Stumble it!Fly. High. Freeeee Market. Yeah!
posted in Recommended, Society by themaiden |StealthBadger pretty succinctly nails the gaping hole in any hard free market argument.
Imagine if your phone company decided that people who didn’t pay an “express service” surcharge were subject to a 5-30 second hold time before a call was placed. Or bursts of static during the conversation. Or outright disconnects.
More precisely, with emphasis added.
I don’t trust “the market,” because there are both bad and good actors present in it, and there’s no reliable way to tell the difference on an individual level until it’s too late - and any rules which assume otherwise, and assume things will “just take care of themselves,” are just as much of a pipe dream as restricting Civil Liberties for “the common good,” or attempting to decouple effort and incentive in the cause of egalitarianism.
He’s right. When the market in question consists in a few dozen or even a few hundred entities, buying patterns will quickly weed out shoody products and outright fraud, but in an economy as large and complicated as modern western economies buyers and sellers are seperated from one another by great swathes of time and geography, and the individual buyer and seller is only rarely the end user and the manufacturer. The result is a kind of shielding of the manufacturer and blinding of the buyer. The result is a muting of the market forces which supposedly keep the system balanced and that free market arguments depend upon.
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