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The idea of free market being "remarkably good at providing" things is completely conditional on the very specific properties of that specific market. Via your

The idea of free market being "remarkably good at providing" things is completely conditional on the very specific properties of that specific market. Via your logic, monopolies would never exist, nor would anti competitive business practices, and yet they do, because the first thing companies do in a free market is do their best to make it unfree where possible as it's more profitable that way. The only way to solve this problem is to regulate markets that become unfree where observed to be necessary to do so.

nostrademons 2y ago
Sure it is, but manufactured goods is one of those markets that has generally proven to have relatively low barriers to entry and lots of competition. That's why first the Japanese, then Chinese, now Southeast Asians have been so successful at displacing American and British incumbents. There's no natural monopoly there, no real consumer lock-in once people write off their bricked-by-software paperweights, and the technological expertise is spread fairly widely across a hundreds of thousands of skilled professionals. You do have economies of scale and pretty large capital costs, but capital is not that hard to come by. You don't need regulation to fix this, you need startups to go compete with the entrenched firms that are bricking their customers' devices.
- CamperBob2 2y ago
  Scratch an abusive monopoly and just beneath the surface, you'll usually find not a "free market", but a government with its finger on the scale. Any industry that involves leveraging copyrights and patents to keep the incumbents in power, for example.
  - ahartmetz 2y ago
    Abusive monopolies really work just fine without big bad government, with mechanisms such as raw power and threat of violence, ownership of key resources (property laws are always fine according to government bad ideologies) and the related natural monopolies, cryptographic-technical barriers, pricing shenanigans to kill new competition, anticompetitive contracts with distributors...
    - CamperBob2 2y ago
      You clearly set out to disagree with my post, but based on the examples you've cited, I'm not sure you succeeded. Threats of violence can simply be handled under the same laws that address it in non-commercial contexts, anticompetitive contracts require government action to enforce, and 'pricing shenanigans' can only exist in a monopoly that is (again) likely to have arisen due to regulatory interference.

nostrademons 2y ago

Sure it is, but manufactured goods is one of those markets that has generally proven to have relatively low barriers to entry and lots of competition. That's why first the Japanese, then Chinese, now Southeast Asians have been so successful at displacing American and British incumbents. There's no natural monopoly there, no real consumer lock-in once people write off their bricked-by-software paperweights, and the technological expertise is spread fairly widely across a hundreds of thousands of skilled professionals. You do have economies of scale and pretty large capital costs, but capital is not that hard to come by. You don't need regulation to fix this, you need startups to go compete with the entrenched firms that are bricking their customers' devices.

CamperBob2 2y ago
Scratch an abusive monopoly and just beneath the surface, you'll usually find not a "free market", but a government with its finger on the scale. Any industry that involves leveraging copyrights and patents to keep the incumbents in power, for example.
- ahartmetz 2y ago
  Abusive monopolies really work just fine without big bad government, with mechanisms such as raw power and threat of violence, ownership of key resources (property laws are always fine according to government bad ideologies) and the related natural monopolies, cryptographic-technical barriers, pricing shenanigans to kill new competition, anticompetitive contracts with distributors...
  - CamperBob2 2y ago
    You clearly set out to disagree with my post, but based on the examples you've cited, I'm not sure you succeeded. Threats of violence can simply be handled under the same laws that address it in non-commercial contexts, anticompetitive contracts require government action to enforce, and 'pricing shenanigans' can only exist in a monopoly that is (again) likely to have arisen due to regulatory interference.