That depends on what you mean by abuses. Most of the complaints leveled against the railroads by the farmers had more to do with the fact that the railroads charged more to move things from isolated areas than they did to move the same weight the same distance from more populated (and thus served by more than one line) areas. But isn’t this simply supply and demand? Don’t the regulations which require railroads to refrain from this sort of pricing violate your ideal of non interference with S&D?
Usually. Greed works very well for this. For instance, you have a natural monopoly on your individual labor. If I need the services of MMI, I have to deal with you. I can’t contract with another vendor unless I want the services of some other person.
Agreed. I’m not entirely convinced that OPEC is a coercive monopoly. They certainly have a lot of power over the oil market (Saudi Arabia in particular). But does this mean that they can prevent others from drilling oil? Doesn’t the fact that we have other oil reserves prevent OPEC from raising prices astronomically? Isn’t their power in the oil market driven simply by the laws of supply and demand?
I would be most appreciative if you would post any book titles somewhere here. I am always on the lookout for a good treatise on this issue.
Well, I’ve done it before, I’ll likely do it again.
Well, again, you have to define what you mean by interference. SentientMeat seems to think that a police force constitutes interference in the market.
Far be it from me to try and influence your fetishes in any way whatsoever. Whats good for the goose and all that.
Absent competition, there is no difference between disliking a product and disliking the category of product. The presence of alternatives enables the possibility of dissent, either in the realm of disliking a company’s politics to its quality of product and/or service.
Again, the idea being that in free markets competition will naturally arise to fill economically viable needs by giving alternatives. This is as true for lifestyles (product categories) as it is for individual product types (direct competition).
This is very closely related to the freedom of a market. After we cover the freedom to dissent politically, we cover the idea of multiple publications, some directly competing (different news sources), others indirectly competing (different forms of printed materials).
What? By any stretch of the imagination, the above easily have their place in the economic realms as much as the political realm. One can suggest a freedom of speech, but disallow the purchase of printed materials. Am I supposed to think this will not impact what I can read?
As this anarchist is so often reminded, I am free to leave the country and find one that suits my needs, or to reshape the current one through existing mechanisms.
I must say that in some cases, no, their definitions are simply no more important, useful or fundamental than their spelling.
Again, apologies if you feel I misrepresent you. (In my defence, clearly there are economic rightists such as cckerberos who think, like me, that eg. privatised policing is more free-market than less.)
Well, if this was genuinely causing you actual suffering rather than mere dissatisfaction, I’d say that the plasma TV’s absence would not be the cause, merely a superfical correlation: I would venture that the cause was some kind of diagnosable mental illness. Again, I do think that government is equally justified in addressing suffering caused by mental illness as suffering caused by crime.
I only get one vote. I attempt to offer a reasonable principle by which to vote, and by which to forment policy, as you do. I believe you are stretching the meaning of the word “suffering” way past breaking point, but you are again free to consider such a definition useful if you wish.
Well, this merely moves us a step back and requires a definition of “force”, which I still feel is less easily identifiable than genuine suffering. In any case, I do not believe that the soundness of a principle should solely be measured by how vulnerable it is to wordplay and sophistry. These threads allow us to present our reasoning for which box we ticked and come to agreement, or disagreement, about how various terms might reasonably be used. I consider feasibly preventable suffering (“suffering” usually being medically diagnosable) to be socially oppressive, making the people less free. You ticked another box for different reasons, which you explained. This is perhaps all we can do here - I think that this is at least far preferable to the partisan squabbling which passes for “politics” in other GD threads!
C’mon, John, what you’re essentially saying is that you don’t give a damn if people starve or are homeless, so long as your ideological itch gets scratched. And I do find that scary.
How on earth do you get this from John’s statement? The question is not “is a completely free market a nice thing to have,” or “is complete freedom fluffy and happy,” it’s asking whether in general, a freer market indicates freer people. Preference is not involved in this question in the slightest. John says that freedom does not entail unmitigated benefits, and he’s quite right. How you twist this to claim that he doesn’t give a damn about suffering is beyond me, frankly.
Precisely so. Therefore a “free” market requires some kind of government regulation to become or remain free.
This would include not only police functions to prevent stealing, but truth in advertising, granting and enforcing patents and copyrights, and other activities designed to ensure that the producers and consumers participating in a market have the accurate information and un-coerced opportunity to make rational decisions.
Fundamental disagreement here. Government is well suited only to a few functions, including the function of ensuring a truly free market. Thus the Constitution allocates the police function of national defense and regulation of interstate commerce, as well as granting patents and copyrights, to the federal government. It makes no mention of guaranteeing universal health coverage.
If you believe that the government is equally well suited to address any and all needs of its citizens, then there is essentially no limit on the power of government. Thus its citizens have lost a fundamental freedom, that of being able to tell the government “This is none of your business”. There is then no ability for any citizen to prevent the government from attempting to force him into meeting the needs of any other citizen, or to choose in what way to do so.
Governments and centralized authority have a limited function in economic activity. They may act so as to ensure the free market to operate with maximum efficiency. Steps beyond that are a fundamental mistake.
