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No Capitalism's been 'hacked' and that's why you have consumerism and unsustainability. The free-market is the most effective way to distribute resources in
by gtpasqual 11y ago
No
Capitalism's been 'hacked' and that's why you have consumerism and unsustainability.
The free-market is the most effective way to distribute resources in an environment, that's it. All problems come from central planning.
- thescriptkiddie 11y agoI honestly can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
- knowaveragejoe 11y agoHe's most likely not. There are honestly people that believe this, rather than a more nuanced view.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoThat free markets ensure a Pareto optimal allocation of resources is the first fundamental theorem of welfare economics. It does not imply any normative statement on whether the distribution is "just", as that is very difficult to qualify.
- thescriptkiddie 11y agoThere's quite a bit of difference between pareto optimal and "most effective". In many situations, pareto optimality is actually among the worst of all possible outcomes (see the prisoner's dilemma, also local maxima). If you had used the former term in your comment it would have been more clear. As it is, it reads like a deliberate attempt to invoke poe's law. EDIT: Oh wait, you're not the same person.
- gtpasqual 11y agoI'm not
- kamaal 11y agoIts not sarcasm. I come from a formerly socialist economy(India). Central planning is a scheme to create bullshit jobs which don't have to exist at the first place. This distract funds and human resources from other competing higher priority work. Every thing is state planned starting from detergent to air planes. All services are mediocre and everything is in a state of stagnation and slow decay.
- mixedbit 11y ago> The free-market is the most effective way to distribute resources in an environment, that's it. All problems come from central planners. Until the resource is clean air that you can pollute for free without a central planner to limit such pollution.
- ancap 11y agoExcept it was American courts in the early 19th century which deviated from the Anglo-Saxon common law tradition of property rights which viewed air pollution was a tort. Soviet rivers were some of the most polluted in the world. A free-market has much stricter limits on pollution than any crony government agency.
- mixedbit 11y agoWhat are these limits if not government regulations? Are you aware of any country that doesn't have regulations to prevent pollution of rivers or air in which free-market prevents such pollution all by itself?
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoAn absence of a particular primary legislation related to pollution does not imply that the economic order is therefore laissez-faire.
- gtpasqual 11y agoGovernment regulations are not torts.
- ancap 11y agoI'm not aware of any countries where there exists a "pure" free market. While there is plenty written on the theory of enforcing laws and property rights sans government, I think it a stretch even with a government run court system, to refer to a court's ruling in behalf of property rights as "central planning". Even calling such a ruling "government regulation" seems pretty far from what most would consider "regulation".
- littletimmy 11y agoA market is "free" when the economic agents in the market are free. Capitalism enslaves most men, and therefore capitalism and the free market are in contradiction.
- Lawtonfogle 11y ago>The free-market is the most effective way to distribute resources in an environment What happens when a child would rather work for food now than go to school and improve future income potential? Government ensuring that children have food and can't work so that they will focus on increasing future earning potential results in a better society than one where there is no government intervention, and thus some number of children have to work now instead of focusing on future earning potential, meaning that throughout their lifetime they will contribute less to society than they could have. This is one example where pure capitalism is not the most effective.
- vezzy-fnord 11y agoYour use of the example "going to school and improving future income potential" is a very externality caused by intervention, i.e. the modern public schooling system and licensing requirements. A more voluntary society where autodidacticism, guilds, apprenticeships and decentralized democratic schooling are practical options for advancement (that a hypothetical laissez-faire arrangement would make easier to emerge) would therefore mitigate the effects of time preference, in that self-advancement would have less legislative barriers and the opportunity for market signaling would be more unfettered now that the principal-agent inefficiencies caused by formal credentialism are lowered. That is to say, employers would rely more on real signals rather than the nominal signals emitted from credentials and licensing that do not account for time and skills corrected after their acquirement, and don't suffer from disequilibrium caused by poorly thought out credential requirements.
- Lawtonfogle 11y agoWhy would we see people expecting to train children in tasks when even today you see adults who need only a fraction of the training a child would not being trained on the job as hiring managers look for already qualified candidates? Even if this is what society would revert to once it ran out of already trained individuals, it would be cyclic and would cause entire generations to be lost as it would always be preferable to hire some adult who has basic training over a child who needs to be built from the ground up in basics. Consider the simple case of a programmer. Who would hire a child who would take years to train (as they would need to learn not only programming, but math and reading and writing, among other fields of knowledge)? Even if the child would work for free for those years of training (which would be problematic for other reasons, but assuming they would anyways), it is still not worth it because the cost of training other than salary would make hiring no one a far better choice. It costs a lot to train a child from scratch and they offer no benefits except in the longest of terms, so people would always hire from elsewhere, such as children who had parents rich enough to afford them basic education costs out of pocket. Apprenticeship would work well in today's world if you start after the basic education has been completed before specialized education begins, so that it would be quick enough to turn apprentices into employees who could produce value. But this would be later high school or early college; maybe earlier for simpler trades. It will not (and historically did not) work well for younger children with more educationally demanding jobs.
- JauntTrooper 11y agoWell, not all problems. Market failures like monopolies, negative externalities, and free ridership that leads to underinvestment in public goods are all problems inherent to unchecked capitalism that lead to an inefficient allocation of resources. Even Adam Smith was an ardent opponent of monopolies. It's pretty well established that capitalism works best with a regulatory state that can correct market failures and enforce private property laws.
- dropit_sphere 11y ago>All problems come from central planning. I agree whole-heartedly that the free market is an awesome, powerful, often-counterintuitively-effective thing. But isn't there something to be said for some forms of central planning? Theory of the firm, multicellular organisms sending themselves to the moon, the empirical adaptive fitness of lumbering nation-states over freemen upon the land, etc. I'm pretty far right, but I see a lot of problems with the free market. None of this is to imply that capitalism has not been hacked. It is to imply that it is sometimes hard to distinguish the hacking from guardrails.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoPlease go evangelize your religion and its anti-empirical dogma somewhere else.