Not a strawman since I was responding directly to Sam Stone who was likening a free market to an emergent system that regulates itself.
If his version of a “free market” includes various regulations then he should spell those out and not assume we all know what regulations can be included under his definition of a “free” market.
Are you suggesting the robber barons were a good thing and that the US could have had economic expansion if we had things like, say, anti trust laws already in place?
What is a “free market” then?
It undoubtedly does. In the absence of a government business would impose and enforce their own rules and those would be rules absolutely geared to support the dominance of their position.
WTF are you talking about? Government isn’t a precondition to slavery. Man’s inhumanity towards man is a precondition to slavery.
Why do you think slavery REQUIRES a structured government?
In which society do you believe slavery is more likely, an anarchic society or a society with rule of law? An anarchic society is almost certain to have slavery while a society ruled by law may or may not have slavery.
Nothing works without government. Thats not to say the more government the better but without rule of law, nothing works, nothing but brute strength and physical force.
it is exactly government’s monopoly on physical force that allows society to function at all.
No? Could you give me some examples in history of institutional slavery a la the pre-Civil War US that existed without a structured government? I’m not talking about casual slavery (or honor slavery such as happened in Africa), but the institutional and generational slavery such as happened in the US…which was the example I was responding too.
Because I can’t think of any historical examples of that kind of slavery working in any environment that doesn’t contain a government? Do YOU have any examples? If not, then doesn’t it seem plausible that you need (require) a structured government to have institutional slavery? Seems logical to me.
One ruled by law of course. Consider the civilizations that had slavery throughout history. How many of them were anarchic and how many of them had a rule of law? I can’t think of ANY examples of institutional slavery in an anarchic society (though I can think of some where anarchic societies or societies with no or low central governments FED the need for slaves from more structured societies).
Horseshit. Or, to be less hostile, can you give me some examples?? I can think of MANY societies that were ruled by law and had slaves, but I can’t think of many (any really) who were true anarchy that had slavery. Some that participated in slavery by catching or enslaving people and then selling them to more ‘civilized’ societies, but none that had institutional slave owning practices themselves (I can think of a few examples of honor slavery among African, Indian and other tribes).
Ok.
Uhuh. Were you speaking to me or just tossing this stuff out?
The vikings used slaves and had a slave trade, did they have a government structure?
Tribes in Africa used other tribes as slaves.
As far as I can tell, slavery predates organized government by several thousand years.
Unless your point was to pigeon hole the definition of slavery and government so as to precisely prove your own point at the exclusion of all others. Sort of like how the definition of “free market” changes and flows depending on what you want to use it for.
It’s a strawman to extrapolate it out the way you did. Sam was using an analogy, not saying that no regulation is a good thing.
It seemed clear to me…and it seems that clearly you were reading more in there and using your own conceptions of what you THINK Sam’s stance is than was warranted. I’ve seen Sam in plenty of these threads and I’ve never seen him suggest that there should be no regulation at all. Nor was his point in making the comparisons he made in this thread an indication that he feels there should be no regulation.
Nope, though I think that in fairness the robber baron era did have some positives. But no, my point was that there would have BEEN no robber baron era without government intervention. It was an example of crony capitalism, not a free market.
Sam has given a good description of this both in this thread and in myriad others, but if you want my take a free market is the interaction between you, me and everyone else (even Damuri Ajashi) in buying and selling goods and services. The ‘free’ in free market simply means that we are free to set prices or pay for goods and services at the value those goods and services have to each of us in an agreed upon or ‘free’ manner, within the constraints of the system we are operating in (I.E. the laws, regulations and other standards of the country we are in). We are ‘free’ to do so without coercion and withing distortion within those constraints, free to decide we want to buy Toyota instead of Chevy, or Sony instead of Samsung, or vibrator X instead of the less popular Y brand, and by doing so We, The People, constitute The Market…That evil Market so decried by many on this board.
What I think most of the folks in this thread are ACTUALLY talking about isn’t The Free Market, but instead it’s capitalism. Of course, I think that a very good case can be made that ‘The most powerful, proven instrument of material and social progress is Capitalism’ as well, if one compares apples to apples. It’s no coincidence that the period in human history that has the most material and social progress is now…and that now, today, Capitalism is pretty much ubiquitous throughout the world, at least in every prosperous nation. It’s also telling (to me) that countries that institute free trade (by my definition) are even more prosperous and have greater material and social progress than even countries (like, say, China) who merely have a Capitalist structure but still have older non-market based structures in place (command economies, say, or blocks or constants on information and the free exchange of goods and services).
