Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x3f | Hacker News Reader

Seems pretty reasonable to me. Is your contention that we _have_ achieved some pure form of free markets or Communism?

The thing is none of the “pure forms” are realistic outside of books.

If your system needs absolute theoretical purity to work, then it's worthless. And that's true of both communism and free market.

I'm not sure this is true. What you're describing is the local optimum problem. Yes, the local optimum is better if you can't push through to a better one, of course. And heading merely 'towards' the better optimum often makes things immediately worse. But that doesn't make the better optima worthless, or ever-unreachable.

It seems a bit like saying humans will never fly. It's a question of technology level, in the sense that governance is a form of economic technology. Which is what leaves it open to people saying it can be done better.

The best solution changes over time, essentially. It's a question of fitness to the current context.

Until you get a technology that makes people acting perfectly rationally, with perfect information and getting marginal cost equal to average cost[1], free market is never gonna work.

And until you get a technology that prevents leadership to be egoistic and corrupt, Communism is never going to work.

I'm not holding my breath for any of those tech to happen.

[1]: interestingly enough, such a condition is pretty much antithetical to capitalism as it requires capital to be free.

I'm not sure I really understand. What do you mean by "never gonna work"? Because markets obviously do largely work, despite the fact that people are not perfectly rational and there are other inefficiencies at the edges. They have their degenerate cases, of course, but I don't think anyone would say markets "don't work" in general.

Most successful economies are largely market-based, as things stand today. Even the successful command economies (i.e. China) use markets extensively.

Unless you mean perfectly free markets will never be perfect resource allocators. Well yes, perhaps, but what does that matter if there's no perfect solution? The nudges required to 'fix' markets are a form of technology, as discussed. As such, it either exists and is effective or not.

With enough regulations, subsidies, strategic planning and government interventions when things turn bad, mixed economies do the job pretty well, that's right. And when the regulation is lacking the outcome is as well.

And even these economies are structured around monopolistic and oligopolistic actors.

They are as related to “free market” as northern European countries welfare state is related to Communism.

Right, those are the current technologies we have to make markets work in a particular way. They don't preclude other technologies which work with freer markets.

Like there's a whole zoo of healthcare provision approaches, for example. Single payer can work fine (ala Norway), but so can Bismarck (ala Switzerland). The latter is a technological architecture that _enables_ similar or better outcomes, while being closer to a fully market-based approach.

It's not “closer to a fully market-based approach” any more than climbing a hill makes you closer to the moon.

Also, if you call regulations “technologies” (which I don't disagree with) then “free market” means technology-free.

But climbing a hill does make you closer to the moon. There's nothing wrong with incremental progress towards a goal, assuming this is a goal for the free-market people.

Also, I'm not sure a free market is technology-free per se. What you're talking about is specifically ancap-like, but most free market frameworks involve a state actor that should (among other things) not allow for itself to be weaponized against other market participants.

Like the paradox of tolerance, you can't tolerate a free market for bribing your way to benefit from the state's monopoly on violence. I don't think the existence of this paradox destroys the value of free markets or tolerance.

> But climbing a hill does make you closer to the moon. There's nothing wrong with incremental progress towards a goal,

I'm sorry to tell you we don't build spaceports on top of mountain, for a reason.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com