Comment by Joker_vD
1 day ago
> Enough "Market for all the things" already..
See, there are two major flavours of pro-market attitudes. The first one is "if we allow many independent individuals to try their own approaches to a problem and let the people with "better" approach to personally profit from it handsomely and make them compete against each other in an environment with objective-ish judgement of "what is better" instead of "impress the (inevitably corruptible) officials to be judged victorious and awarded the fortunes", and also manually guard and regulate against several universally known ways to sabotage such competition, then we'll be able to channel human ingenuity into solving difficult to solve technical problems while also rewarding those who are able to come up with (and implement) such solutions with low overseeing overhead". Of course, such an attitude isn't strictly speaking "pro-market", it's been around since ancient times; hell, the USSR of all places had this attitude in spades until about the 70s or so.
The second one is "Nah, we don't have to try and think about anything ourselves, just let people fend for themselves, they'll figure it out, and it won't have any unforeseen bad side effects, why would it; markets are magical like that!" Yeah, about that...
Right, a market is a small tool of larger systems. That’s fine, hard to get right but can make systems better. Type two just seems to be the cargo culted everywhere..
I think it's actually not that hard to get right (or at least "right enough"), as evidenced by the fact that markets have successfully run the entire global economy for thousands of years with no central oversight and almost no regulation.
Markets failures do happen, and when they do it can be helpful to have an external force step in to nudge the market back onto the rails. But even without such interventions they work remarkably well on balance.
> markets have successfully run the entire global economy for thousands of years
Markets, as they are understood today, are more like about 300 years old, even less in some places. The bulk of world economy has been sustenance farming for most of the human history, with some communal mutual help (based on favours and mutual indebtedness) thrown in.
> with no central oversight and almost no regulation
Lol what? E.g. Roman Republic (and later empire) tightly regulated its markets, especially food trade, during all of its existence.
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