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Comment by dudeman13 | Hacker News Reader

A close to most fundamental factor must survive close to most observations of the real world. That's not the case.

Monopolies have historically shit all over the notion that supply and demand is a good model to use for the market.

Much like most economic models, there are underlying assumptions about it that make it bad at actually predicting the real world. Things like perfectly competitive markets (haha), prices being adjustable (haha) and the forces that act on supply/demand being rational (extra hahaha).

There are lots and lots of cases where it fails, like the housing bubble, administered prices and wages.

Still, it might as well be a religion. Afterall, people can say it is close to a most fundamental law about markets with a straight face (despite it failling all the time).

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Monopolies are the opposite of a free market. I'm not sure how a critique of using supply and demand to explain how free markets work will apply if you choose a monopolised market as your rebuttal. You may as well say that supply and demand doesn't hold under communist conditions.

What I would counter is that it that we can see that free markets work preferably to monopolised ones, or any of the other ones you've provided where selfish intervention of one kind or another has interfered with supply or demand.

monopoly is the goal of the free market, not its opposite. "supply and demand" are clearly forces at work in the economy, but the idea that an unspecified dynamic simply called "supply and demand" is predictive of anything is not accurate.

this false dichotomy between monopoly and its precursor is non sequitur.

> monopoly is the goal of the free market

Ignoring the fallacious teleological argument, I'm happy to rely on Wikipedia for this as this is basic knowledge:

> In economics, a free market is a system in which the prices for goods and services are self-regulated by buyers and sellers negotiating in an open market without market coercions.

What are market coercions?

> Examples of such prohibited market coercions include: economic privilege, *monopolies*, and artificial scarcities.

So you're implying me the only place supply and demand actually works is in an idealized free market that doesn't exist? If that's the case, yeah, we agree on it.

All those cases I mentioned came arose under one of the most (maybe the most?) free market of modernity.

> So you're implying me the only place supply and demand actually works is in an idealized free market that doesn't exist?

No. I don't believe you're trying to create a straw man intentionally but if you're going to jump from black to white, and a large jump at that, then it produces the same outcome all the same.

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