In the absence of government, business as we know it wouldn’t exist at all. Most of the institution as we know them wouldn’t exist. It’s pure loony-Libertarian fantasy that business would flourish in the complete absence of government.
Yeah, the vikings had government structures. Very centralized government structures with those king thingies.
(Leaving aside the fact that there were certainly many strong governments and societies in Africa) Yes they did…so did some Native American tribes, and other nomadic peoples. But a lot of that was honor slavery…you were captured in battle and thus lost honor and became a slave for some duration (or even for life in some cases). So the slave, while probably not happy about it, was at least a partial participant in the ritual (I’m glossing over a lot of stuff here, obviously, and of course none of this gets into women). But this was individuals. The concept and ability to have institutional slavery (i.e. slavery where a certain class or ‘race’ of people and their decedents were slaves) necessitates a government to impose and maintain it. A tribe of anarchists simply can’t do it…they don’t have the resources.
At least that’s how I see it. I admit, I could be wrong…wouldn’t be the first time. I simply can’t think of any examples of institutional type slavery that isn’t associated with a society with a strong government. I think that I’ll let it go at this, as I have unintentionally hijacked this thread…if anyone wants to discuss this all further then I’d say open a separate thread to discuss it.
Um…well, ok. So, you think I’m changing definitions based on the argument. Well, could be true. If so, I’d say I’m in good company on this board.
Personally, I think that it’s others who are trying to twist the definitions of what a ‘free market’ is to suit their own political axe grinding agendas. As to my definition of what slavery is or isn’t, I was responding to the mention of slavery in the US pre-Civil war, and my original answer was oriented towards that. Personally, I don’t believe that wide scale slavery is possible without a government, and without government and societal buy in. That said, it really is irrelevant to the theme of the thread, so if you want to posit that slavery happens with or without government then that’s fine by me…depending on how you look at things, it’s even correct in some historical instances.
Oh, come now! Surly it’s not even in the top 20. I love the way some folks have latched onto this, however.
Having given it some additional thought I still think that slavery a la that in the US is only possible with a strong central government. However, I was wrong in the way I made my point.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. Native Americans had slavery without much government structure. It’s true that institutionalized slavery like antebellum US requires a government but that’s true of any complex human endeavor; e.g. there aren’t many instances (read: none) of industrialization without government.
That’s what I was trying to say, yes. When I was thinking of ‘slavery’ I was thinking of structured slavery a la the Greeks, Persians, Romans, Europeans and Americans…all of which would require a structured government.
As I said, I was wrong in the way I said it and made my point, and wrong that I didn’t consider honor slavery or more informal slavery. Plus, this really is a hijack and is taking away from the main discussion. Plus, there is all that backpedaling and stuff I had to do, which while no doubt amusing to some 'dopers in this thread is making me a bit uncomfortable…
I do not believe he would say “no regulation” whatsoever either. Nevertheless he was making a case that the free market was self regulating. Well, it is within the boundaries of external regulations.
If someone is making a case that regulations are, on balance, undesirable things and the market should be left to itself as much as possible then it is incumbent on the person to define what regulations are necessary at least as a minimum.
Otherwise I may think X-regulation is a minimum and Sam or you may think otherwise. It is important to agree on the starting point we are debating from.
Well, that only goes so far.
You are free to set prices but regulations can add to your bottom line. If I make you pay a minimum wage the company in China that can pay a pittance has an advantage. If I make you properly dispose of the toxic waste you produce in manufacturing your price goes up compared to the company in China that can dump the sludge in the nearest river.
We have now skewed the free market because not everyone has the same regulations imposed on them which (usually) translate into a cost thus affecting your pricing.
So, we get to the meme that regulation = bad. Of course a toxic river is pretty bad too but as long as you don’t have the sludge in your backyard it is easy to say regulation = bad.
That prosperity has been built on the back of massive suffering.
Slavery in the US, then labor with no rights giving you horrid conditions in factories and such then moving that off to other countries where the workers are similarly paid a pittance and forced to work in miserable conditions.
Foxconn in China, which builds (among other things) iPhones, recently installed nets on its buildings to stop workers from committing suicide. Yeah, they had so many suicides they went to that effort and no, I am not kidding.
Out of sight, out of mind I guess. It is the American way.
Maybe not business as we know it but commerce would certainly exist in some fashion.
Doesn’t an absolute free market require perfect knowledge of all ‘equal’ items. Ford and Chevy for example. To pick the one that best suits you as an individual relies on the information you have at hand.
Towing capacity, gas mileage etc, aesthetics, etc…
It is/should be the governments responsibility to supply that information. Not prop up some companies over others because the governments is following some sort of agenda.
