Phigure wrote:i dont really see how anyone living in today's world can advocate the free market. just look at the terrible inequality of wealth/income (and the power that comes with it),
Today's world isn't a free market. Your point is moot.
Phigure wrote:an inequality that's still increasing and shows no signs of slowing down.
Created by the wealthy and connected transfering wealth from the middle and working classes to the wealthiest top 0.0001% through legislation, bailouts and backroom deals.
Phigure wrote:corporations are more profitable than ever before
They aren't; the top corporations you're describing are protected by state laws. If they were profitable in the free market, they wouldn't need state protection.
Phigure wrote:yet workers and the average person have received none of that.
That's called time preference. People value stuff
now more than later. That includes wages. Laborers did make more money 110 years ago, before the state inflated the currency through legal tender and pro-monopoly laws protecting the federal reserve.
Phigure wrote:obviously we don't live in a true free market, but it's not aspects of socialism, communism, etc or even neoliberalism that are at fault. how can you blame anything BUT the free market principles at work?
Here are the 10 planks of the communist manifesto
1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and
6. Centralization of the means of communications and transportation in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
1) Private property has for the most part been decimated (i.e. state legislation trumps private application) and people are no longer capable of owning land; they can merely rent it from the state.
2) This speaks for itself. We apply a heavy progressive taxcode. Most of the 1% even pay almost half of their income in taxes. It's only the top 1% of the top 1% who are exempt from progressive taxation. Check the state and federal tax code
3) Rights of inheretance aren't completely abolished, but limited.
5) The creation of the federal reserve and the European central bank are examples of this. The centralization of credit in the hands of the state created among other things the housing bubble. Government sponsored enterprises Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae decided that more people should own houses (regardless of what market forces indicated). The federal reserve helped finance mortgages at artificially low interest rate, which caused consumers to malinvest in real estate. Pricing and interest rates are communicators in a market, they indicate what type of investment is profitable and what isn't. The central bank distorted that. The eventual bursting of the bubble made thousands of people homeless or poor.
This is how much purchasing power 1 dollar has lost since the Federal Reserve Act of 1913:
6) This goes without saying
7) Again, goes without saying.
8 ) The state has been active in trying to provide people with jobs.
9) YOU GOT ME!!
10) .... Do I even have to say anything?
Phigure wrote:the free market is a disaster. the great irony about people singing the praises of the free market is that there has never been a real free market in a developed society. the only free markets that exist are in the 3rd world, and that's a big reason why the 3rd world looks like it does.
The closest thing to a free market right now is in third world countries. Countries that mimic the situation of the industrial revolution. People's wealth in those countries is increasing and western intervention is causing a slowing down of the process. Like when westerners forced anti-child labor laws on Bangladesh, where children then opted to get into prostitution or starved to death.
Phigure wrote:not to mention that proponents of free markets fail to take account all of the massive externalities that come about. and i'm not just talking about environmental disasters like pollution and the catastrophic climate change we're about to face because of unchecked capitalism, etc
Define uncheckered capitalism. Show us how it can exist with large invasions into the market by the state and with the existence of legal tender laws protected central banks that issue credits and make secret loans to, among others, McDonalds worth 13 billion.
Phigure wrote:but the systemic risks that a free market introduces. its an inherently unstable system, every few years theres "business cycles" and every few business cycles there's major economic disasters where the entire thing would go to shit if corporations didnt get bailed out by the taxpayer. these are already bad enough in modern mixed states with some sort of regulation and monetary policy to attempt to counterbalance these cycles, imagine how bad things would be in a true free market.
I like how you're saying 'businsess cycles'; Austrian business cycle theory explains the boom and bust phases of economies created by the innitial sugar high of artificially low interest rates as decided by central banks that then lead to the eventual bust when the market can no longer support the continuous malinvestment and misallocation of resources by uninformed consumers.
Phigure wrote:chomsky has a good example of how markets don't really help to increase your choice, but restrict it: the free market gives you a ford or BMW, but it's not going to give you public transport like a metro system.
Except for the private bus companies here in the Netherlands.
In the video I first posted, Tom Woods described a ferry company that competed with 2 government-supported companies by offering their services at only the quarter of the price of its competitors, free food and at certain times, even free service.
Public transport, like parks, increase the value of property. Housing corporations would be smalrt to invest in it.
And again. What free market?
Phigure wrote:markets only encourage individual consumption.
Markets don't "encourage" anything. Socialists and pro-central planners make the faulty assumption that markets are concrete institutions that people move in. That's far from the truth, though. Markets are merely what happens when individuals freely interact with each other and the resources in their environment.
Phigure wrote:only commodities can truly succeed, things like vaccines or cures for diseases aren't profitable enough to justify their research and production (they can only sell you a cure once, in a free market you'd probably just get treatments that you have to buy until youre dead)
Insurance companies also find vaccines and cures profitable; if they can offer cures and vaccines to customers, then they have to pay less in healthcare costs and can offer cheaper services.
Phigure wrote:even if we say "okay, let's go with free markets" and ignore all their negative effects and shortcomings, there's still an obvious limit in terms of scale. do you think we ever would've made it to space / the moon in the last century had governments not taken up the task?
Maybe we would have waited 50 or 80, or 100 years and done it with a greater incentive, greater efficiency, without going over budgets by billions of dollars.
The moon also presents a potential source of mining. There is definitely market potential for it. But as of now, the market (meaning the culumative will of the people and our realistic capabilities) say that we need to wait a little while longer until we can realize that.
Phigure wrote:there's a lot of things that are just too risky and not profitable enough for any business to undertake. we probably wouldn't be having this conversation right now because the internet (and computers themselves) grew as a government funded research project
The internet was restricted for decades. It wasn't until it was liberalized and private consumers could make use of it that it really advanced. Look at each major innovation in the internet and computing; IBN, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Youtube, Gmail, Netflix etc. All done by private companies in the '80s and early '90s. Before that the internet hardly made any true progress in capabilities when it was still in the iron clutch of the state and military. You're saying that advanced communication would be unprofitable. This is false since the aforementioned companies rely on that to make profitd
TL;DR I'm pretty damn awesome
like that's not gonna go corrupt in about .03 seconds. and there would be no regulatory agencies or police forces (again, private police forces are infeasible imo) to be sure they actually pay you a fine and don't do it again.
