Hacker News Reader

Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

This will just end up being a discussion about definitions, but lets dip into it.

We can define a socialism government to be one that have the goal of having social ownership and democratic control of the means of production.

We can define a free market to be one in which the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government, price-setting monopoly, or other authority.

Thus a Free Market Socialism would be socialism which achieve social ownership and democratic control of the means of production by having a government that prevents price-setting monopolies.

View on HN

Free markets allow monopolies. Actually it is the dream of all producers, but in practice they cannot live long. Reason there are monopolies or very high barriers to enter some industries is the state granted rights (eg. IP rights), regulations and restrictions.

Also you are avoiding the actual "social" side of the Socialism. In Socialism, there is always a forced redistribution mechanism in the name of "exploitation of the labor class". Which makes the "free market" impossible.

monopolies and a free market is a oxymoron because at that point the monopoly has become a authority that intervene in the forces of supply and demand. Such authority can exist without government, and given enough capital and positioning it can be very stable. In history we can find examples of companies that through pure size and weight can solely influence the forces of supply and demand, with no need to get help from governments.

The state can naturally also create monopolies. patents are explicit in this, granting an entity a "limited" timed monopoly.

> there is always a forced redistribution mechanism

And now we enter the definition of terms. Forced redistribution is mechanism, not a goal in itself. Historically there have been governments that have tried it, through to be honest there hasn't been a country that have not had events of forced redistribution, and if the book Debt - The First 5,000 Years is correct in the historical data, the elimination of debt through violence was a recurring event that happened in all cultures. Forced redistribution happens all the time in history when the ability to repay get too impossible low compared to the amount of money being owned.

No, What I said is, monopolies can exist for a short time in a free-market system. But they live much longer in state controlled-restricted markets. And I doubt there is any example in History a real monopoly lived as long as patent expiration time (no, Standard oil was not a monopoly.) even in a "mostly" free market economy. Examine the Phoebus cartel for an example. Patents are indefensible in my eyes after witnessing the damage it gave to the development of human kind (pharmaceuticals, tech, software etc.). Besides, IP rights is only one of state's monopoly generation tools.

Perhaps my wording was not correct. What I mean by "forced redistribution" is getting money from producers by force (via taxation) and distributing it to a arbitrarily selected people. This is required in all forms of Socialism and it violates the rules of free market (capitalism).

monopolies in a free-market system is an authority. One can claim that they should expire faster or exist with less frequencies, but an authority is an authority, and with it it can exert pressure on what would be a balance between supply and demand.

If we look far enough into the past, large enough monopolies are indistinguishable from governments. The Hanseatic League had their own armies, their own laws and even their own cities. Under their rule they fully controlled supply and demand, including price, which no longer makes it a free-market system. Still, they aren't what we define as a state (definitions...).

Taxation don't violate a free market. A free market need laws, which in turn require police and military, which in turn need to be paid (which distributes money). If everyone has to have their own police, military and laws, everyone becomes small islands of states. Those states then violate the supply-demand market, and thus you no longer have a free market.

There is no free lunch here. One can try to redefine what a free market is, what socialism is, what a state is, what a authority is, what taxation is, what interferences is, but it will just ends up arguing definitions.

What do you mean by "social ownership"?

The traditional definition of socialism is that it has public ownership of the means of production (i.e. shared by society as a whole). What you describe wouldn't achieve that, because, even with market regulations that prevent monopolization, means of production would still be privately owned - there'd just be more such private owners. But the basics of private ownership of the means of production - the ability to extract economic rent from them - wouldn't change, and that basic ability is what defines capitalism.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com