Marketing subverts those choices into ‘feel good’ campaigns (which is allowed and even promoted)
Do you even bother to read my posts? This is a serious question. Because apparently you missed these choice snippets, which made up about a third of my entire post:
There. I’ve even bolded the relevent phrases to aid in reading comprehension.
Let me expand upon this. Emergent order depends on rules. You don’t get emergence out of pure chaos and randomness. But the rules can be fairly simple, and still result in wildly complex outputs. The Mandelbrot set is amazingly complex, but derives from a simple equation, iteratively applied in a consistent fashion. Evolution requires DNA and natural selection - relatively simple mechanisms which allow the retention of information across generations. Out of that emerges every life form we see on the planet, including us.
For markets to function efficiently, they require certain things:
A civil society
Protection of property rights
A stable legal framework
A monetary system with prices that reflect the perceived value of goods
Freedom of speech and association
Choice
temporal stability (the rules don’t change, the value of currency isn’t manipulated by external forces, etc)
Information about the value of goods being available to all parties in a transaction
The costs of trades being internalized by the trading partners (no or low externality cost)
The proper role of government is to work towards ensuring these things. A civil society needs a minimum basic safety net. It needs a legal system that is widely perceived as fair and non-prejudicial. Choice requires government protection from monopoly power. Government can be invoked to prevent externalities. We can debate how government should do these things, and how much government is required to do them.
But government can and does undermine these things as well. Central banks manipulate the currency and introduce instability into the monetary system. Activist regulators change the regulatory ‘playing field’, making it hard to make long-term choices. Governments can break up monopolies, but they can also ensure them through subsidy, land grants, nationalization, or by fiat. Most monopolies that have existed have done so through government action. Government regulation can limit choice or create externality costs.
What government should NOT do is interfere in markets for ideological or political reasons. For example, passing laws that benefit unions against employers (or employers against unions), or passing laws subsidizing things that government thinks are good. Government should not turn a basic safety net into a guaranteed income scheme or a wealth redistribution system. Government should not be in the business of throwing benefits to the middle class. Government should not be directing industrial production, setting trade tariffs, or telling people how to live their lives (including where they must get their health care).
So there’s a very clear divide here - You can have government that seeks to help markets perform better, protect legal rights, and help manitain a civil society and a basic safety net. Or, you can have government that seeks to control or displace markets on behalf of special interest groups or political constituencies or the best intentions of a ruling class. I support the former, and oppose the latter. I recognize that there are some fuzzy areas in both categories, and perhaps some overlap between them, and that these are reasonable areas for debate.
Okay, so what you’ve done is shown that society requires a strong and structure central government to function. Which is in direct conflict with the quote in the OP, and the agenda of the conservative movement: *small *and *limited *government with *fewer *regulations.
The point of this thread is to address the fallacy of “free market” that conservatives continue to promote. This idea what if we could get taxes lower and the government off our backs, the world would be better and everyone would be happy.
It’s a myth, a sad and tired old myth. But with that said, it’s not as if the progressive movement is without myths of their own. But that’s for another thread.
The most frustrating aspect to all this is the way it plays out in the current political environment. The Republican Party has managed to brand itself as against taxes and against regulations, which is such an easy and populist message. Everyone hates taxes that they have to pay, and everyone hates regulations that impede what they want to do.
But a functioning society needs taxes and regulations, leaving the Democrats as the party that taxes and regulates. But that’s the opposite of a populist message. And so over the past couple of decades we see a cycle of Republicans lowering taxes (increasing deficit spending) and deregulating, until shit hits the fan. Voters boot them out, leaving the Dems to clean it up, meaning balance the budget and increase regulations. But once things are fine again, the Republicans can start a new campaign that they’ll lower those evil taxes, and get rid of those annoying regulations.
You would be surprised at how much of that information exists in the marketplace that you simply aren’t aware of. We internalize a lot of information that we receive through secondary sources such as prices, brands, word of mouth, expensive buildings, etc.
For example, it can be shown that a BMW dealership can sell a used car at a higher price than the ‘cash for cars’ outlet on the street corner. Economists wonder why, and realize just how much information is transmitted to consumers by things you would never have thought of. For example, BMW spends a lot of money on expensive buildings. Cash for cars rents a dirt lot on a corner and puts up a trailer for an office. What does that tell you? It tells you that BMW plans to be around for a long time, and therefore has a vested interest in making sure they don’t sell lemons to consumers. Cash for cars? Not so much. Humans are very good at spotting these clues. BMW is good at extracting value from their brand and capital outlay. The result is that people who value quality of their used car will go to BMW and pay a premium, and people who just need the cheapest car they can get will trade risk for price and buy from Cash for Cars.
