Historically, those who legislate and wield power have not invoked it in that way.
That's the point. "Deregulation" is code for taking hundreds of laws and dumping them in a garbage bin. "Privatization" is code for stealing tax dollars and hiding it in offshore accounts.
I only care about the actual, real world material reality that has historically factually happened. The champions politic in a way that tends strongly away from rule of law as quickly as possible.
It's a framework that gets invoked to go both ways. It's a vendor's "freedom" to not have to label, say, gmo, but then it's the vendor's "rights" to prohibit soy milk from using the label "milk".
"Freedoms" and "rights" get interchanged to rationalize the preconfigured results. The dogma is a general tool.
It was the "freedom" of agrobusiness to flood mexico with corn after NAFTA and run the local farmers out of business and then it was their "rights" to the marketplace when mexico pushed back. The farmers didn't have that same right to the marketplace, they didn't have the same freedoms, only international capital does. How convenient.
That's why the zealots always think it's the right answer - it can be reshaped like a mound of clay to justify and rationalize whatever they want.
For instance the sanctity of contract matters when it's with the gas pipeline company but not when it's with the american tribes
When instead it's a pipeline of people via a subway through a wealthy neighborhood like the purple line extension in Beverly hills, all of a sudden the free market gets invoked to guess what? Reach the opposite conclusion.
It's fundamentally a convenient power tool of capital. They used to use the Bible, now they use Friedrich Hayek. Skullduggery with the purest, most heavenly goals. Sure...
In practice, free markets are lawless raw power that bend the state to do their bidding like some feudal king, but now it's wearing a bowtie and a cardigan instead of a sceptre and a robe.
> "Deregulation" is code for taking hundreds of laws and dumping them in a garbage bin
Or regulation is taking things from the garbage bin and make them into law.
> "Privatization" is code for stealing tax dollars and hiding it in offshore accounts.
If tax dollars are being stolen, it is the government that is doing both the tax collection and allowing the tax plundering.
> For instance the sanctity of contract matters when it's with the gas pipeline company but not when it's with the american tribes
What you really want is more free markets: that is, more rule of law, law that can be applied systematically and with no discretion and discrimination. You mention the enemy over and over: the coerced state that does terrible biddings. But you then exempt government as if it were innocent first and corrupted later.
It is the mechanism by which you decide on economic matters by power that produces the vast majority of the issues you mention, way above the famous "market failures" and unaccounted externalities.
Every business offense I mentioned is orchestrated through government. As a tool of exploitation and enforcement, they're utterly inseparable.
Concentrating the gain + spreading the cost requires both.
Capital and governance (CG) have been the internal organs of the body politic forever.
Hacker news, facebook, an elementary school, every institution is CG.
The theoretical framework of free markets requires the fiction that they are somehow separate and independent!
It's imaginary rubbish.
Corporations were started by the crown and modern political empires grew because of their corporate needs.
They expanded together. Every. Single. Time. Always.
The free marketeers think they can ignore all history and merely, through zero evidence intellectual exercise, derive absolute truth that needs no confirmation, measurement or testing because by logical deduction alone they know The Truth.
They use rubbish homo economicus behavioral models, rubbish ideas of clean governance and capital separation, and the rubbish assumption that companies win by playing by the rules instead of the reality where they find a new exploit.
That's why it's a scam. It's based on a classic scapegoating shell game and then uses classic cult systems to ignore evidence or question a priori assumptions.
It's the same internal logic as astrology and horoscopes. Complicated models, no reality check, cherry picked evidence, projected interpretations, same thing.
Total nonsense. It belongs in the spirituality section
I agree with the notion that everything is related to governance, and free markets are not anarchy. But it is a proposal of a system that requires a set of rules, some nowadays unavoidably performed by government, but the key are the rules not the government.
In any case, I see the same corruption you see, and the question is how to go about it. If the state is powerful and corruptible, I want a smaller state, with less surface to be corrupted. And it is surprising how you can reveal most corruption by just the simple application of freedom: that's whats appealing of the free market framework.
My advocacy is to reject all dogmatic ideological frameworks, they are fundamentally the wrong approach.
"Smaller state, larger state" no... Those are answers without considering the questions.
Heterodoxy, material analysis, material goals, provable statements, methodologies of measurements and metrics...
That and not disconnected faith based theory opinions are what matter. Labeling things as whatever-alist is a just a silly sports game for tribalists as if it's more important to pass a purity test than it is to construct a positive functioning society.
Whether a solution makes the state bigger or smaller is irrelevant.
What is the efficacy for the effort trade-off, that's really it.
Any commitment to a theoretical purity sets one up for a blindness and bias of analysis and an easy way to be exploited.
