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This is how Adam Smith described free markets, potentially influenced by regulation to ensure monopolies and rent seeking didn't exist. In that framing, the ma
by joshuamorton 6y ago
This is how Adam Smith described free markets, potentially influenced by regulation to ensure monopolies and rent seeking didn't exist.
In that framing, the market is free from economic privilege, and individual actors are free to compete on equal footing.
- nextaccountic 6y agoThanks, this makes sense. What confuses me is the overloading of "free market" to mean something opposed to government intervention.
- trident5000 6y agoGovernment set the rules in free markets. A free market is a competitive market with even rules for all participants.
- joshuamorton 6y agoYes, lots of anti-regulation people have taken a specific brand of free-market capitalism (arguably even an extremist brand of laissez-faire free-market capitalism) and tried to make that the only "real" market economy. Free market socialism isn't a contradiction, despite what many would have you believe (think: worker owned co-operatives and nonprofits that compete in the broader market). Similarly, market economies need not be wholly unregulated to be good. And indeed, I think you'd be hard pressed to find mainstream economists who claim that worker safety regulations are bad (like, they might be able to point to particular regulations that are dumb, but there are many that are not).