> 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.
> This is such an important point, and why free markets work best.
Free markets don't work best, popularity is not best; free markets cater to what people want, not what they need and certainly not what's best. Absolute belief in the free market is a religion, not a fact supported by history.
Market driven economies are wonderful for producing loads of crap and me too-ware and woefully inadequate for solving really hard and necessary yet not immediately profitable problems. Quite simply, market driven economies optimize the making of money, not the solving of problems in the best way.
> 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.
> I think a “free market” has to retain some degree of competition and choice.
An ideal market is both competitive and free, but the former is not a component of (and is often, outside of abstract ideals, in tension with) the latter.
> I think it is ok to let the free market to pick the winner.
Seems to me the market is calling for regulation, because it’s a huge barrier to adoption. Ask any skeptic (who doesn’t have a moral issue with it such as environmental impact) and 9 times out of 10 they go “it feels like a scam” or “I don’t want someone to hack my money.”
People like to gripe about regulation, but we also find a little security in it. It often makes us feel safe at the end of the day - and when it comes money, that’s a cornerstone feature that needs be present.
> 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.
>> I always wonder why people think the only 'fair' pricing is pricing based on costs. This is not how free markets work.
In a real free market that is how it should turn out. If someone is charging too high above cost, a competitor will likely step in to grab market share by offering the same thing at a lower cost. Companies go to great lengths to make the playing field uneven - "unfair" practices, unfair employment agreements, patents (government granted monopolies), lobbying for barriers to entry, etc...
Lots of people like to talk about "free markets" when they really want no such thing. In a real free market, everything tends toward commodity pricing.
> If there was a real market that people could enter, competitive pressure would force them to be cheap. If the market was, hypothetically, choked by regulation then they'd be in a great position to charge absurd prices.
This is a fabrication - a free market with large capital investment requirement tends towards a monopoly. Economists call These places natural monopolies.
We had them in oil and in railways before regulation.
This doesn’t happen in food because anyone can grow a cucumber in their yard. But that’s not gonna cut it for surgeries.
And on top of that you get charlatans, snake oil salesmen, homeopathy, treating people with magnets.
> It is fine for consumers to look at things from a consumer's perspective.
That's just refusing to exercise personal responsibility. I'd hope an average consumer is capable of more than that.
People shouldn't assume the free market will somehow optimize for fair play, because it doesn't. The market quite directly optimizes for the things people (in aggregate) use to discriminate between purchase options; unless people vote with their wallets on the conduct of companies, you cannot expect the market to provide your conscience for you.
>> The market is not really free - its being manipulated by one side.
The market is free, it just isn't a healthy market. Those are different concepts. Participants in a totally free market are free to use their size/power/leverage as they wish. A free market is one where the little guy, the job applicant, will be hammered by the big guy. A 'healthy' market is one that is regulated in such a way that the little guy has at least a hope in the negotiation process. This then fosters competition, innovation, yielding a free-but-healthy market.
Regulation needed to do those things that the "free" market cannot.
>Luckily however, we have a way to tell which is more efficient: The free market!
The free market rewards selfish, short-term impulses. It also doesn't require that individuals have a full understanding about what they're buying into.
>>This isn't the question. The question is whether or not the market is fair. This is the role of government in this case - to protect the little guy from being taken advantage of by the big guy.
Exactly. Having a free market is desirable if and only if we can also ensure fairness for all market participants. Otherwise it's just like the Wild West where the strong take advantage of the weak.
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.
reply