General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: New Leader Of UK's Green Party: Nuclear Power Is The Betamax Of The Energy World [View all]A) quality - Some quality controls, but they controlled the entire city, so you had no recourse for shoddy manufacture
B) skills - kept skills to themselves, no outsiders. If you wanted to learn something, you had to go to a guild.
C) innovation - If they didn't like it, they suppressed it. Kept to more "traditional" methods, even if they were inefficient.
D) free trade - pretty much the same thing as A. you had to buy from the city guild, no going somewhere cheaper.
E) technological innovation - Same as C.
F) technology transfer - Same as B.
G) business development - really didn't care about expanding business if times were good.
They basically kept information to themselves, which happened during a time of no "intellectual property" stifling technological development. If there were no "intellectual property" protected by nation-states, the same thing would happen. I would agree that patents and copyrights are too long, but I think that it is necessary.
Just because I may agree with something someone says, or it was in an article, doesn't mean I subscribe to everything they say. That is a fallacy.
PS. Karl Marx in his Communist Manifesto also criticized the guild system for its rigid gradation of social rank and the relation of oppressor/oppressed entailed by this system. From this time comes the low regard in which some people hold the guilds to this day. In part due to their own inability to control unruly corporate behavior, the tide turned against the guilds.
I'm assuming that if Marx says it, then you'll agree with it, whereas, if Ogilvie says it, you won't.