And I think at least in the cases I observed it hasn't fixed the 'problem' either.
The EU is a single market consisting of many sovereign states. Sovereign states are naturally protectionist. Each member state wants to support domestic businesses over their rivals from other member states, but a single market can't work like that. To overcome these natural tendencies, the EU set up a regulatory environment that undermines the advantages established businesses have in their home markets, in order to allow businesses from other member states successfully compete against them.
That same attitude bleeds to dealings with businesses outside the single market. EU regulators see large profits and large market shares as signs of insufficient competition, and they see insufficient competition as something inherently negative.
"We will back your participation in this "competition" only as long as your participation furthers our preconceived objectives about how the world and society and economy should work."
It stems from the idea that being an FTE at one place for a long time (and not really having any class mobility) is a good and decent thing to encourage for most of your society. Stability above upside.
It's the root cause of why the USA has a startup culture and Europe does not.
It's fine if that is your belief, but to pretend that it's "competition" when they have their thumb on the scale tilting it toward a specific social ideology is a bit disingenuous.
The core idea is that we see the market as a means to an end, not some end in itself. When the market is incompatible with societal good, the market needs to change, not society.
A market by itself only optimizes for maximum profits for shareholders, at the expense of everything else. Often, you want your economy to optimize for different things, so you direct the market to support your goals.
It's the root cause why inequality is so much worse in the US, why you have a much bigger housing crisis, why health care in the US is such a mess, why there's homeless people everywhere etc etc.
I don't think a single part of this claim a) logically follows from the previous paragraphs, or b) is actually true.
For just one example: the housing crisis is a lack of supply, which is the result of the exact same kind of status-quo-maintaining, market-forces-secondary-to-regulatory-aims (NIMBYism by property owners and their representatives) thing you describe as being the European norm.
To say that these philosophical differences are the root cause of failures in very complex systems is of course the popular and prevailing European narrative about the USA. (There is another, equally popular and equally false (but self-congratulatory) one in Europe about gun violence in the USA.) I just don't see much evidence to substantiate it.
44% of the housing stock is in public ownership, two thirds of the population live in public housing. Rent is affordable and housing stock is of high quality.
Market forces would not have solved this, as there is very little profit to be made with low-cost housing - so the lack of housing was fixed by state intervention and Vienna has the highest quality of life in the world [1] as a result.
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/vienna-...
I’m fairly certain that this is not correct.
The market was never an end to itself. Literally go back and read anywhere from Smith, Hume to Hayek. That is just a straw-men argument.
> When the market is incompatible with societal good, the market needs to change, not society.
And who and how is it determined, what the social good is? Are bureaucrats loosely connected to politicians loosely connected to voters a better an more reliable form of social preference allocation then the price mechanism under the same law? Not by any existing evidence in social science.
But the core of your argument is basically the government whenever it feels like it can just intervene in the market directly and put its finger on the scale. Not by fundamentally changing the rules, just be direct intervention whenever they don't like something. Often that is a foreign competitor and some vague hard to prove claims about market power. And often it is the citizens of that country that end up having higher prices or higher taxes. French book market being a good example.
Many times it has been shown historically that the monopolies far, far, far more often are government created then market created. And laws to establish 'fair competition' are usually strongly sponsored by the very competitors who get crushed in the market, often for good fundamental reasons.
The first Anti-Trust law in the US was by local butchers to prevent centralized butchers with refrigerated rail-cars. Would it really be 'fair competition' to give money to local butchers to prevent them from this 'unfair competition'. No, its how you get a stagnate economy depended on subsidies.
Very often its just governments doing what they want for the political clients that they have. French publishers, German news organization.
A perfect example is Germany where German Newspaper have fought tooth and nails for years against 'Google News' and basically want to monetize every link to their sites. This is all done in the name of 'fair competition' while introducing laws that are really the opposite and hurt user freedom in the process.
> It's the root cause why inequality is so much worse in the US, why you have a much bigger housing crisis, why health care in the US is such a mess, why there's homeless people everywhere etc etc.
If you think housing and health care are examples of 'free market fundamentalism' then you are very badly informed.
Regulations reduce competition by raising the bar to entry and the unforeseen consequences of compliance.
So, regulations are necessary part of free markets. The question is what regulations are good and what regulations are bad.
There are empirical and game theoretical examples where regulations create better outcomes than nonviolent free market competition. There are games where the tragedy of the commons occur i.e. Nash equilibrium creates bad outcome [0]. This is also true in the real world e.g. collapse of the Atlantic northwest cod fishery.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wNj9hOIt9g
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_of_the_Atlantic_north...
And free markets imply free people - slavery is the opposite of that.
Taxing externalities is also necessary, and it's tax, not a regulation. But that is something we're still working on, with little success it seems. See the carbon/pollution international issues with China, Russia, Australia.
Also, a simple tax can not solve the tragedy of the commons for fisheries as long as fishing will remain profitable. Nash equilibrium involving full exploitation remains as long as there is a profit. Fish are not an externality that can be reduced to avoid taxation, but the objective. While cap on fishing will work.
Infrastructure is the usual example. If your company owns something like a cellular network or a local power grid, the EU requires that you let other businesses use it for a fair price to sell their services to customers. This regulation creates more competition and lowers the prices for customers, while simultaneously making businesses more efficient and less profitable.
Surely a marjet without competition, i.e. monopolised, is no longer free? Or what does 'free' mean?
it depends to whom you ask.
in the US, for a long time, anti-trust was kinda cozy with monopolies - they were accepted as the natural outcome of a free market: the most efficient solution.
In the EU there is more emphasis on market competition, and big monopolists are seen as problematic.
The same argument that justifies monopoly also justifies soviet-style central planning. It just changed the 'monopolist' in charge.
Do not confuse regulations made to fix even worse regulation with an actual healthy, competitive free market.
In Eastern Europe, after the fall of communism, people would lay Ethernet wire between apartment buildings to create ad-hoc communication networks. There were dozens of them. Today that is illegal and we only have a single Internet provider per city block.
This is literally wrong. OpenBanking only applies to the biggest banks and not little guys, and it allows little guys to access data stored in huge banks.
How does thay reduce competition? It reduces bar to entry
I can think of 10 startup banks like monzo and starling and have accounts in 4 of them, where is this lack of competition?
Is it also regulator's fault there is no competition in running water and sewer providers? In your world there is no such thing as capital requirements, barriers to entry, natural monopoly, all issues are summed as 'regulation = bad"
real world experience suggests the contrary is true.
What actions the US government took to "institute" Bell's monopoly?