On 9 March 2014 06:02, meekerdb <[email protected]> wrote: > On 3/7/2014 10:56 PM, John Clark wrote: > > > Then who would ever want to live under a "free market system" >> if as you admit the transnational drug gangs are an exemplar of a well >> evolved free market? >> > > There is no disputing matters of taste so you could say if you wished > that markets, and therefore people, shouldn't have too much freedom; but > you can't say that the Black Market isn't a free market. > > So it's just your taste that says that a market where monopolies are > enforced by murder is free? > > It could be, surely? The definition is that trade occurs without restriction, I believe. How that is enforced isn't part of the description - however it appears to be the case that free market capitalism leads to monopoly capitalism, as I'm told that pesky old economist Karl Marx predicted. He had to wait a century or so to be vindicated, with a lot of nonsense about states calling themselves communist and so on discrediting his ideas in the eyes of those who couldn't be bothered looking past the labels, but he got there in the end.
Yes, free markets leads to monopolies, and monopolies enforce their control of the markets by murder. Even legal ones do, if you look beneath the surface (although the free trade evangelists would prefer that there were no governments, in which case there would be no such thing as a legal or illegal corporation, it would just be a free for all in which murder would no doubt become the order of the day. See the works of Frederik Pohl and CM Cornbluth for some interesting examples of how this may play out.) But anyway, this is how evolution works, when applied to economics. Which is the main argument for free trade - "it works, and we couldn't do possibly better." And we all know that humans can't do better than evolution, don't we, she asked rhetorically (while wearing glasses and only being alive due to antibiotics and keyhole surgery...) Trouble is, finding a viable alternative that everyone can agree IS better. I won't be asking Kim Stanley Robinson any time soon. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
