22. The Tyranny of The Bookstore

Any college student across the country could tell you how frustrating the textbook system is. Prices are too high, The buybacks and sellbacks are under-advertised almost as if to fool students into missing them, and books are made to be available only through the bookstore. You're forced to play by their rules--rules which are unfair.

If The Bookstore is a profit-making entity, why doesn't competition do its perfect work and drive them to caterer to the customers needs? With a free-market system about "The customer is always right"how do they get away with forcing the customer to bow to their wishes?

The problem lies in the definition of the textbook market: It is far from a free-market system--it actually more closely resembles a government-controlled market with government created monopolies. Much like a government patenting the production of products the University collaborates with the bookstore making it impossible for students to buy books elsewhere--otherwise they fail the course and do not get their degree from the University.

By the way of definition the bookstore is a firm with no private authority over consumers and the University is an entity with real authority over the consumer-students who have willingly surrendered some of their freedoms when affirmatively responding to their acceptance letter. So in essence, because the bookstore collaborates with the University the bookstore can use the Universities authority to impose prices upon consumers. This changes the rules of the economic system meaning that students must live in both a world of free-market rules off of campus as well as socialistic rules imposed on campus.

Looking at the example of the University Bookstore, why do we as rational human beings choose to give up our freedoms to control-based economies rather than playing simply by the rules of the free-market? The answer is rational: Humans choose a system that benefits them now. When people loose or suffer losses playing by the free-market systems rules they seek to recover those losses by changing the rules. Though they lost fair and square they'd rather change the rules to benefit themselves--what they miss is that changing the rules benefits none but themselves. They also miss the fact that placing any type of authority based control over the free-market results in unfettered tyranny. They are like the foolish Israelites who plead with Samuel to be placed under the tyranny of a King.