Yes. The market should be free. Let’s start by abolishing copyright and trademarks.
No, not like that! We just want you to drink lead, is all
Make it so people can flow across borders as easily as capital.
Probably an unpopular opinion here, but a competitive market is an excellent tool for efficient resource allocation.
‘Free markets’ are typically not competitive as actors have incentives to reduce the competition for higher profits. A properly managed competitive market is an amazing tool. I think most people who are free market absolutests think they are saying they believe in the benefits of competitive markets. They’ve been deluded into thinking that removing all rules and regulations makes a market competitive. Unfortunately, rules and regulations are usually required to keep markets competitive (and to gain the benefits of markets’ efficient resource allocation).
Thanks for coming to my TED talk!
Most people don’t understand what a free market actually is, how supply and demand, and prices work. That’s both on the left and right.
It means it’s easy to enter. It means information is transparent to every participant. It means there are many sellers and buyers. An oligopoly, monopoly, monopsony, etc. isn’t a free market.
Markets often need regulation to become or remain free.
Competition means unnecessary duplication or more of workloads/resources/distribution.
Markets based systems are also terribly inefficient because they seek to gain the most profit at the expense of everything else.
Duplication Not really. If two companies create a product, and have a similar market share, they are producing the correct amount in total. If they aren’t, one of them will be running a loss and be forced to adapt.
Also, because there are two or more options, there is competition, innovation and a push to optimize and lower prices.
Profit
Yesn’t. Thats the point of properly regulated, to force the actors into doing things right instead of abusing economic power. AKA, if you have UBI, people won’t need to take slave jobs, and the companies will have to sacrifice higher profit for paying wages that keep their employees satisfied.
Markets don’t necessarily need profit incentive, just that different people have different preferences for the things being offered. There are examples where markets are created and used to allocate resources where the exchange currency isn’t even money, such as time banks.
“Duplication” of production is not inefficient from a macro economy perspective. First it provides supply chain redundancy, second it typically incentivises innovation. If you assume a centrally planned economy (which is the typical opposite of market based in discussions) both of these benefits of duplication hold in theory.
Free as in beer