But thanks agains, SentientMeat, for starting this series of threads. Very interesting and informative.
Just to clarify, I did not say that a market with no government was the “most free”, I said the most free market was one with no governmetal interference in the economy, such as a state-run police department rather than a privatised one where charity paid for policing areas whose residents could not afford the necessary contributions.
OK, but in theory a private organization could carry out the police functions. Department stores, for instance, have their own security. This makes the stores more free, not less, IMO.
The reason we have a public police is to ensure as far as possible that the police functions are carried out impartially, without giving special attention to the organization paying them. A public army is more reliable, by and large, than mercenaries.
But I maintain that government regulation done to maintain public order, property rights, and sufficient correct information makes a market more free, not less. And therefore its participants are more free as well.
No, I don’t feel this distinction is valid. A “free” market (in my sense of “a market regulated so as to be most free”) nearly always maximizes personal freedom for those who participate in it.
Insofar as a private police force is being biased in how it regulates a market, they are making the market less free.
I didn’t mention it before, but I ticked Agree to the OP. I believe a free market always maximizes freedom, and usually maximizes well-being as well.
Public police can also be biased in this regard, and the state monopoly would mean that one could not simply take one’s business elsewhere, to a less biased force.
Again, we’re just explaining our own use of various terms. Thanks for your encouragement - these threads are just as much a product of your input as my instigation.
Well, apart from some communist bogeymen, I think everyone more or less agrees here. As ever, the devil is in the details. Do various degrees of personal and corporate welfare systems help make the market more or less free by maintaining order? Is one person polluting his own property somehow infringing on others’ property rights? Etc.
I cannot recall how I answered this question. I printed out all my answers but that sheet is at home now and I am at work. Likely I chose “agree”, though. If I chose disagree I am not currently aware of what would have caused me to do so. “Freedom to choose” is almost a redundant phrase, and freedom to choose has obvious economic ramifications.
Of course they do, but as has been said, this is a contract entered freely and openly, with the general terms known to all parties beforehand. If we did not enforce such contracts, no one would pay their bills if they got mad. Which means that businesses would have to blacklist patrons (which itself might be termed oppression) and charge more to the rest. And there would be so many holes: businesses would refuse to serve travelers, since only people with known local addresses could be known and blacklisted if they didn’t pay, barring awesome use of the WWW. But no one could trust that not to get hacked.
No offense, Erislover, bt I’ve always found that ideological anarchists don’t think through the consequences of their ideas. They seem to rely too much on the “and here a miracle occurs” phenomena to justify their ideas. Practical anarchists are nothing more than moochers. I don’t know whether or not you fall into either of those categories, but…
And there are mechanisms in government for changing what you do not agree with, freely and openly as well. I find the “taxation is theft” to be as absurd.
I feel I understand why we enforce such contracts. I was simply pointing out that businesses rely on the same “force” for their guarantees as the government does for collecting taxes. We don’t get to smear taxation but applaud legal business behavior when the agent that enforces behavior is the same in both cases.
Since I don’t believe I’ve presented a single thing in this thread relating to applying anarchy, or how such a thing would be done, I’m not sure why it matters.
Yes indeed, and the varying answers to each of these questions go a good way towards explaining how the US can have two different political parties who both claim allegiance to free-market capitalism, but differ on the issues.
Also quite true. Indeed, the same argument could be made towards all the other possible functions of government. Even universal health care, and related issues on which we disagree.
It could even be argued that some forms of universal health care are a monopoly - and therefore not efficient.
If you post it, they will come. If you are considering starting another series after these play out, I would be glad to participate. This is the kind of thing I value on the SDMB.
Definitely agree. This series has been a lot of work for SentientMeat, and while I almost invariably disagree with him, I think he’s done a hell of a job on it. Kudos.
I’ll disagree here. My impression was that the OP was saying we are now more free to express dissent in the realm of politics. I don’t believe he was talking about being dissatisfied with your loaf of bread. You can express discontent with a politician even if there is no realistic alternative to him.
Again, non sequitur. I’m fairly certain that the OP was talking about “other lifestyles” in the context of homosexual relationships. I know for a fact that is what I meant. If you live in a Communist society like the Stalinist era USSR you have no real freedom in the market. But if the government was favorable towards homosexuals, then you would be free to express other lifestyles. This has nothing to do with product types and product categories.
You are making the fundamental mistake of trying to classify everything under the sun in economic turns, and this method is coming up short and doesn’t really integrate well with the real world.
This is a better example, because books and magazines actually are market products (unlike living life as a homosexual or voting for a politician.) However, I think the OP was referring more to the fact that during the Gilded Age, society was fairly conservative. More forms of literature were banned or very restricted. While in contrast today, journalists can pretty much say anything about anybody. And pornography is an easily obtainable item, where once it was highly restricted. The restriction of literature by the government isn’t a function of the market, as it is a function of society’s acceptance of government regulation over reading material.
The freedom of speech can logically, and is logically, extrapolated to mean you both have the right to express yourself and the right to publish books holding your expression. In the bast the USSC would allow more regulation based on “slander” and “libel” or “obscenity” than it does today, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is more a political issue than an economic one.
