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> But for decades, the American market has not been free. The grand, boneheaded naivete to fail to understand that middlemen are an emergent and intrinsic prop

• marginalia_nu 7mo ago
  Antitrust legislation used to be very effective at dealing with this sort of stuff. These laws were designed to put an end to the gilded age (Standard Oil in particular), and accomplished what it set out to do. Though Ronald Reagan dared asked what nobody else thought to ask, "what if monopolies ... good?", so now we're back with a new set of Morgans and Vanderbilts.
  • thelastgallon 7mo ago
    The Morgans, Vanderbilts, etc at least built things that create value (and extracted wealth from them), things that didn't exist before in the economy. The billionaires of today are just pure rent extraction schemes on things that already exist, make money by enshittification of what is already there. Nothing of value ever needs to be created. They use the govt to help them, after all why create anything new at all, when you can just take it?
  • registeredcorn 7mo ago
    If you haven't, I'd encourage you to give "The House of Morgan" by Chernow a read.
  • frm88 7mo ago
    On this note: Peter Thiel: Competition is for losers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Fx5Q8xGU8k
• kmeisthax 7mo ago
  Sometimes the real market failure is just that a market exists at all. Like, in some really fucked up neoliberal hellscape it might make sense to charge money for reservations separately, but that introduces all sorts of extra new inefficiencies that weren't there before. Like, now that reservations can be bought and sold, it's now legal, possibly moral, and most notably, profitable to hoard them. And since reservations are a derivative on the underlying capacity of a restaurant, you're going to have tables that are "reserved" but unused because the "owner" of that reservation happened to sell it on to a third-party vendor that's now trying to hike the price to last-minute diners. Meanwhile, the actual restaurant trying to sell food, can't sell food in their own restaurant, because their salesfloor is full of empty tables that are worth more to the market dead than alive. They are undergoing demand destruction as they are involuntarily transformed from a food vendor into a landlord of tiny plots of real estate whose desirability has long since been detached from any surrounding circumstances. The argument for markets is that unregulated commerce is very good at calculation. Or, more specifically, that price discovery is the process of putting bounties on better information than is currently available. The flipside of this is that everything around the market needs to be regulated or you're calculating garbage into garbage.
  • R_D_Olivaw 7mo ago
    I really liked this. And you made me think of this current market trend where we can effectively beg for tips and donations from a small, roofed, and electrified domicile and you might even become famous, but if you do it out on the street, it's frowned upon and people are less willing to give.
    • kmeisthax 7mo ago
      Well, in the former case, that's usually part of some kind of entertainment. Street performers do the same thing and get about the same proportion of people tipping - i.e. not much, but enough to make a living if you're lucky and savvy enough to hustle the system.
  • refurb 7mo ago
    A free market is individuals and companies can willing enter whatever transaction they want. If someone is willing to pay for a reservation and a restaurant willing to take payment, then it’s a free market. It’s not inefficient at all. You may not like it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not free
    • ErroneousBosh 7mo ago
      But then you don't need to have the restaurant at all, you just need to have the idea of a restaurant that sells the idea of a booking. Someone decides they want to pay £100 for a booking at Restaurant A, which actually only exists on paper, so now they have a restaurant booking. They can then trade that booking to you for some other amount of money, if they want to make a profit on it. How badly do you want to have a booking at Restaurant A? And now, you want to actually go to Restaurant A and eat a curry, but they look at you like you've grown an extra head. Eat Food? What, here? In Restaurant A? Congratulations, you've just invented banking, where people look at you similarly if you attempt to actually go and collect the gold that your bank says represents the money that's actually stored as a series of north and south magnetic domains on a thin sheet of rust painted onto a rapidly-spinning aluminium disk. Meanwhile I ring the guy at the restaurant started by his grandmother when she fled Pakistan at the end of the Second World War, about ten minutes before we show up, and when I get there I've got a pint of Guinness, a menu, and some chapatis and chutney already on the table. I prefer it that way. The food's better, for a start. I don't need the menu, the guy's just going to bring me the desi shit from the family meal.
• justonceokay 7mo ago
  Any sufficiently robust ecosystem will eventually develop parasites. The more different kinds of parasites per host organism the more robust the ecosystem. The ideal state of the ecosystem is not the ideal state of any organism within it.