There’s No Escaping Competition: People Need a Way to Decide Who Gets What

Let me explain a specific example: If a person A cheats person B out of his money, it affects me negatively. It poses a risk in the future that person A, being a cheater, will repeat this many times and eventually will have enough money to cheat me. (Both B and me will agree to be cheated by A at the time when we will be cheated, yet it won't be our preference. Kind of like getting a forced move by check in chess.)

Now I am not sure your claim, that this problem can be expressed as property rights, is correct. At very least, these would have to be collective property rights. In fact, I think what we are getting here, if we are to express this correctly as property rights, to is state control over transactions, in one way or another.

> Being absurd doesn't necessarily make it less philosophically valid.

I would say it's a good way not to be taken seriously, but YMMV.

> On a more concrete level, the rejection of quantifiable utility is based on rejection of the extra assumptions it requires.

Which is a bullshit excuse. We have mathematical capabilities to deal with these kinds of problems - probability, fuzzy logic, whatever. It's just laziness of economists to show that the free market assumptions hold under these new assumptions. (To be fair, it's probably not laziness, I doubt they would hold.)

In particular, we can model things like this in computers. I don't know of much cases where this was actually done, but I heard that free market in silico very quickly collapsed into an oligopolic mess.

Anyway, your assumptions should be close to the real world as much as possible. That should be the criteria for choosing them. It's a nice curiosity to have free markets work under some weird, unrealistic assumptions, but it's rather useless in the real world.

But could you really isolate those? Wouldn't quick interventions in one area not likely also have indirect effects on other areas making at least some smaller adjustments necessary? This looks to me like you would become pretty busy doing quick interventions and propagating the ripples through the rest of the plan at which point you are back where you started without any longer term planing.

It seems to me that any form of longer term planning incurs a cost by not being able to react in a timely manner, effects propagating asynchronously and as fast as possible in markets would propagate way slower over a couple of planning iterations because they are unnecessarily forced into lockstep.

Markets actors can be corrupt, but the market itself is supply/demand driven. Corruption in central planners however is catastrophic.

>Not necessary, they can just take quick actions. Markets can't predict the weather either.

Markets don't predict complex systems, they are the complex system. They trend towards equilibrium when possible. Guessing where that equilibrium lies is nearly impossible for humans, but they try everyday.

>3) Never sleep or take vacations.

Never bought anything after 9pm? Amazon isn't a bad place to go for that, or Walmart, 7-11, nightclubs, bars, restaurants. Also while exchanges close there is after hours trading, orders being placed etc. The second the opening bell rings on the exchange there is an implied opening price that is different from yesterdays close due to 24/7 activity.

>Not necessary, since the market has proven that it's doesn't result in any 100% perfect arrangement regarding needs either.

Read about Boris Yeltsin's trip to the Clear Lake grocery store in the US in 1989. The US Market had better performance than Soviet central planners at stocking a grocery store according to demand.

>The needs of a huge percentage are ignored (to the point that they can even die homeless and sick), 0.1% controls 80% of the wealth, and even individuals are taught and conditioned to make bad decisions all the time for their own needs, destroying themselves in the process (e.g. having easy credit pushed upon them, etc).

Payday loans are an interesting phenomenon. Maybe they should be illegal, but no one in there right mind would charge anything short of usury rates with default levels as high as a payday loan operation. You are free to go head to the bad part of town and start lending at prime rate, but you will be destitute in one week. The alternative is no loans which may be better. Also in the US homelessness seems to be driven not from economic problems but from mental health issues and addiction. You may get hit with a massive medical bill, but without making a lot of mistakes along the way you will have a roof over your head.

>All those arguments presume the market is 100% perfect, or even if they don't presume that, they still ask that the "planning system" should be 100% perfect (instead of just better than the market which would be a more logical demand).

Those arguments say that to be better than an imperfect chaotic system, you have to be able to perfectly model that system then make decisions about it.

Free markets are chaotic and thus people especially non-producers are scared form it. However, history showed us clearly central planners (especially Russian style) no matter what they tried it failed miserably and unlike free markets results were often measured by death toll. Markets are much more local and distributed. It has a huge advantage over central systems. Big Corporations with political ties harm free markets a great deal, but even than I say it fares better.

Many suggested with better technology central planning would have an edge, my counter claim is that with better technology free markets will have a further advantage.

That's not quite true. While internal firm planning does seem to get less efficient as firms get larger, that inefficiency doesn't seem to stop firms from actually getting larger, or gobbling each-other up to form monopolies and oligopolies. The real-world upshot seems to be that as long as firms are allowed to grow past the point of efficient planning and efficient competition, they will actually harm the larger economy by attempting to grow and consume market share even when doing so makes them less economically efficient.

How is this substantively different from just calling human beings (or perhaps "rational" human beings?) money-maximizers and pretending we don't even need particular items to be bought and sold as long as economic transactions take place?

What you're proposing sounds far too vulnerable to the "Disneyland with no children" scenario.

