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"Free market" is almost always a True Scotsman. It's "free market" whenever the outcome is good and "not-free-enough" or "not-market-enough" when the outcome is
by jampekka 3y ago
"Free market" is almost always a True Scotsman. It's "free market" whenever the outcome is good and "not-free-enough" or "not-market-enough" when the outcome is bad. Very rarely any proposals for an actual system where the good-outcome producing free market would manifest are laid out. (Extreme right-libertarians are an exception in this, but personally I see no way how their system wouldn't collapse into some private army plutocracy within days if not hours.)
Regulating the market is a really tricky business. And once regulatory reigns are lost, it becomes almost impossible, exactly due to the cronying up. To get the reigns on again things like total economic collapses (even 2008 apparently wasn't enough, 1930's was), major wars or violent revolutions sadly seem to be needed. I think we lost the reigns already in the 1970's or so.
- croes 3y ago>It's "free market" whenever the outcome is good Good for whom? Good for share holders, companies and investor or employees?
- jampekka 3y agoTo whomever is saying it, or what they think is good or what they think that their audience thinks is good.
- thereddaikon 3y agoIndeed. The "free market" is an easy scapegoat, for both good and bad outcomes to give to people who are ignorant of how the economy works. Which is most people since economic education is only the most simplistic in high schools and doesn't tell you how the system we have operates.
- jampekka 3y agoEconomic systems are educated not that differently from how psychotropic substance effects or sexual matters are often educated.