Government. Because government is by definition allowed control over violence.
Without a government, the “free market” would then be open to violent solutions, so eventually a junta would arise which would essentially replicate the functions of government. Meet the new boss, etc.
On the other hand, in order to commit carnage on a massive scale, you need organization that’s best provided by the government (megacorporations could do it if they felt their interests were threatened, but would tend not to as there’s no money in it.)
So government can control man’s inclination to harm each other better than the free market, both in the sense of lessening it via police, and increasing it at times for political purposes.
There’s nothing more free market than “open your legs to me or you’re fired.”
Nonsense. The free market is no restraint on “man’s inclination to harm man” at all. On the contrary, it encourages such harm because harming others is often profitable.
This assumes the government is a caring actor in all this that will step in when needed to protect its citizens.
The history of labor disputes in the US (not to mention the world) is a bloody one and a long one. The US government for well over a century would side with business leaders and send the police/military in to bash heads…literally. Until 1935 “yellow dog” contracts were the norm which forbade membership in a union. This is something the Supreme Court itself upheld (Adair v. United States and Coppage v. Kansas).
The Thibodaux Massacre saw 35 people shot dead by militia. A strike by Pullman workers in Chicago saw 34 shot dead by federal troops. The Ludlow Massacre saw, among others, 12 children shot by militia. The list of this sort of thing is a sadly long one.
Labor did not get the concessions it eventually got easily. History has shown that once you surrender something to big business, it is extremely difficult to get it back.
I don’t see a government vs free market dichotomy. Both serve a necessary but seperate role.
Imagine society as the NFL. The government is the league and the refs - their role is to write and enforce the rules for the game. But they don’t play the game and they don’t choose who wins and loses. The free market is the teams - they compete against each other for the championship but they do it within the framework of the established rules.
The game wouldn’t work if the refs just arbitrarily decided how many points each team got. And it wouldn’t work if the teams could arbitrarily do whatever they wanted on the field.
I don’t even know what you mean by “pay to play”. And I have already said repeatedly, even in this thread, that government can be used for oppression so what’s your point?
Based on the standards of argumentation established so far in this thread, I could make an argument that any one of the following things are responsible for material and social progress:
The free market
The government
Rule of law
The invention of language
The Industrial Revolution
Photosynthesis
I mean, Jesus, what an open-ended, meaningless question, really.
The free market is in fact a very powerful tool, but it’s not a complete system in and of itself. The main problems with most right-wing beliefs on the subject is, first, that the free market is exactly what you get when the government gets out of the way, and that second, this is inherently good. Neither is true. For instance, we currently have a socialist energy generation system, where the major cost of energy generation is borne by all, not just by those who use the energy. It would take government intervention to turn this into a free market system, but right-wingers overwhelmingly oppose such intervention.
The whole topic of the free market reminds me of certain data analysis techniques used to find the optimum in highly complicated systems, such as Monte Carlo Markhov chain searches. An MCMC search is provably optimal as maximum-search methods go, in a large number of different measurements. For instance, such a search will always eventually find the true global maximum, and will also in the process find all of the local maxima and how good they all are. And such methods are, actually, fairly similar to how the free market works (and also similar to how evolution works, for that matter). But nobody ever uses a pure MCMC method, since it’s incredibly slow. In practice, it’s necessary to tweak the method, usually in ways which end up compromising its optimality, in order to get it to run fast enough.
Likewise, consider pure free-market solutions to economic problems. The free market did in fact eventually come to the realization that the derivative instruments the banks were offering were junk, for instance… But it took so long to realize it that the realization, when it finally dawned, ended up trashing the economy. We would have been much better off, there, if we had made the markets a little less free, and prevented the junk derivatives from being sold at all.
Well, cites go all the way back to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and his Invisible Hand. But I think that most economists and sociologists would agree that the tyrany of the free market can be as bad as the tyrany of a centralized dictator.
The free market is essentally amoral. It simply allows people to buy and sell whatever goods and services they can for whatever price they can negotiate. Of course Der Trihs, usual diatribe about slavary and exploitation is nonsense. By definition, it is not a “free market” if you are exploiting people through the use or threat of force. That is the role of government. To enforce agreements and property rights and prevent abuses through regulation.
You don’t need to use physical force to exploit people. As for slavery; of course the free market will look good if you handwave away anything bad that happens as “not really driven by the free market.”
Government has existed since we climbed down from the trees, yet standards of living have been in the shitter until very recently, I’d suggest. I know you’ve said that governments aren’t perfect either, but do you say that governments are better than markets, even though governments have coexisted with child labor, slavery, rape and whatever for far longer than free markets have? Perhaps you suggest that free markets do more than merely coexist with evil. I’d say the exact same about almost every kind of government ever, and then I’d go cough-social conservatism-cough. Now if you were to have said liberal democracy, I’d give you a high five in broseph fashion.
Certain philosophers (Nozick) suggest sort of the opposite: government is a natural result of market interaction- like the invisible hand, government style. Everybody pursuing there own anarcho-capitalist solutions to security creates a monopoly on force.
BTW I read about Mill talking about what you’re talking about, except that there is no ‘redistribution’ because all distributions must be manufactured by government in the first place. Blew my mind. Then I remembered Locke and I regained my composure.
This sounds kind of like what the contract for America is doing, attributing stuff to markets that they’re only tangentially responsible for at best, except doing it with bad things. Not that you’re doing it wrong but that we can be specious in both directions.
That analogy doesn’t work; if anything there’s more exploitation in the world using non-violent methods than there is using violent ones. Especially given that governments are far more prone to crack down on violent forms of exploitation; that horse is a lot more likely to lose to the donkey if there’s a guy from the government at the track who’ll shoot horses but ignore donkeys.
It’s not “handwaving”. Anytime you use force or coercion or fraud to artificially set the price of a good or service, you have now successfully usurped the free market. That’s the definition of free market. People with power don’t want a free market because they can just take what they want.
How is a market “free” if there are any counters against the power of money at all? Seems to me that contradicts an oft-cited conservative principle: equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. “Opportunity” being the chance to get rich.
I probably would have said that “The most powerful, proven instrument of material and social progress” is violent revolution against unjust governments, but I’m not advocating that. Just noting that violent revolution is, throughout history, the most successful way for an oppressed minority to gain greater rights and wealth. The downsides for failing, though, are pretty spectacular.