That's why televangelists can so blatantly and openly rip people off. The purity theory blinds the faithful. This is true for socialism, capitalism, syndicalism, anarchism, all of them
Power is being used very loosely here. The power to use violence is very difference to the "power" you get from producing something that is so good that gives you a lot of leverage.
The best way to beat a company that has market power is with other companies that fight in the same space or around it. And if there is one last man standing to reap profits from the victory, its again not necessarily bad. Market monopolies are overblown ghosts.
Nonsense. The absolutely last thing a company wants to do is compete. They avoid competition at all costs.
The first instinct is to buy, then shut it down, then smother it out with sheer capital, then retreat either up or downmarket.
That's why when you go in to the supermarket to look at commodities, they're often owned by either 1 or 2 companies that are mutually invested in each other.
You see a bunch of brands, but the capital ownership structure is almost entirely consolidated. Better products get dragged to court by existing players who try to shut them down or legislatives get greased palms for new regulations ("protected" terms).
In instances where this can't happen there's cartel systems which is why the dominant grocery store changes city by city.
The Austrian model of how humans work is dead wrong, how markets work is dead wrong, how capital flows is dead wrong, they're just wrong wrong wrong.
That's why they never use any examples and only have theoretical exercises, because there's absolutely zero evidence for their claims. Any observation of reality would show they're incorrect in a multitude of ways at every step.
That's why when you look at economics texts before the classical liberalism hubris, it is full of actual historical events, actual earnings and economic history to use as evidence and it's why the Chicago quacks had to tear those parts out, because their ideas don't work when you look at reality. If you look at evidence, their theories don't agree with it. They know this and that's why they don't use anything more than broad non-specific folksy anecdotal stories, because narrative fiction is the closest thing to reality they can get.
I completely reject your red-baiting witch-hunt assuming I'm a socialist because essentially all of mainstream modern economics have been calling the austrians out on their bullshit for almost 20 years now.
The ideal "free market" requires an insane level of planning.
Perfect knowledge. Perfect competition, no friction to switch loyalties, oversight of m&a to avoid the different classes of -opolies. Securing those rights are insanely complicated.
It's extremely bureaucratic and has vast overhead costs. Regulatory bodies, thousands of pages of rules, committees, it's insanely mind bogglingly planned.
That's why you need certified specialists to do anything in free market societies.
It's planned but this planning is not based on reality which is why everything keeps going crazy all the time.
The free market is a purely dogmatic ideological project, not based on any actual material evidence.
So I totally reject that bogus Hoover institute style premise.
These theoreticians set up a fraudulent spilt that doesn't exist, then states a false thing about them, and says 'ho take that'.
It's like someone trying to prove things with astrology charts. There's an internal logic to it but that actually doesn't matter because it's all disconnected fakery to begin with.
Nobody is talking about your "ideal free market". I saw you mention it on another threads and let me make this clear: we are only talking about the regular, imperfect, free market. Free as in free of government interference, not some other ideal. Free as in everybody is free to participate.
And its not binary, either. You can have it completely free, freer, free-ish, all the way to lightly regulated, heavily regulated, planned and completely locked down.
Finally, I am not talking from economists' perspective, but from that of the regular guy on the street who is just able to see policies and their result. But my conclusion is extremely simple: the freer the market is the better everybody (other than profiteers, bureaucrats and politicians) is.
That's the point. "Deregulation" is code for taking hundreds of laws and dumping them in a garbage bin. "Privatization" is code for stealing tax dollars and hiding it in offshore accounts.
I only care about the actual, real world material reality that has historically factually happened. The champions politic in a way that tends strongly away from rule of law as quickly as possible.
It's a framework that gets invoked to go both ways. It's a vendor's "freedom" to not have to label, say, gmo, but then it's the vendor's "rights" to prohibit soy milk from using the label "milk".
"Freedoms" and "rights" get interchanged to rationalize the preconfigured results. The dogma is a general tool.
It was the "freedom" of agrobusiness to flood mexico with corn after NAFTA and run the local farmers out of business and then it was their "rights" to the marketplace when mexico pushed back. The farmers didn't have that same right to the marketplace, they didn't have the same freedoms, only international capital does. How convenient.
That's why the zealots always think it's the right answer - it can be reshaped like a mound of clay to justify and rationalize whatever they want.
For instance the sanctity of contract matters when it's with the gas pipeline company but not when it's with the american tribes
When instead it's a pipeline of people via a subway through a wealthy neighborhood like the purple line extension in Beverly hills, all of a sudden the free market gets invoked to guess what? Reach the opposite conclusion.
It's fundamentally a convenient power tool of capital. They used to use the Bible, now they use Friedrich Hayek. Skullduggery with the purest, most heavenly goals. Sure...
In practice, free markets are lawless raw power that bend the state to do their bidding like some feudal king, but now it's wearing a bowtie and a cardigan instead of a sceptre and a robe.
Same thing, different era.