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points by _s_a_m_ 4 days ago | 0 comments

Ah yeah, our lovely free market, always asking for tariffs, blocking competition, to build cartels and monopolies.

Free markets don't exist to help individual companies, they are explicitly meant to hinder them.

They are meant to help the consumer.

Unfortunately neither of the two parties in the US even pay lip service to free markets anymore.

Free markets help the big producers much more than consumers.

The Peter principle doesn't apply to consumers, but it does to producers. And if nobody regulates how big you can get, you eventually end up with a nothing but ruthless monopolies in every industry. Regulated markets tend not to generate as many monopolies. And of course, for natural monopolies, the state is the least bad option, because consumers have at least some say in how its operated through voting, and there is no profit motive.

[–] eeedda 4 days ago

I wouldn't say 'help' the consumer as that makes it seem like things are biased.

The idealistic perfectly competitive markets entail exhausting all gains from trade.

[–] smallmancontrov 3 days ago

...but in practice there are a few highly suboptimal Nash Equilibria sprinkled throughout the market that are systematically unaddressable by greedy optimization, and these turn into an infinite money glitch for the rich and an infinite resource drain for the poor.

[–] deaux 4 days ago

TINSTAAFM. There is no such thing as a free market under capitalism, as the first winners - which there are, even in a perfectly free market - will put their resources into making it not-free, as we're seeing here. These advantages accumulate and you end up with a few massive monopolies which the market exerts little control over. Not zero, but little, much less than most economists claimed for close to a century.

Keeping a market free would require magnitudes more regulation than right now - the opposite of what free market proponents advocate for.

[–] threecheese 4 days ago

Given this is obvious to mere mortals like us, how do economists defend the walmartization of every market? "It's working, don't fckit up", or "we're getting our bag, get yours"?

There isn't one adult who looks at this massive centralization and sees that it goes against the very principle of the thing?

[–] deaux 3 days ago

Dozens of different religions have millions of followers. They're generally not compatible with each other. Many of the followers incredibly intelligent and accomplished in their fields.

I'm not saying this out of anti-religion, I believe religion can be a force for good and often is. But it shows that yes, this is possible. Also see things physicists, and especially physicians, believed for centuries.

> There isn't one adult who looks at this massive centralization and sees that it goes against the very principle of the thing?

There's a growing number who do. But the reason why they didn't get much attention for most of a century, and as such what made the fantasies of Hayek become mainstream, is of course tightly connected to the fact that it's the one that just "happens" to be the one most favorable to these mega corporations and their friends in financial and political institutions. It's clearly not a coincidence at all.

It's also just an incestuous cycle of professors teaching students who end up being professors who teach students. Takes something to break that.

[–] dnautics 3 days ago

I'm not an economist but it's pretty obvious to me that walmartization is downstream of Financialization which is not inherently free market (its a product of centralized banking and interest rate and bailout policies)

[–] deaux 3 days ago

I don't see why Walmart wouldn't get this big even without centralized banking, bailouts, and hard money (say gold convertibility), thanks to economies of scale. In the late 1800s you had Standard Oil. That didn't need any of those things to arise.

Of course the things you mentioned further accelerate walmartization. But that's the chicken and the egg. The government does bailouts and prints cheap money because the corporations do exactly what I said: the winners (who arise naturally thanks to economies of scale) will put their resources into gaining these things.

[–] dnautics 3 days ago

sure. It's less likely let's say. More opportunity for competition to arise per business cycle when growth is still there but has natural drag due to money not being cheap.