His struggles with the East India Company show clearly how a small man can be made larger than the greatest monopolist through a simple grant of privilege. Taboo’s protagonist, James Delany, makes this clear as he bargains with the US and Great Britain for a tea monopoly for his company, which consists only of himself. If anything, their size is a result of the political power invested in them. Monopolies don’t just appear spontaneously, and they aren’t defined simply by their size. The main characters know government is the source of lasting economic power, and the dramatic tension arises from not knowing which government will be the one to distribute privileges, or to whom. Returning to Taboo, what separates it is a frank acknowledgment of what monopoly is. Consumers lose their bargaining power because the law eliminates choice. Audiences see these behaviors in their everyday lives, but misunderstand what causes them: rather than “ unregulated” markets, they are consequences of legal privileges that protect companies from customers instead of leaving them at their mercy.
#Fx taboo iflicks free#
Such behavior is thought to represent the logic of free markets. These are the firms that cheat their employees, ignore their safety, attack peaceful strikers, or dump toxic waste on their neighbors. But this error usually involves fictional firms that ignore the law and their customers. The most important example is the State itself, which is a monopolist of violence. The second error involves blaming free markets for the behavior of monopolists. Evil must be lurking behind the scenes if the corporate headquarters is more than four stories tall. Instead, size and corporate identity are thought to correlate strictly with nearly unstoppable economic and legal power. In fact, it’s rare to find any hint that profits are fleeting or that they could depend on the whims of consumers. Few shows are willing to acknowledge that success in the market might signal that an entrepreneur is making society better off. The first is the problem of the "evil corporation." For many people, a large company with few competitors is automatically a monopoly.
The trouble is that pop art tends to suffer from one of two problems: it either calls things monopolies that aren’t, or it accurately depicts monopolies without realizing what they are. In pop culture, monopoly as such isn’t a taboo subject in fact, it’s everywhere. Unfortunately, this understanding of monopoly is usually lost on the art world. It also has a distinguished pedigree in economics, where it emerged and evolved through the works of Carl Menger, Frank Fetter, Vernon Mund, Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and others. This is not simply a convenient definition: it reflects how the term has been understood for most of economic history. In other words, monopoly was and is a legal barrier to entry. Historical rulers singled out specific companies as beneficiaries, which in turn created competition for political privileges at the expense of the public. The term has long been used in this sense to mean a grant of exclusive rights to produce and trade in certain regions or goods. In this sense, the show violates a pop culture taboo by calling monopoly what it is: a grant of privilege from the State. In particular, the setting of Taboo means that monopolies are depicted more as they were historically rather than as they are understood today in popular culture or in unrealistic economic models of competition. In this sense, it’s one of the most realistic portrayals of monopoly on the small screen.
To put it bluntly, this is not a story about the wonders of the free market, but about the evil things people do to restrain trade and mold society to their own desires rather than to serve others.
At the center of the drama is the East India Company, the classical monopolist par excellence. The stakes are high - “all the tea in China” - and governments are willing to use any means necessary to dominate this enormous market. Set in 1814, Taboo’s story revolves around political disputes over trade monopolies. Taboo calls monopoly what it is: a grant of privilege from the State.
#Fx taboo iflicks tv#
But it’s also something rarer still: a TV show that understands the economics of monopoly. Taboo is the dark and brooding saga of mystical cannibal tea traders you’ve always wanted.
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