Note also that some sectors are natural monopolies.
You seem to be trying to paint market forces as some kind of democratic-like institution, but in many cases they’re flat-out plutocratic.
The poster and I had that conversation back around post #28. Just an FYI post. 
Ye…es well, markets tend to form everywhere and for everything, but it’s hard to argue that markets without law and order would produce socially positive(forget optimal) results.
Not you, definitely, but IMO, it’s the unstated assumption behind many calls for greater regulation, which are fairly common, on this board and elsewhere.
Yes, exactly! Electronic components have become a commodity produced by a few large firms, and this reduces the entry barriers for firms which use electronic components in their final products. Contract manufacturing is thus making it much easier for firms to innovate and break down monopoly power.
Your argument is very religious, ironically. No thing can exist without regulation. Let there be a regulator, who will thus exist
Not to say that it isn’t always true either. One example that I’ve seen argued quite well on these boards is SCUBA diving equipment. I’ve never seen a convincing response to that. Would you care to attempt one?
Complicated systems produce emergent high-level behaviors that cannot be directly correlated with low-level events within those systems.
So large free markets will inevitably generate undesirable emergent effects that will not be immediately apparent to the people making decisions within that market. For example, when the automobile was introduced, almost nobody grasped the potential for wide-scale car ownership to turn large cities into smog-choked hellholes. Nobody “wanted” their city to be a smog-choked hellhole. That was an entirely undesirable side-effect of people pursuing what they did want: convenient personal transportation. So it would be ridiculous to claim that since people were free to choose whether or not to buy a car, the transformation of cities into smog-choked hellholes was an expression of what people wanted.
The market is frequently an ass.
It’s no more religious than saying you can’t have a well made building without skilled builders. Incompetents put up bad buildings, and an unregulated market will be a corrupt mess.
I don’t understand the question (or know much about SCUBA equipment).
I haven’t read the whole thread, but no, on the contrary, those who espouse neoliberalism are either gaining something from it, or are delusional. Neoliberalism has failed for most people, just as Marxism-Leninism failed, and the challenge that now confronts us is to see if we can bring down the current system and replace it with something more positive.
Some free-marketeers are honest people, who dislike neoliberalism for its severe market distortions. They readily point out that corporations gain their power by using the state. I respect this honesty, but they are still delusional, like the mirror image of Trotskyists. You know how Trotskyists claim that everything went wrong once Stalin took over, and they use terms like “degenerated workers’ state” and “deformed workers’ state” to refer to the Soviet Union and its neighbors, among other regimes? My question for them is why this shift is seemingly inevitable in the authoritarian, Leninist model they still defend.
Well, my question for the capitalists, Randroids, and people who stole the word “libertarian” is why attempts to make markets more free always undergo the same kind of unfree, rent-seeking, authoritarian shift. They’re even more obsolete than the neoliberals, who at least can countenance reforms sometimes, and even face the music when things don’t go according to plan.
There are indeed alternatives. I have mine, and I study and work with those who have others. About 12-15 years ago, this was a common conversation, and the issues have not gone away. A better world is possible, a better world is necessary, and a better world is on the march.
You said no social system can exist without regulation. Surely this includes the regulators?
And, here’s an example of a market that exists without regulation (not saying that this is necessarily replicable, only that for your absolute statement to hold, you need to rebut this) -
Not that I’ve seen. Most calls for greater regulation are in response to specific instances where companies caused problems. In many cases short term considerations will force companies to do things dangerous in the long term, which can only be cured by regulation. I’ve seen no one here who don’t think lobbyists exist.
I thought you were talking about manufacturers, not customers of manufacturers. Even there I don’t quite agree. 40 years ago any idiot could design and build a board by himself (I did one for my Bachelors Thesis.) When Sun Microsystems started they built their first systems themselves. Today with tiny surface mount devices you can’t go into your garage and build stuff yourself. Solectron and Celestica and the like will let you ramp more easily, but I don’t know if there are more low volume factories today than 20 years ago. So I’d say it was a wash.
Well, of course. “Plutocracy” means “power of wealth,” and where has wealth more power than in the marketplace?
BTW, there is no Randian theory of economics. Anything in Objectivism that tends to support a free market is a matter of ethics, not economics. Ayn Rand fancied herself a philosopher, but never even pretended to be an economist.
No, I didn’t say that. I said that the system would be corrupt.
<shrug> Assuming that’s true, that just makes it an aberration in the face of many thousands of counterexamples across thousands of years.
I think it’s insulting to Marxists to lump them in with those laissez-faire Pollyannas.
To the OP: There was a time when all theological beliefs other than Christianity were “obsolete”–if you were only listening to the Christian Church. It didn’t make Christianity true.
And, economics being a science of a kind (less of one than physics, more of one than astrology), “theories” would be a better term than “ideologies.”
Except in this case it is an ideology, or even a faith. Something they believe because they want to believe, even in the face of the evidence.
That kind of thinking got us unregulated derivatives. I think we need to understand that under-regulation is a natural impulse for politicians and public servants as well.
Don’t hand the country to martinets, but don’t be so easy-going that you let the really irresponsible and the sociopathic take over.
Exactly. Marxism worked. Not well, mind you, but well enough that very large countries were able to function with their economies organized along Marxist lines. Factories still made stuff, farmers still grew food, schools stayed open, borders were defended. There were huge inefficiencies, of course, and horrible brutality was common, but Marxism only looks like an abject failure when you compare it to the regulated market economies of the west. It was certainly a step up from the feudalism that it often replaced.
I’ll start taking the free-market absolutists seriously when they can demonstrate a similar measure of real-world success. Communism defeated Hitler and put the first man in space. What achievements can libertarianism point to? Record-breaking dumpling production in Kowloon Walled City?
I’m sure that is true of political Libertarians and Objectivists, but is it true of every economist of the Austrian or Chicago School?
No; I assume many are just corrupt.
N.B.: Everything you’re saying is about Soviet Communism/Stalinism and systems modeled on it. Whether that system is “Marxism” or not is a debate for another thread, if Board interest would support it – probably not – but certainly much-debated among Marxists.
Quite true, except for certain startling instances where it was worse – the Holodomor, the Great Leap Forward, the Killing Fields – but, yes, on the whole a step up from feudalism. And, yes, so long as lunatics are not running it – sometimes, even when they are – even the Stalinist model of totalitarian socialism does work – for limited purposes, i.e., heavy capital formation. It’s what you do if you want to industrialize a country in a hurry. In 1924 Stalin took control of a country that always had been a backward, laughable peasant Ruritania, marginally industrialized by the onset of WWI and that little industry devastated by that war and the Russian Civil War, and – by methods which were bloody, brutal, repressive, wasteful, but effective – by 1939 had turned it into an industrial power capable of going head-to-head with Hitler’s Germany; and Germany had always been at the leading edge of the Industrial Revolution. No way could that have happened, if Russia had had a free-market system during that period.
OTOH, central economic planning, lacking the constant corrective feedback of competitive market performance and consumer demand-pressure, is spectacularly inept at any kind of fine-tuning. Moreover, it does not encourage innovation very well. No state planner would ever have thought of something like the Sony Walkman, or the Pet Rock, or fabric softener. (Whether that is an argument for or against Stalinism is open to debate.)
From Economics Explained, by Robert Heilbroner and Lester Thurow:
Korea’s another example, practically a controlled experiment: Two neighboring, culturally-identical peasant-countries industrializing at the same time, one Stalinist, the other not. I’ve read that up through the 1970s, the North Koreans were actually eating better than the South Koreans. But then NK’s economic growth hit a wall, and SK caught up and kept on going.