessity of strong government regulations to prevent global markets collapsing into the current state.