Big Business’s relentless push to equate the free market with freedom
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Market competition is what ensures companies compete to improve their products. Market competition is what ensures companies lower prices for consumers.
Unregulated free markets create monopolies. Figma being sold to Adobe and scrapped is unregulated free-market. Figma staying unsold, forcing Adobe to compete, is regulated healthy market competition.
The fact that free-marketers don't believe in natural monopolies or think that unhealthy monopolies can occur shows how far they will stretch reality to conform to their world view that "fundamentally companies should never be regulated for any reason what so ever".
Even while a bank just rescinded regulation and is tipping the financial sector as we speak.
Market competition is essentially for a healthy, innovate growing economy and country. Unregulated markets stifle competition and innovation and lead to unhealthy practices.
I really like Michael Brooks quote: Be kind to people but ruthless to systems.
Do you believe that we are currently in a "unregulated free-market"?
What of the easy money policies and price fixing of interest rates? Does this not drive sky high stock valuations, tech hype cycles and acquisitions?
Look around the stock valuations in the tech sphere. Companies with no profits are hyped to the moon. Individual investors are speculating on cryptocurrencies with little to no underlying usage. AI virtual assistants are being hyped up as the next big thing. Serial employees are adding "ML researcher" to their resume as if they published research papers in the field.
How can you claim this is laissez-faire? Regulators have been shoveling easy credit into the economy. They still cannot raise rates anywhere near their stated inflation metrics... and people are already panicking, blaming them for not providing more free candy.
Free trade between a free market economy and an authoritarian nation results in mercantilist behavior on the part of the latter toward the former, with a range of net detrimental outcomes to the former.
I don't buy this - China has provided us with natural resources, cheap goods, cheap labour. Material resources of this world. And no-one forced us to take them.
The responsebility for the way it played out rests with us.
There is no positive confidence in markets as such; there is negative certainty that control placed in the hands of the few is a ticket to tyranny, QED with social media.
So while the public might be trusting in one thing, behind the scenes (and under the table) big biz is constantly having Uncle Sam put his thumb on the scale.
It's ok if we don't have free markets. It's not ok to perpetuate the idea that we do, especially when behind the scenes actions don't seek free markets.
No True Communism called, they want their punchline back!
Go here and learn more about economics in 30 minutes than 99% of people.
Straight from wikipedia. This isn't basic economics. It's essentially the the absurd "capitalism at all costs" group think that's being called out here in this article.
It's why Alabama just rolled back child-labor laws today.
> In the early 90s, Austrian economist Steven Horwitz called the Mises Institute "a fascist fist in a libertarian glove."
> In 2000, a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) categorized the Mises Institute as Neo-Confederate, "devoted to a radical libertarian view of government and economics."[28]
> In 2003, an article by Chip Berlet of the SPLC noted Rothbard's disgust with child labor laws, and wrote that other Institute scholars held anti-immigrant views.
> In 2022, fundraising emails sent by the Mises Institute reportedly told followers that "elections aren't working anymore", arguing that the system is irreformable, captured by "parasites such as the Deep State, the political class, and the Federal Reserve", and claiming that "the Founding Fathers would demand revolution."
Second problem is more widespread and it is that in practice, economics is always political (in the sense it includes some moral axioms whether you like it or not), and various right-wing attempts (austrian, objectivist, neoclassical) to repaint it as something objective are highly contested if you look at history of the profession. I think Ha-Joon Chang (whose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_Things_They_Don%27t_Tell_Yo... is also a great read) points this out very nicely in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdbbcO35arw.
Michael Goodwin's Economix is also pretty good. It mentions all the different heterodox approaches.
Who owns the oceans, and who owns the air?
Fwiw, Mises.org is shadowbanned from new submissions on this site, but the authoritarian view from legacy media sources is celebrated. You can even post articles from socialist/marxist outlets like Jacobin.
What is your view on the Tragedy of the Commons with regards to air, and ocean?
Are you advocating they be privately owned?
Doctor: Here's why you should take medicine. It is grape flavor
jones: Underlying conditions be damned. I don't like grape flavor. Not taking it.
Doctor 2: Yeah sure, just eat chocolate.
jones: Here's my pharmacy's number
If your use of the atmosphere on your property harms my health or otherwise detracts from the value of my person or property, then you should be liable.
Liability shouldn't be limited by citing, "But I was within the EPA guidelines! Don't like it, take it up with the state! We all voted and you've had your say. Breathe in the toxic fumes democratically. You had your chance to elect politicians who in turn could appoint bureaucrats; Bureaucrats which can freely interpret and selectively enforce legislation as per their capricious whims. Yes, you've had your chance in the land of freedom."
Is there a bigger tragedy of the 'commons' than democracy? Everything falls under the public prerogative. Who you should marry and what you should eat or drink is now part of the 'commons'. What is private today can just as easily become part of the "collective good".
> In 2003, an article by Chip Berlet of the SPLC noted Rothbard's disgust with child labor laws, and wrote that other Institute scholars held anti-immigrant views.
> In 2022, fundraising emails sent by the Mises Institute reportedly told followers that "elections aren't working anymore", arguing that the system is irreformable, captured by "parasites such as the Deep State, the political class, and the Federal Reserve", and claiming that "the Founding Fathers would demand revolution."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mises_Institute
The Mises Institute is a political advocacy organization with pretty radical views. It endorses "heterodox economics" kind of how the flat earth society could be described as endorsing "heterodox science".