4 ms·

The US has never been a free-market and, honestly, the vitriol that folks use when talking about socialism has just hurt efforts to apply sane regulations that

by munk-a 6y ago

The US has never been a free-market and, honestly, the vitriol that folks use when talking about socialism has just hurt efforts to apply sane regulations that would help stabilize the market. The US still uses SSNs for everything because everyone is too afraid of government identification to pursue a more sane approach, the result is a government issued identification that is poorly designed for what it's used for and extremely insecure. The same thing happens with our economy, instead of taking sane measure to fight against the penultimate death of capitalism (the slide into oligopolies) the vitriol against any form of government intervention has placed us in a situation where heavy handed government intervention is regularly required - we're avoiding a soft form of socialism and ending up with having to intervene like a planned economy about once every decade. I really hope this can be solved by some smart people without trying to enlist wide-spread political support since I don't think that support is ever going to materialize.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
>The US has never been a free-market Pretty much every market in the US has been insanely free, like "just don't kill people quickly and we don't care" free at some point. They all stopped being free when they got big. Then government got involved and regulation, regulatory capture and whatnot happened (I'm intentionally glossing over the details because they vary by industry and I don't want to pass judgement).
- davidf18 6y ago
  Suggest you read some microeconomics, specifically about rent-seeking, a market failure or market inefficiency typically but not always caused by politics. As a simple example, consider that NYC taxi medallions were limited by NYC city council to about 13,000 and as a result, the market value of a medallion was about $1.2 million. Then Uber/Lyft came and relieved the politically induced rent-seeking market failure of hailable vehicles in NYC and now medallions are worth a fraction of what they had been. Real estate including housing costs in NYC, Boston, DC, Seattle, SF, LA, and much of state of CA are not free markets, but again through rent-seeking, politics has created an artificial scarcity of land by use of zoning density restrictions primarily but also overuse of historic landmark status.

by munk-a 6y ago

throwaway0a5e 6y ago

>The US has never been a free-market Pretty much every market in the US has been insanely free, like "just don't kill people quickly and we don't care" free at some point. They all stopped being free when they got big. Then government got involved and regulation, regulatory capture and whatnot happened (I'm intentionally glossing over the details because they vary by industry and I don't want to pass judgement).

davidf18 6y ago
Suggest you read some microeconomics, specifically about rent-seeking, a market failure or market inefficiency typically but not always caused by politics. As a simple example, consider that NYC taxi medallions were limited by NYC city council to about 13,000 and as a result, the market value of a medallion was about $1.2 million. Then Uber/Lyft came and relieved the politically induced rent-seeking market failure of hailable vehicles in NYC and now medallions are worth a fraction of what they had been. Real estate including housing costs in NYC, Boston, DC, Seattle, SF, LA, and much of state of CA are not free markets, but again through rent-seeking, politics has created an artificial scarcity of land by use of zoning density restrictions primarily but also overuse of historic landmark status.