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> unregulated market A free market is not unregulated. It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants. The alternative is to have the mark

by pdonis 1y ago

> unregulated market A free market is not unregulated. It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants. The alternative is to have the market regulated by those who aren't participants--i.e., who have no skin in the game and who suffer no consequences if the regulations are bad. That's basically the situation we have now. Anyone who thinks that's a good thing isn't living on the same planet as I am. > will be quickly monopolized by a biggest player The claim that this is a problem of free markets, as opposed to non-free ones, is historically false. Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players. THe original meaning of the word "monopoly" was permission from the king to be the sole seller of a particular product or service.

worik 1y ago
> Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players Really? * Search: What special privilege for Google? * Desktop OS: Microsoft? * On line retail: Amazon What am I missing? These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they?
- b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
  > These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they? They did and still do. They spend millions lobbying the government to make it harder for outsiders to break into their industries.
  - majewsky 1y ago
    So we're back to square one then, and came to agree on the original premise: Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action.
    - pdonis 1y ago
      No, not money. The problem is not that Google, Amazon, etc. can buy special privileges from the government; the problem is that the government has them for sale. It's government power that's the root of the problem, not money. If the government didn't have the power to give out such special privileges (which comes from the power to issue regulations that all businesses must obey), it wouldn't matter how much money Google or Amazon or anyone else had. In other words, what's "compelling action" here is the government, and its power to do that is not based on money. But since the government is run by humans, who can be bought, the government's power to compel things ends up being for sale. And even if you magically took away all that money from Google and Amazon and spread it around evenly, that would just mean government favors would get curried in other ways. (Plus the fact that, even if you spread the money around evenly once, it wouldn't stay that way.)
      - lucyjojo 1y ago
        the alternative being that there is no entity able to regulate, a direct path to a living hell.
        pdonis 1y ago
        > the alternative being that there is no entity able to regulate No, the alternative is for people to realize that "regulation" provided by government doesn't work--that the only way to effectively regulate a market is for the market participants to do it by the transactions they choose to make and the transactions they choose to refuse. As long as people won't do that--as long as, for example, people continue to believe the fantasy that a valuable service like web search can be provided by Google for free with no downsides, or that everything can be magically cheaper on Amazon without them bullying their supply chain in all kinds of underhanded ways and treating their employees like shit--we're doomed. Government regulation can't save people from themselves. These big companies can only get away with what they do because we keep feeding the monsters.
    - b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
      In the same way that computers are a device that exists to search Google, sure.
Yizahi 1y ago
> It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants. So, what do you think would happen when the biggest market participant makes a choice incompatible with choices of the smaller participants? I can tell you - the biggest player would win. Or it would slowly destroy competitors (slowly mean just a few years), and then start imposing it's rules. Basically any free market would turn to feudalism, which would then turn into a bloody and crude proto-government. Basically the same we have today minus any pro-human and pro-free market policies we have managed to carve for ourselves over centuries. It is impossible that free market would be anything different. So yeah, because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control. > Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players. Correct. And do you know why that happened? Because there was no control and biggest market players could simply buy the poor politician they wish. And in the free market you describe these two step would be simply combined into one - the biggest market player would also perform as a pseudo politician, ultra monopoly with zero oversight.
- pdonis 1y ago
  > because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control. No, that's even worse, because, as you admit, humans are shit at governing--and the "external control" is just more humans being shit at governing, but with a much bigger negative impact because the scope of their shitty governing covers many more people. Advocates of free markets, like me, don't advocate them because we think they solve all problems. We advocate them because, given the fact that humans are shit at governing, free markets are the least worst of the alternatives open to us. Big market players who still have to make money through voluntary transactions do less damage than governments run by humans who are shit at governing. That's the lesson of human history. Unfortunately most of us still haven't learned it, and continue to cling to the foolish belief that somehow calling a bunch of humans a "government" magically makes them no longer shit at governing. It doesn't.
  - Yizahi 1y ago
    My point was not that government is better or worse than corporate oligarchy in a question of governing. It's all the same people, same humans, just with different labels. My point was that free market is kinda like unstable isotope, it can't exist for any significant length of time and will decay into a government. As soon as some corporation starts dictating its rules to an unrelated people, we can call it a proto-government. The department responsible for those unrelated people would be a proto-executive branch, the law department would be a proto-legislative branch etc. And to address your second comment, about competition: Competition can't work in the free market. The instant external control ceases to exist, the most shrewd and smart players would start employing all kinds of currently illegal shit. They will buy out all media and platform to blast their ads 24/7 and disallow all competition. They will swithch to currently banned practices and materials to save costs and undercut competitors. They will switch to slave work to save costs etc. As soon as one player becomes relatively bigger the rules of free market will allow him to accumulate more and more benefits of the kind I've described. Any competition would be woefully behind, outdated and overpriced relative to the bigger player. And that's assuming elastic market. As soon as market for some goods becomes inelastic, bigger player can do even more damage. For example they can completely buy out some resource or manufacturing capacity of a crucial component or resource and completely deny it to the competitors. Basically the whole human history and law corpus is a list of examples how free market failed and how humans had to fix it via restrictions.

