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Yes, but only because people that are willing to vocally self-identify with a powerless 3rd party platform already extremist in their views. Us everyday libert
by kobeya 9y ago
Yes, but only because people that are willing to vocally self-identify with a powerless 3rd party platform already extremist in their views.
Us everyday libertarians are often more moderate, realizing that while there is nothing more efficient than a free market, sometimes incentives are not aligned with goals, and markets in those cases efficiently make bad outcomes. In such cases artificial incentives through laws and regulations create the environment in which free markets succeed at getting us what we want. Global warming is a prime example -- I'm a big fan of cap-and-trade systems, a very typical "free market on top of regulation" setup. We just think that by and large most regulations are not of this type and need to go, and in fewer cases we are lacking regulation we might want or need, like carbon trading.
But lack of regulation is NOT "more freedom for big business to do what it wants." In most cases, more regulation is what causes that. Most big businesses welcome regulation because of regulatory capture. They hate getting rid of regulation because it creates environments where they can be out-innovated by competition, old or new:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
- Synaesthesia 9y agoActually the free market can often be irrational, inefficient and completely unpredictable. The free market (caring only about profits) is what has given us an environmental catastrophe. If the regulation gets captured as you say that means less, or no regulation effectively and more freedom for the businesses. Regulation has to have teeth if we’re gonna implement it.
- kobeya 9y agoIn economics "rational" has a very specific, technical meaning, specifically acting in the way that is most profitable. So I'm not 100% sure I understand what you mean when you say that free markets can be irrational by caring only about profits and I would suspect that we are speaking past each other. Regulation doesn't "get captured." Regulatory capture is where a monopolist captures a market by means of regulation. For example, PayPal invented a new business model: digital money transfers. They then lobbied for and got expansion of financial regulations to make it very, very difficult to enter the money services business. So difficult that for 15 years until now they had no serious competition. Were consumers made safer by that regulation? No, because as it turns out the hurdles to getting approval to operate as a MSB really aren't consumer protecting at all, they're just that: very expensive hurdles, outside the reach of a startup. And the innovation we've seen recently with Venmo, Apple & Samsung Pay, etc. is what we could have had all along if they weren't granted a de facto monopoly that took an Apple-sized company to break.