> Supposedly, the free market should correct this when consumers stop buying the flawed product.
Any free market purist will tell you that all transactions must be both mutually consenting and informed. If these conditions are not met, it is the governments job to step in.
> There are preferences, and those will lead way to eventually a market that picks a winner - maybe, typically, IDK, free market works when it's actually free.
Exactly! We saw precisely this thing with cell phone chargers. Not enough people recognize this.
A healthy dose of market realism is in order - if the market doesn't deliver what people want, it's not the market, it's the people who are wrong.
> The other problem is that free markets are self correcting.
The use of the term "correcting" gives the free market way too much credit. Especially given that, as you note, there is no objective mechanical principle at work besides mass hysteria.
It would be better simply to say that _free markets fluctuate a lot_.
> In the future (or maybe it already is), most of our appliances and vehicles will be subscription-based just because companies can push it.
This makes me angry and sad. But evidence so far shows it to be completely true. Free markets are not properly sorting this out, because markets are not really free. Instead they are mostly oligopoly, and can thus control image and regulation and competition.
> the free market is basically not a thing anymore
The free market was never a real thing. It's like spherical cows in a vacuum. It describes what you would expect to see given a sufficiently large number of buyers and sellers, with no network effects, with perfect information for buyers and sellers, no players with controlling stake of the market, and over a long enough timespan.
In this case, the fact that most industries have literaly been reduced to one or two players, the powerful force of competition isn't very effective at reducing prices. It might eventually, but because there are so few competing sellers, we'll have to wait a long time.
> People believe that the dynamics of “free markets” where people have choices of what to consume/purchase lead to ever increasing quality.
Some people may believe that -- extreme free-market libertarians being the most obvious example -- but I'd be surprised if it was a majority view. There doesn't seem to be a consensus that food safety regulations are an unnecessary irrelevance, for example.
To a first approximation, yes, but this also forces things like small farmers and retailers being unprofitable, and all the societal changes that come with that, and of course then the tendency for consolidation and the inherent risk of more monopolisation from that.
Free market is great when it's full and noisy and no-one is large enough to control or manipulate it, the aim should be to keep it in this state (because then keeping prices low falls out naturally without terrible second order effects)
Because it turns out there are pesky uncontrollable externalities that keep popping up. Like, you can't buy some random lot in suburbia and turn it into a nuclear waste dump or a trash incinerator site, no matter what you pay the neighbors, because of regulations like zoning.
Only if enough consumers are affected.
Situations like the OP happen, but they're exceptionally rare. They just make a lot of noise.
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