by pdonis 1y ago

worik 1y ago

> Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players Really? * Search: What special privilege for Google? * Desktop OS: Microsoft? * On line retail: Amazon What am I missing? These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they?

b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
> These firms got no "special privilege " from government, did they? They did and still do. They spend millions lobbying the government to make it harder for outsiders to break into their industries.
- majewsky 1y ago
  So we're back to square one then, and came to agree on the original premise: Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action.
  - pdonis 1y ago
    No, not money. The problem is not that Google, Amazon, etc. can buy special privileges from the government; the problem is that the government has them for sale. It's government power that's the root of the problem, not money. If the government didn't have the power to give out such special privileges (which comes from the power to issue regulations that all businesses must obey), it wouldn't matter how much money Google or Amazon or anyone else had. In other words, what's "compelling action" here is the government, and its power to do that is not based on money. But since the government is run by humans, who can be bought, the government's power to compel things ends up being for sale. And even if you magically took away all that money from Google and Amazon and spread it around evenly, that would just mean government favors would get curried in other ways. (Plus the fact that, even if you spread the money around evenly once, it wouldn't stay that way.)
    - lucyjojo 1y ago
      the alternative being that there is no entity able to regulate, a direct path to a living hell.
      - pdonis 1y ago
        > the alternative being that there is no entity able to regulate No, the alternative is for people to realize that "regulation" provided by government doesn't work--that the only way to effectively regulate a market is for the market participants to do it by the transactions they choose to make and the transactions they choose to refuse. As long as people won't do that--as long as, for example, people continue to believe the fantasy that a valuable service like web search can be provided by Google for free with no downsides, or that everything can be magically cheaper on Amazon without them bullying their supply chain in all kinds of underhanded ways and treating their employees like shit--we're doomed. Government regulation can't save people from themselves. These big companies can only get away with what they do because we keep feeding the monsters.
  - b_e_n_t_o_n 1y ago
    In the same way that computers are a device that exists to search Google, sure.

Yizahi 1y ago

> It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants. So, what do you think would happen when the biggest market participant makes a choice incompatible with choices of the smaller participants? I can tell you - the biggest player would win. Or it would slowly destroy competitors (slowly mean just a few years), and then start imposing it's rules. Basically any free market would turn to feudalism, which would then turn into a bloody and crude proto-government. Basically the same we have today minus any pro-human and pro-free market policies we have managed to carve for ourselves over centuries. It is impossible that free market would be anything different. So yeah, because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control. > Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players. Correct. And do you know why that happened? Because there was no control and biggest market players could simply buy the poor politician they wish. And in the free market you describe these two step would be simply combined into one - the biggest market player would also perform as a pseudo politician, ultra monopoly with zero oversight.

pdonis 1y ago
> because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control. No, that's even worse, because, as you admit, humans are shit at governing--and the "external control" is just more humans being shit at governing, but with a much bigger negative impact because the scope of their shitty governing covers many more people. Advocates of free markets, like me, don't advocate them because we think they solve all problems. We advocate them because, given the fact that humans are shit at governing, free markets are the least worst of the alternatives open to us. Big market players who still have to make money through voluntary transactions do less damage than governments run by humans who are shit at governing. That's the lesson of human history. Unfortunately most of us still haven't learned it, and continue to cling to the foolish belief that somehow calling a bunch of humans a "government" magically makes them no longer shit at governing. It doesn't.
- Yizahi 1y ago
  My point was not that government is better or worse than corporate oligarchy in a question of governing. It's all the same people, same humans, just with different labels. My point was that free market is kinda like unstable isotope, it can't exist for any significant length of time and will decay into a government. As soon as some corporation starts dictating its rules to an unrelated people, we can call it a proto-government. The department responsible for those unrelated people would be a proto-executive branch, the law department would be a proto-legislative branch etc. And to address your second comment, about competition: Competition can't work in the free market. The instant external control ceases to exist, the most shrewd and smart players would start employing all kinds of currently illegal shit. They will buy out all media and platform to blast their ads 24/7 and disallow all competition. They will swithch to currently banned practices and materials to save costs and undercut competitors. They will switch to slave work to save costs etc. As soon as one player becomes relatively bigger the rules of free market will allow him to accumulate more and more benefits of the kind I've described. Any competition would be woefully behind, outdated and overpriced relative to the bigger player. And that's assuming elastic market. As soon as market for some goods becomes inelastic, bigger player can do even more damage. For example they can completely buy out some resource or manufacturing capacity of a crucial component or resource and completely deny it to the competitors. Basically the whole human history and law corpus is a list of examples how free market failed and how humans had to fix it via restrictions.