Requirements for the government-free market
In your opinion,
what conditions must be met, by
- buyers
- sellers
- sector/goods/services
- the market itself
for a market free from direct govt. intervention to lead--over the long term--to better outcomes wrt efficiency, effectivity, lower prices and similar benefits? Note that I am not considering intangible benefits such as moral character. Illustrative real-world examples very welcome
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Better outcome compared to what?
Let's say, markets with as much regulations as there were under Saint Reagan. Or Nixon, even.Originally Posted by Wraith
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
As in progressive improvement, eg. this year our processors are 1GHz, next year our processors will be 2GHz.
Not as in "compared to the way things are in today's reality"
"One day, we shall die. All the other days, we shall live."
Ideally, I'd like to see accurate free-flow of information, and for buyers and sellers to only engage in activities where there are a.) plenty of competing buyers and sellers, and b.) all participants are acting willingly toward their percieved gain.
Really all I'd want a free market to be.
The biggest differences between that and what we have. Is we have community funds given to the government (our elected leadership) in faith it is given back to us in the form of tasks being accomplished that none of us could better off afford ourselves; however, they are instead often given corruptly to favor cerain business, and industries. This creates anti-free market. Where the best, the brightest, and the hardest working do not propsper but government picked favorites (who are chosen because they already have a market lead and are able to create laws and policies to maintain it) Where they donate X million but get far more than X million worth of anti-competitive policies in their favor. This is a problem, it's sickening really. Goverment serves itself, and people worship money over the lives of others. This is the problems of misplaced trust.
If we eliminate this many problems go away.
However, I have a socialist side to me, I don't beleive in letting people starve or die ever. The only trade off for life is life. Just have to make the best call since you only have a finite amount of resources. Technology invests in future life, and spending it on people now saves todays people. It's complex, but I think solvable prolem. I think in harnassing energy we may even find simple ways to power human bodies, e.g. Star Trek-ish.
The question is how to distribute resources and Capitalism provides a decent answer, though one that could be improved upon.
It seems impossible to have any usable data on the subject; we know that even command economies have managed innovation, but the amount of variables is massive.
In the future, the Berlin wall will be a mile high, and made of steel. You too will be made to crawl, to lick children's blood from jackboots. There will be no creativity, only productivity. Instead of love there will be fear and distrust, instead of surrender there will be submission. Contact will be replaced with isolation, and joy with shame. Hope will cease to exist as a concept. The Earth will be covered with steel and concrete. There will be an electronic policeman in every head. Your children will be born in chains, live only to serve, and die in anguish and ignorance.
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.
I'm fairly certain I'm setting myself up for an ambush, and fear needing to once again repeatedly utter the phrase "that's not what I said," but I'll bite, if only to forward the noble goal of procrastination and avoidance of real work.In your opinion,
what conditions must be met, by
for a market free from direct govt. intervention to lead--over the long term--to better outcomes wrt efficiency, effectivity, lower prices and similar benefits? Note that I am not considering intangible benefits such as moral character. Illustrative real-world examples very welcome
- buyers
- sellers
- sector/goods/services
- the market itself
To meet your goal of efficiency, the only things I believe are needed are buyers and sellers both being honest, honoring any agreements made, acting in a rational and intelligent manner (self-interested or not), and for any given market segment to have two or more participants on both supply and demand side that do not collude. This is only to meet the goal of efficiency, not any ones that get added, and further assuming that you do not attempt to define any of the terms overly broadly to try to sneak in extra goals. I skipped the other ones because I don't think I can guess at your meaning of them well enough, and something like lower prices can be at ends with maximum efficiency in some cases. I'll also note that I don't really think that meeting the stated requirements adequately is a reasonable expectation when there is no government intervention.
This is slightly different than the goals stated in the OP, IMO, and requires different things. Rapid technological advancement is not necessarily the most efficient path, does not necessarily lead to lower prices, and if I'm guessing at your meaning of effectivity correctly, can be at ends with that too. (The old story about NASA spending millions to develop a pen to write in space, while the Russians just used a pencil).
edit: I think you can optimize for this goal by using the requirements I gave above, and in addition changing the values that the consumers seek to ones which prize novelty and technological superiority above all else (trumping things like price, usefulness, etc.). And I did realize, if a bit late, that you might not be specifically asking for things like tech improvements.
Last edited by Wraith; 02-06-2012 at 10:07 PM.
The definition of the free market, in other words.
Yup. Not that this is possible, or that all the effort or expense put into regulation has managed to come anywhere close either.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
How does honesty factor into the definition of free market? Isn't the only requirement that free markets are controlled by supply and demand? Is it not a sound strategy for a supplier to try to create as much demand as possible using whatever legal means the supplier has?
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
How can something become illegal without governmental intervention? Or to phrase it different, why would someone not do something illegal without governmental intervention?
"Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen." - Helmut Schmidt
Nope. Monopoly and oligopoly conditions are excluded from the definition of a free market, as is "fraud" and government regulation.
The academic "Free market" definition is just a theoretical framework for the way a market "should" work, without the interference of all the things that we know fuck up the functioning of a market. (Government, fraud, monopoly/oligopoly conditions, threat of/use of violence in settling disputes, etc.)
