I’m pretty sure that I’m going to get my ass handed to me on this one; but here goes.
So, some of the Big Challenges for the 21st Century are:
Climate Change
Peak Oil
Religious Extremism
Nuclear Proliferation
Can anyone explain to me how market forces are going to put a dent in any of these?
I’m laughing too hard to post much atm.
I just wanted to congratulate you what may be the bravest and most-upfront self-assessment ever offered by an OP in the OP about the OP.
::Tightens Foil Helmet::
The point of this forum is to spark debate, right?
Well, two of them seem to be slam dunks to me, while the other ones don’t seem to have anything even vaguely related to the market.
Green energy and lowering carbon emissions are only going to happen when you can convince business and the people that it’s in their best interest to go down this path. Trying to do this by fiat hasn’t even worked with our Euro buddies or the various Asian economic powers, even though they talk a good game. It’s certainly not going to work here. However, if you can convince business people that there is a competitive advantage in going green or reducing carbon, and if you can convince the populace that it will save them money AND ‘save the planet’, then suddenly the equation changes…and changing the equation this way involve market forces.
(I’m assuming that when you say ‘free market’ we are talking within the frame work of reality here, and not some libertarian fantasy, or what the OP THINKS is a libertarian fantasy…i.e. that we are talking about the actual market that is influenced by real world regulation and government impacts on the various markets)
Pretty much a classic example of how markets work, assuming we aren’t talking about some dooms day end of the world scenario, and instead simply talking about reaching a peak in oil production (which might have already happened). I’m sure some of the economic savvy 'dopers can explain it best (like Sam Stone), but in a nut shell, the price of oil will continue to rise. As it does, there will be more pressure and demand for alternative. Many alternatives that aren’t economically viable today will become economically viable once the price of oil reaches a sustained level (i.e. when the price of oil is stable at some high level, as opposed to short term peaks at a high price then going back to some lower level).
What has this got to do with the market?? I don’t know what the ‘answer’ to this is, but it’s certainly not going to be fixed by market forces, free or otherwise. It’s not going to be fixed by Government Control either.
Again, this doesn’t really have anything to do with a market, free or otherwise, so it’s not really subject to market forces. I suppose this IS an example of where Government Control is fully and completely in charge.
-XT
It’s a mistake, made by both sides of the aisle, to assume that government control and free markets are at odds with each other. The free market is in fact a powerful tool, but sometimes, the way to bring that tool to bear is by increasing government control, not by decreasing it. Take climate change, for instance: The reason that it’s currently a problem is because carbon dioxide emissions are an externality in the economy, so people don’t have to pay their fair share for their emissions. Introduce a carbon tax or cap-and-trade, and the externality is internalized, and the market will start finding solutions. In other words, in this case what we need is more governent and more free market.
This may or may not be a hijack, but is anything in between possible? Could the market provide a solution, but too slowly in comparison with price increases, such that it only arrives after years of misery and pain? Could that be the OP’s outlook on things (thus why it may not be a hijack)?
Religious extremism *can *be defeated by the free market - the free marketplace of ideas.
Or barring that, by cruise missiles.
Here in .us the conservatives are fighting cap-and-trade tooth and nail. All republican elected officials would rather sell their sons into gay prostitution than appear to even consider anything that looks like a tax increase.
Makes rational discussion of economic policy, let alone actual compromise, a somewhat difficult problem. In the same sense that squaring a circle using only techniques available to classical mathematicians is a somewhat difficult problem.
The 20th century needed more government control and less free market. Our health care can’t be reformed unless it protects the profits of health insurance and pharma industries; polluters have massive sway in our energy policy; the financial industry almost collapsed the global economy; etc.
It isn’t really controversial that we need regulations and that reaganomics has been a failure and a thinly veiled excuse for plutocracy.
As far as climate change, my impression is once a clean technology becomes affordable market forces will spread it around. But up until that point, the market doesn’t work. So you need gov. subsidies in R&D and purchasing which luckily we do have. But you’d need both market forces and gov. intervention to switch to a clean economy.
I don’t know how gov. regulation will fight religious extremism. Or how the market will either.
First of all, religious extremism and nuclear proliferation don’t belong on the same list as the others.
More broadly, tackling these Big Problems requires resources, and government intervention in the market reduces economic growth. If we reduce growth we lose the ability to do lots of stuff, and all these causes will be less effectively promoted because we simply don’t have as much capability as we could have had. (The USSR for example was much worse on the environmental front than the US, not because they cared less about not living in polluted environments, but because their economy was weaker and they didn’t have the resources to go around.
As with compound interest, the longer the time-scale you’re thinking about, the more important economic growth is. I find it curious that folks who advocate government intervention like to think in terms of grandiose plans, even though the benefit of government programs is concentrated strongly in the near-term and decays over time (through mission creep, unadaptability, bureaucratization, and regulatory capture). I suspect it’s psychological: a conflation of the grandiosity of Being In Charge and Getting Things Done with the grandiosity of long time-scales.
One of the maddening things about politics right now is the knee-jerk opposition by many on the right to ANY attempt to use the government to accomplish something.
Sure, the government can’t solve ALL our problems, but it can solve SOME of them, and refusing on ideological grounds to even discuss possible government solutions is insane.
That assumption is what gets us in trouble. You’re describing a “market” but a “free market” as opposed to a “regulated market” is in fact a libertarian fantasy.
Markets are fine. Manipulating markets (with things like cap-and-trade) is useful. But that will be opposed not only by fringe libertarians but by “mainstream conservatives.”
Again, everything you say is true, except you are using “free market” as a synonym for “market.” What does “free” mean again? It doesn’t just mean, “nice always positive word I can stick in front of everything.”
athelas, not all growth is the same rate, not all contraction is the same rate. Growing the economy by by 0.02% while cutting the government share of the economy from 20% to 18% still gives you a government that’s 10% smaller, 10% weaker, & less able to manage problems that only an entity with coercive power can manage.
Just to make sure that we’re on the same page…GDP includes consumption, investment, net exports, and government spending. If the economy grows by 0.02% (and mind you the average rate of economic growth is two orders of magnitude higher) and the amount of government spending falls by 10%, that means the non-government economy grew by a significant amount to offset that. Now that can be good or bad (depending on whether what’s transferred is done better by the private or public sector), but all things being equal, your scenario is a (very small) gain, not a 1.98% loss.
Again, in the long run, growth dominates everything. The size and role of government is bound to grow and shrink over the next century, as left and right fight it out. But - again, if you’re thinking in terms of how to solve century-long problems - fighting over the correct allocation of the government sector today is practically meaningless compared to raising the economic growth rate by 1% over the next century.
And for completeness’ sake, let me note that the government’s share of the economy is closer to 40% than 20%.
Good point. The OP’s #3 and #4 take care of themselves!
I tend to agree with: “nice always positive word I can stick in front of everything”, but the ‘free’ in ‘free market’ does mean something.
If the government says that all oranges cost ten pence (or some reasonable figure) there would still be a market for oranges but it would not be free (and probably wouldn’t work very well).
The ‘free’ qualifier is a bit redundant nowadays, of course as virtually all markets are ‘free’.
Right, it means that the prices of all components of a system are negotiated on the market. Including externalities like pollution. The energy industry is already a market, but it won’t be a free market until they have to pay for their share of carbon, too.
Who in heaven’s name has EVER suggested that the free market will reduce nuclear weapons stockpiles?
Seriously, the “Free Market Sucks” threads are starting to get a bit silly.