Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Markets are very good at a lot of important things, but the idea that’s taken hold in many places is market fundamentalism. It’s the idea that the market should run absolutely everything and if the market doesn’t do it, it has no value.

It’s like the inverted doppelgänger of Soviet Communist ideology that the state and the party know what is best and if they don’t decide to do it we don’t need it.

Fundamentalist thinking in general seems like a huge cognitive antipattern, especially when dealing with any kind of living organic system like human society. Organic systems are complex overlays of multiple systems doing different jobs. Imagine “liver fundamentalism,” the idea that kidneys should be eliminated because the liver is the ideal way to purify blood. It’s like that.

Yeah. There's an even simpler way to formulate it: different types of goods require different mixes of market vs planning. For example, video games can be an almost completely free market. Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). But things like water supply or power supply seem to have their own gravity, which again and again leads to more centralized solutions: see the Wikipedia pages for "natural monopoly" and "public utility". And then there are goods like policing, which should absolutely be centralized.

I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved the same.

>Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns).

Wha? Food production is a very regulated market for national security reasons in almost every nation. Otherwise one entity with a bunch of money can starve a smaller nation very easily and then take it over. Now on the higher end of food sales, what one can produce is generally less regulated.

Good point, didn't think of it. And yeah, I don't know in general which goods should be more vs less free-market.

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