Sure. It's also a sound strategy to try to corner the market and achieve a monopoly. Successfully doing that violates the definition of the "free market" too.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
But how does honesty factor into the definition? Or is dishonesty one of those things that fuck up the free market and thus excluded?
And if it's merely academic, why do I ear so many people who want the free market to be reality?
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
Same goes for:
- Socialism
- Communism
- Anarchism
- pick your favorite ideology.
Things always sound soo nice until they hit reality.
"Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen." - Helmut Schmidt
government-free market?
doesn't exist
Bingo.
Think of it more as a theoretical maximum - a "free market" that meets the academic definition may not actually be achievable, but it is the most efficient form the market can take on, and an arrangement where all transactions are mutually beneficial to all parties involved (or at least, have the potential to be mutually beneficial, given rational, informed actors).
So that's why so many people want to make it a reality (or get as close as is possible in an imperfect world) - it is the best possible outcome, and thus, something worth working towards.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
How are all these exclusions to be mitigated?
Faith is Hope (see Loki's sig for details)
If hindsight is 20-20, why is it so often ignored?
Oh, but government does have a role in the economy; it should make sure through regulations that there are no (semi-)monopolies and government also has a task protecting the consumer. Government owning (parts of) companies that can exist in a free marktet is a government overstretching.
Congratulations America
Lets just say I'm loving the irony for the government as necessary evil to make a free market possible ...
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
As a liberal (in the European sense) to me this is one of the core duties of the government.
"Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen." - Helmut Schmidt
The practice won't work in theory.
Unless you can figure out how to get 80 million US baby boomers to die in a "timely manner". Or how to care for disabled 20 year old war vets who'd like to live a few more decades, thank you very much.
Your theoretical free market framework was cancelled out by early gov't (public) investment into R & D/interventions that gave us things like Small Pox, Measles, and Polio vaccinations. Followed by antibiotics, cardio beta blockers, sophisticated anti-virals, cancer chemotherapies, etc. These very things also help/ed you live longer, well onto your way to being the next generation of expensive medical care recipients.
Well, no, government regulation (like fraud) is one of the conditions that prevents the existence of a free market. So there's not so much as irony here, as a balancing act. With no law, people will defraud and steal from and kill each other, preventing the existence of a free market. With too much law, you end up with 10,000 fucking pages of regulation preventing the existence of a free market... and don't eliminate theft and fraud either.
So, like EJ said, the role of a competent, responsible government, is to encourage the existence of a free market with proper enforcement of laws against fraud and theft and so on, but without burying the market in regulations, like all modern governments do.
Woman, stop smoking crack.The practice won't work in theory.
Unless you can figure out how to get 80 million US baby boomers to die in a "timely manner". Or how to care for disabled 20 year old war vets who'd like to live a few more decades, thank you very much.
Your theoretical free market framework was cancelled out by early gov't (public) investment into R & D/interventions that gave us things like Small Pox, Measles, and Polio vaccinations. Followed by antibiotics, cardio beta blockers, sophisticated anti-virals, cancer chemotherapies, etc. These very things also help/ed you live longer, well onto your way to being the next generation of expensive medical care recipients.
"I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them."
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
-- Thomas Jefferson: American Founding Father, clairvoyant and seditious traitor.
I am surprised, where are the hardcore libertarians disagreeing.
And if we agree that everyone in free market has to play fair, why do we still want to have free trade with China?
"Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen." - Helmut Schmidt
So you meant to say, "Well, yeah. To a certain extent".
You're so cute!government regulation (like fraud)
I could have had class. I could have been a contender.
I could have been somebody. Instead of a bum
Which is what I am
I aim at the stars
But sometimes I hit London
Because someone else getting unfair advantages/unproportional return doesn't mean that no one else can get any return. You can still make money in those markets.
Last night as I lay in bed, looking up at the stars, I thought, “Where the hell is my ceiling?"
But you don't need to let down your pants, don't you? I do think it's a good idea to trade with China, but currently it wouldn't be good to open up the markets completely.
Well as we run a trade surplus with them we might be an exception, but for other western states, it might won't be that good.
"Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen." - Helmut Schmidt
You forgot that another important "role" of government has been funding expensive R & D, in the things a private-for-profit "free market" can't or won't. That's why I used medical examples that extend our longevity, even diseased or unhealthy longevity that's quite expensive. But you could just as easily look to NASA, or high-tech military endeavors, funded by our taxes/government.
Freee market or not, individual companies--even conglomerates or multi-national corporations--can't really compete with large nations that will put billions or trillions into an 'investment'.
You may have misdiagnosed people as hardcore libertarians.
China is certainly a trade manipulator. But the basic idea of getting them into the WTO was they would slowly be unable to control the modernizing/opening forces that come with free trade. China is certainly trying to control this, but it has become increasingly difficult (and will continue to get difficult). Especially when it comes to industries like media and finance.
That said, this process has been significantly slowed by the tendency of Western companies to accede to joining a "joint venture" with Chinese companies in order to access Chinese markets.
They can be diagnosed too? Like severe conservatives?You may have misdiagnosed people as hardcore libertarians.
"Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen." - Helmut Schmidt
And zombies, yes.
That's the same.And zombies, yes.
"Wer Visionen hat, sollte zum Arzt gehen." - Helmut Schmidt
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