Le 2011-10-26 à 18:41:00, Simon Wise a écrit :
By "free market" in that context I am talking about the grab-bag of ideas that are promoted under that label by a very noisy and influential section of the press and economics commentators (especially but not only in the English speaking parts of the press) and are embraced as some kind of axiomatic "good thing" by many voters in this part of the world (Australia).
Ok, looking at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_market I can already see that there have been multiple different uses of that expression.
I mean the underlying assertions that the best way to manage the allocation of resources across society is allowing everything to be bought and sold for a dollar price,
Even buying votes, selling souls, and... «paying» attention, of course.
and that the best decisions for a society are made when responding to the so-called invisible hand of the market.
The invisible hand ? Sounds like that's the hand of one of the companies secretly plotting to become a monopoly. Surely not Santa Claus' hand.
Clearly from my tone above I do not believe that this "free market" is a fair or decent way to organise society,
Agreed...
though it is probably a reasonable way to deal with the distribution of the kind of goods and services that are not basic things expected by everyone,
Has a cell phone become something too basic for that, or not yet ?Anyway, I agree (for things not considered basic), but only after minimum wage law, employee protection laws, consumer protection laws, telecom laws, and the rest of the large corpus of relevant laws that a free market of any kind can't come up with. All the laws shape the market in various ways that aren't due to supply&demand nor contract law, and much of that is in the blind-spot of economic theory (let alone economic ideology).
______________________________________________________________________ | Mathieu BOUCHARD ----- téléphone : +1.514.383.3801 ----- Montréal, QC
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