No, it should be the government’s job to set up a legal framework that allows you to seek restitution if you are defrauded. I would say that it’s an optional but potentially public good for government to act as an information clearinghouse only when it comes to matters of public safety, public health and the like. It’s not responsible for telling you which car has a nicer sounding stereo or more comfortable seats. But it might want to publish the crash survivability ratings of various cars.
You’re wrong about marketing. Marketing is an essential part of the economy. It’s an information transfer mechanism. And it’s bidirectional. Marketing campaigns fail, and producers learn from the failure. Good marketers don’t just try to manipulate people - they try to discover what people want, then build ad campaigns telling people why their product has the characteristics the people say they desire.
If Ford has a “Built Ford Tough” truck campaign, and that campaign runs for a long time, it’s because Ford has discovered that people value tough trucks, and that Ford thinks it has an advantage in this area that it wants to promote. And consumer satisfaction and market share will tell them if their campaign actually marries consumers to trucks that satisfy them. If they created a “Built Ford Comfortable” campaign, and their trucks aren’t as comfortable as the competition, the campaign will fail.
Now, it may be that there are other trucks out there as tough or tougher than Fords, and those companies just haven’t done a good job of informating their potential customer base of their advantages. Too bad for them. The ones that are really bad at it go out of business, and the market rewards those who figure out how to do it. That’s how we evolve.
Advertising is a complex topic, but suffice to say that advertising in general makes markets more efficient and promotes consumer choice.
Which is NOT a free market. It is some sort of hybrid system that uses the government to round off the sharp corners of the free market, producing something that is better than either a purely free market system, or a purely government controlled system.
The conclusion being, the Contract FROM America is full of shit. The most powerful instrument of material and social progress is the NOT the free market, but rather a well regulated free market that requires a strong and stable government.
You are pretty close to right some of the time. The freest market in the world will always have asymmetrical information, inherent market failure built right in. It’s possible for some regulation to do something about some of them, used car dealers and lemon laws, for example. Even in the freest market imaginable sellers always have an incentive to overstate the value of a thing, absent regulation in the form of mind reading.
What is there about ‘it’s illegal to own human beings’ that’s complex and requires a powerful central government? It requires no more government to enforce that as it does to enforce a law that says you can’t kill someone.
The empirical evidence to date certainly shows that lower taxes and smaller government makes countries wealthier and the population generally happier - to a point. If the government is too small, then other forces start to control people. The trick is to find the right balance.
Presented without evidence or even rhetorical support, this is just meaningless.
No, the real populists are the ones who promise to take things from a small minority and give it to a majority of voters. The populists are the ones who claim that they can fix all of society’s problems by taxing the rich or putting business under their boot until they bend to the will of the masses.
The difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Republicans buy votes by promising to cut taxes (without cutting benefits for the mass public), while the Democrats promise to increase benefits (without increasing taxes for the mass public). Republicans promise to cut spending, but never spending for middle class entitlements. Democrats promise to raise taxes, but only on the ‘rich’. But you can’t balance the budget without cutting entitlements and perks for the middle class, and you can’t balance it by only raising taxes on the rich. So both parties in the past have wound up on the default path - deficit spending.
Not if you promise that the regulations will only apply to ‘evil businesses’ and that taxes will only apply to ‘the rich’.
Notice how many flips and twists the Democrats went through to promise the voters that the health care reform bill would only have positive effects for them. It was going to be paid for by cutting waste, fraud and abuse, and by taxing employers. You could keep your current health plan if you wanted. There was absolutely no downside for anyone. All peaches and cream. If anyone pays, it will be the ‘rich fatcats’ and the ‘wall street tycoons’.
That’s populism.
Deregulating, huh? Were that it was so. Regulations have gone up steadily, year by year, under both parties. The only major deregulating that has happened in my lifetime was the deregulation of trucking and airlines - by Jimmy Carter.
This is just a load of crap. When pressed about exactly how the Republicans have gutted the regulatory state, Democrats invariably point to the repeal of Glass-Steagall, as if that was solely responsible for the financial collapse and the recession. This is little more than a Democratic talking point, and is highly simplistic if not outright misleading.
The financial collapse and recession had a lot of causes, and it’s not even clear if Glass-Steagall was a negative or positive force. It’s just as easy to say that the crisis was brought upon by NEW regulations, such as mark-to-market accounting and implementation of the Basel accords. But the truth is, there is plenty of disagreement on all sides about the root causes of the collapse, and they don’t lend themelves well to partisan talking points.
