this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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The free market is going very well here
This is 100% capitalism. It's not free market to have a goverment-enforced monopoly.
This is textbook late stage free market ideals at work. This is how the free market always ends.
X - ~~The system is broken.~~
✅ - The system is working exactly as intended and must be destroyed.
When did it start?
Sorry have you been around to observe a lot of free markets ending?
There are lots of different kinds of markets, like phone market, grocery market, goldsmith market, etc.
The governments have to interfere in many markets all the time, that there aren’t monopolies forming or Price-fixing agreement be done, which would lead to prices go ridiculously high, or last companies in markets fucking up taking tons of knowhow with them.
Gestures wildly at current state of things
Yes but the statement was “this is how free markets always end”. And I’m just wondering if the commenter has actually been around to see “free markets ending.”
I think they were less talking about them ending as much as them tending towards the monopoly state over time.
Got it. Saying “this is how free markets always end” if they meant “free markets tends to move towards monopolies” confused me.
That's a fair comment I guess...but it's the reality of the game. The US was a free market through it's early history and today is the result of that.
It's just how the free market ends, always. It starts with a few winners consolidating, abusing their monopoly and buying their government protections, and poof...welcome to late stage capitalism.
"Free Market" people always disregard human nature at it's worst. There will always be people and orgs that game the system. You simply can't prevent that. The US is absolutely an end game free market.
You are correct. There would be no copyrights or patents in a free market.
Copyrights and patents are literally government enforced monopolies for huge companies. Without them, there would be a lot more competition.
Or trade secrets. "Perfect information" is a bitch. Not to speak of "perfectly rational actors": Say goodbye to advertisement, too, we'd have to outlaw basically all of it.
Trade secrets don't need to be enforced much by law. You can create an ad hoc trade secret regime by simply keeping your secret between a few key employees. As it happens, there are some laws that go beyond that to help companies keep the secret, but that only extends something that could happen naturally.
To get closer to the free market there would have to be a duty to disclose any- and everything that's now a trade secret, no matter how easily kept. To not just get closer but actually get there we all would need to be telepathic. As said, perfect information is a bitch of a concept.
Are you telling me that the axioms behind the simplistic model are wrong??
shocked-pikachu.jpgWhat's government enforced about it? Is ARM the only allowed chip designer for cellphones?
Copyrights and patents
That's not a government enforced monopoly. A government enforced monopoly means nobody else is allowed in the market. Like utility companies.
Lots of Utilities are consumer cooperatives which is funnily enough Socialist, but the people working there wouldn't like to hear that.