“The most powerful, proven instrument of material and social progress is the free market.”
Why? Because the free market creates competition, and competition is good.
So the best thing ever is a free market, where the government is involved only to enforce contract law and property rights. It’s not anarchy after all.
But wait, the free market leads to oligopolies and allows for collusion. Those artificially reduce competition.
Ready for it?
What the free market needs is the government to step in and create competition.
Uh oh. Now we’re back at the start. Turns out it’s government that creates competition, and competition is good.
Seems like we have a bit of a chicken and egg scenario. Almost as if neither are more useful than the other.
It’s obvious that an economy completely planned by the government is bad, because it reduces competition. Which is why we need the free market.
But the free market also stifles competition, which is why we need government.
These are two of the funniest things I’ve read in a long time.
Why are you still clinging to this fantasy.
Alan Greenspan all but wept before Congress as he admitted he was wrong about the market self-regulating itself.
Unless you want to consider complete and total collapse as self regulating. I noticed you switch from ecology to physics. Which isn’t surprising because in ecology there are a lot of self-regulating factors, and they involve death. If population is successful, it grows, it dominates, then you know what happens? It wipes out its food supply and suffers massive starvation. That’s the pendulum swinging back the other way. Equilibrium means that most of a colony dies so that it’s food supply and regrow.
Self regulating in the free market involves a massive crash. Like you said, a company will grow and dominate. Eventually self regulating will kick in and destroy the company.
Is that what you’d like us to go through? A market crash every couple of years?
Ants don’t have a central regulator authority, so they grow and eat and grow and eat. Eventually, they eat everything they can find and the colony dies. Sound anything like the mortgage melt down?
There is nothing stable about the free market. Quite the opposite. It doesn’t swing back, it crashes. What you see as stability is the market starting over again after nearly everyone died.
How many times do you have to be proven wrong before you get it?
I’m not sure what sort of point you are trying to make.
The “best thing ever” so far is a free market operating in a framework of laws by a democratically elected government. The reason for this is that an economy is better able to meet the wants and needs of its people when its people are able to directly exert influence. 300 million people are theoretically collectively smarter than any centeral planning board when it comes to determining their wants and needs. Government serves as a counter to the potential excesses of laissez faire free market capitalism, for basically many of the reasons you described. To keep the economy veering wildly between irrational speculative bubble to periodic collapse like a truck careening down the highway guided by nothing but the Jersey barriers on either side of the road. But there is a danger that in trying to guide the market one might be tempted to try and control or second guess the market.
There is also a temptation to look to government to provide for many of our needs and wants. But since the government doesn’t actually produce anything, it is unable to fullfill that promise without taking a greater control of the economy. This is what is known as a “wicked problem” as the more the government tries to control the economy in order to meet the needs of the people, the more it distorts the market and renders it unable to meet those needs.
That summed up my point exactly. The two forces work in harmony, not in opposition. Too much free market will cause just as many problems as too much government.
A person that stands on a soap box and preaches that the free market is self correcting is just as wrong as someone that thinks the government can provide for many of our needs and wants.
The most powerful, proven instrument of material and social progress was NOT the free market. The free market on its own (not anarchy) is just as devastating as any oppressively restrictive government.
The most powerful, proven instrument of material and social progress was the combination of free market and government in balance. None stronger nor weaker than the other.
We’ve seen through the progression of this thread that the free market needs a strong and stable government to enforce contracts and property rights. Then we saw that it needed to go a step further and enforce intellectual property rights. Then we saw the way collusion, oligopoly, and monopoly degrade the free market, further requiring government influence.
We can also go the other direction. Russia, China, and Cuba tried a planned economy, with obvious and disastrous results. But then look at China now, as it introduces free market principles their economy takes off, and with it material and social progress.
A free market proponent would look at this and scream it’s proof the free market is great, but they’re sadly mistaken. It was the blend of government and free market, just as it is with Western social democracies (ie the US). China is working of a 60/40 split, the US working on a 40/60 split. Both seem to be working pretty well.