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Comment by _rrnv | Hacker News Reader

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> every true "free market" is eventually dominated by a *poly - most often, mono- or duo-

If a market is monopolized (or collusion occurs) it ceases to become free. Part of ensuring a free market (that's sometimes overlooked, particularly by some politicians if they're paid for by AT&T, Comcast, Google, etc) is making sure they don't happen.

Therefore, here’s a philosophical question - is a regulated market a free market?

That has a very simple and obvious answer: it depends whether the regulation makes the market more or less free. Promoting competition is good, setting artificial prices for things is not.

Ideologies often dont make much sense in the real world. The world's leading economies are in fact mixed.

The best way I've found to find truth seems to be the scientific method. Test your ideas and reject the ones that fail.

Ideologies are antithetical to that. But people are smug enough to think they just simply know better and dont need to test and modify their theories of the world.

Economics is just too complex for the scientific method. Feedback loops are very long, nothing is reproducible and you can almost always find a measure by which whatever you are looking at looks good or bad. But yes. All successful economies are mixed economies that have evolved by pragmatic adjustments and not by ideology.

I agree. But I would say we should try, like Sandra DOC stated: "the Founding Fathers intended the states to be experiments in policy."

People, I think, agree with this. I always hear it casually said this is why Europe has such better governance.

European here. Fascinated to find out why anyone - with our huge issues of nations with completely different values sharing the same currency, Islamic terrorism, and both a harder left and a harder right than the US - thinks we have better governance.

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