Just consider the simplest case of how it can happen that someone has power over someone else despite having same real strength. Person A comes to person B and says: "If you don't do what I say, I will have me and person C to beat you up." Since B doesn't know C, he would better comply. Then person A comes to person C and says: "If you don't do what I say, I will have me and person B to beat you up." C doesn't know B either, so he has to comply. Now A has (some small amount of) power over B and C. This power could be easily broken if B and C would meet and talked about A's bluff (this is actually the price A pays in higher risk of B and C finding out).

Now you may observe in the example that neither interaction was about just two parties; every interaction was about all three parties. So to be able to discuss power, you need to have interactions that involve at least three parties, and also some information hiding.

(In fact, as an aside, I believe that for any n there exist n-person games that cannot be accurately modeled via any series of (n-1)-person games, and the above is just example for n=3.)

> The stories about monopolies of market power from the morgue of the Hearst newspapers

Not sure what you refer to here, but I will say this:

I consider the idea of free market to be some set of rules of how people conduct business. These rules then can lead to (moral) failures, such as accumulation of wealth and power. This can be seen not only in the real world, but also by putting those rules into a computer and running a simulation.

Many people apparently don't agree with this approach. If I point to a market failure, such as monopoly, they will say "but this is not really a free market". Well, with such a definition of free market, you deliberately didn't allow for failure. But unfortunately, this approach doesn't give you rules that you can just apply and get whatever you call the free market.

I absolutely disagree with this statement. In democracy, you cannot trade or accumulate votes, and it is one of its tenets. In capitalism, you can trade and accumulate "votes".

This means, at the very least, what family you were born into influences your life. It's better than feudalism, for sure, but it's still far from the ideal of equal opportunities.

That's a misconceived question in the first place. There are only actual feelings, preferences, etc. that actually-existing human individuals really have. To talk about "more objective" versus "more subjective", you have to talk about how well-informed those feelings and preferences are by someone's experience of the world: the objective, normative preference is the one you would form if you had all relevant experience of the world.

What values are not is subjective in the economic sense, of being both completely particular to each given agent and also arbitrary, unlinked to what sort of person you are or your circumstances. This is why it's often a better idea to inform and educate someone than to merely give them what their misconceived desires currently point towards -- for instance, to hospitalize suicidal people.

>I don't particularly favour capitalism or democracy as systems, but I do prefer them over central planning or dictatorship BECAUSE I believe values and morality to be subjective. Any alternate system should take that into account.

But again, you are completely ignoring both the definitions of the systems you're talking about, and how they actually operate. The questions you're trying to argue about are not fundamentally about "objective values" (a less misconceived idea) versus "subjective values" (a very extremely misconceived idea). They are about how you transmit information about what actually-existing people want or would want, and combine material inputs to give people what they want or would want.

Capitalism, especially of our current kind, is quite bad at giving people what they want, whether it's objective or subjective or naturalistic! This is why you are sitting here resorting to bad meta-ethics and bad history: you cannot justify your system by reference to the broad masses being genuinely satisfied with their lives, so instead you say, "Values are subjective, so capitalism is the only alternative to dictatorship, because Arrow's Impossibility Theorem." Every part of this statement is fractally wrong: there are more political systems than just "democracy" and "dictatorship", there are more economic systems than just capitalism and "central planning"/command-economy, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem demonstrates certain limitations that markets have to follow just like everything else, values are naturalistic, and the masses are mostly quite unhappy with their lives.

Please, learn more history, learn more political science, learn more economics, and learn them honestly. Avoid ethics, actually: it's a crappy field because it's founded on the false assumption that there are actually things called "values", which are either dictated by God, spring fully-formed from the Platonic Form of Reason, or are "subjective" to the point of meaninglessness.

I am not sure what is your argument. Voting (if that's what you're alluding to) can have the same real consequences as spending money. Both are a limited resource.

Anyway, I wanted to remark something that perhaps wasn't obvious. When I say "distribute resources democratically", it doesn't necessarily mean to vote about every resource. It can also mean to democratically establish rules that go against the market in specific cases, or choose market in some other cases.

Pretty much what I am saying is that free markets can fail and it should be democratic decision on whether they failed in specific case and how to remedy it.

> but social interaction does not reward honesty

Interesting. Not sure what you mean by social interaction, but it seems that this contradicts the idea that free markets can work in human societies. In particular, it implies that people are rewarded for dishonesty, which breaks down the free flow of information assumption needed for proper market function.

You are absolutely wrong in that it does not create productivity. When the underclass has the ability to take risk, it enables them to take part in all that which makes capitalism great. The loss in innovation at the top is more than made up for an increase in innovation at the bottom.

The people who would benefit from it the most would have the freedom to invest their time and money raising their children, bettering themselves, or taking risks and starting businesses.

Also, money repeatedly changing hands itself generates tax revenue, as well as personal wealth. Again, not zero sum. Giving these people purchasing power can also spur innovation from businesses who would offer them services that otherwise wouldn't be easily monetizeable.

As more jobs get replaced with automation, basic income will become increasingly attractive.

I take it you're in favour of financial market reforms too then?

We are doing these already, and we are spending public money already.

The idea behind basic income is just adjusting where to input public money. Instead of watering the flowers (trickle down economics) you water the roots.

If people have some way to survive then they won't turn to crime and they will be able to buy goods. So this expenditure goes right back into the economy.