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Comment by HKH2 | Hacker News Reader

If the government pays people to stay home, do you have a free market?

If the government pays people to not grow crops, do you have a free market? If the government props up certain industries with $BB in subsidies, do you have a free market? If the government approves mega-mergers that remove the ability for new companies to compete, do you have a free market? If the government bails out megabanks and investment firms after they crash the world economy, do you have a free market?

Of course not. The US hasn't had a free market economic system, or anything closely resembling that, in 60+ years. The US is at best a mixed economic system.

The megabanks didn't crash the world economy, they assisted as role players. The Fed's artificially low interest rates - an attempt to try to dodge a harsher recession after 9/11 and the dotcom implosion - primed a massive real-estate bubble that inevitably had to collapse. Just as the Fed has once again primed the massive asset bubbles in the US (both stocks and housing) by holding rates artificially low for far too long to try to spur fake economic growth.

prior to world war 2, the US wasnt a free market either. with massive government involvement to solve the great depression.

The government paid businesses too via PPP. They were called loans, and then some part of them were forgiven [1]. Is that a free market?

[1] https://www.sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/covid-19-relief-o...

Not original poster, but I presume that the answer would be "of course not".

The government paid workers via PPP, not businesses

The US federal government hasn't been paying people to stay home for a while and some of the more US conservative states stopped the extra payments before the feds did but those states are having trouble filling jobs too.

Of course you do. The government has set the absolute price of labour relative to activity. Business then has a relative cost to obtain that labour.

In fact the market has been levelled. Before workers needed to work to eat whereas business only needed to hire if there was a chance of a profit.

Now both sides have a “no deal I’ll wait” option.

> Now both sides have a “no deal I’ll wait” option.

No, only the workers do. The companies will go out of business without workers, but the "workers" (should we even call them that if they choose not to work?) will live off of our tax dollars through our safety net programs without jobs.

Good. The invisible hand if the market will cull the companies too weak to provide living wages.

When you can live off of the money you get for doing nothing, companies have to pay a lot more than a living wage to get you to work for them.

Does the money people are 'living off' not get spent with companies in your world? Doesn't that mean the company owner gets an income, the bankers get an income and the workers in that company get an income. The company owner and bankers only get an income to the extent that there is a productive use of workers above 1-1 - delivering sufficient surplus of real goods and services to feed and house the rest of us.

Isn't that what we want?

Always remember that money doesn't stop at its first use.

didnt the govt assistance for covid already end? also i wasnt aware it was actually enough to live on...

It wasn’t enough for anyone to live on. At best, it helped a few of my relatives when they couldn’t work for one paycheck due to illness.

Supposedly it moved large swaths of kids out of poverty. If that’s the labor companies we’re counting on using…

Ha! My spouse got $1000 per week, which I can assure you is more than enough for even both of us to live on.

Those elusive two weeks of minimum wage pay were enough for all workers to live off for all time!

If people are not born into wealthy or well networked families in an environment where they can acquire the skills and connections that allow them to choose between multiple hundred thousand dollar desk jobs that can be worked from home versus working as a janitor in hospitals, do you have a free market?

Yes. Including a free marriage market. And in a free marriage market an assortative mating strategy, which is generally used by human beings, will result in the children of successful people being considerably more likely to have heritable traits that contribute to success.

I can't see why not.

I think the notion that government is only supposed to subsidize and help and tax break and bail and help businesses, and not people, will need more thought out support to stand a chance of being taken seriously, than a snarky half sentence :)

It is actually a freer market, because it counterbalances the government paying banks to keep the financial treadmill going.

I'd love a sane economy where the government isn't distorting the market with trillion dollar stimuli and artificially low interest rates. But we haven't had that for many decades! Spending on social programs isn't some brazen giveaway, rather its mitigation for the ill effects of extreme giveaways to the financial industry that "both" parties solidly agree on.

Businesses especially the large one get free guarantees, bailouts, low interest rates, preferential treatments, etc. It isn't free for many decades.

The people I was talking about clearly have no problem with the government paying corporations to stay home, and they still call it a free market.

Then you're right about them being inconsistent.

no, because free markets are an illusion (information asymetry).

also the ppl payed to stay at home are mostly not working-class.

> no, because free markets are an illusion (information asymetry).

That's not relevant.

> also the ppl payed to stay at home are mostly not working-class.

Citation?

> That's not relevant.

it serves to disprove your misleading implication that free markets were destroyed by the goverment paying ppl to stay at home.

> Citation?

look around

> If the government pays people to stay home, do you have a free market?

83% of the value of all the 2020-21 Paycheck Protection Program loans were forgiven as of December 19th, 2021 [1]. That's a total value of $653,038,613,899. That's nearly as large as the 2008 bailouts. Even that doesn't tell the whole story because 94% of the 2020 loans alone were forgiven, and 2021 is on track to meet it.

[1]: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/2021-12/2021.12.19_W...

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