"anti-freemarket" rant

Economics Economics Questions
1

im clearly aware that the issue that im angry about is not the free market per se, but certain elements that can happen in any economic system.

the main issue is problem of “anarchy of production”. the problem not that being that there will be chaos if things are not centrally planned, but the following

  1. for example many repair shops make the abhorent excuse of “gotta eat” to deceive costumers at any step of the way and give them things they dont need.

1a. selling the subpar parts just because the better one is less profitable.

  1. companies trying to keep information asymetry at all costs and put on a “we want help our costumers” BS face.

  2. TV shows, gambling establishments, lottos claiming that they want their partons to win when the opposite is painfully obvious.

now i understand that in free society duping people is allowed, since the costumer can allow themselves to be duped. or as rothbard said, one cannot create a “false need”; false needs have to be formed by the person. ie you cannot make me buy eddie hardy.

the fact remains that many if not all entreprenurs make their lives praying on insecure or simply naive idiots and one wonders what would have happened if all consumers were highly educated.

no-one could have said it better than karl marx. (no im not a marxist, just a good quote)

Sell a man a fish, he eats for a day, teach a man how to fish, you ruin a wonderful business opportunity.

2

So, what’s the solution? Educate people? Surely you aren’t advocating the State, the greatest deceiver in history, do something about this?

3

exactly. these kinds of shananigans can well happen in a purely state-socialist or even anarcho-syndicatist society. a guy walks into a shop and the state owned store sells him some junk, or one syndicate member writes-off car part to his syndicate. what im uncomfortable about is that socialist cliche that the market created strong insentives to lie and cheat. mises said that if you want wars to end you need to remove the economic incentives to war. if one uses the same logic, there are ever present incentive for busineses to swindle people.

however my biggest gripe is that the capitalists put on a straight face, implicitly admitting that their business endevors are too evil to be said out loud. if profits are so good, then why do small-store owners constanly try to deceive their costumers about the competition and their profit-margins? as nixon said “if people knew their real intentions, they would boil them in oil”.

its as though their profits are too “obscene” and stores and companies try to put a fig leaf over them.

4

In the current day and age it is because everyone has been taught that profit is evil. We’ve been taught that somehow the side of the transaction which takes money in exchange for goods is somehow exploiting the other side. If people understood economics, they would realize that in any voluntary exchange, both parties profit from the trade and that it is simply an interaction of persons with opposite preference rank orders for the goods in question. It’s not that capitalism or profits are evil, it’s that much of society has been taught that capitalism and profits are evil and believe it.

5

Forgive me for bringing up something that you might have already considered, but wouldn’t the incentive to swindle be substantially less in a free market because if consumers caught on, they’d turn to alternatives?

6

yet capitalists are almost always repeating the same anti-capitalist cliches themselves. the shopowners are consumers too. the 500 pound gorilla is still there though. the incentive structure that makes business practice into institutionized seduction.

7

What is any voluntary interaction except seduction? You only have two choices when interacting: you can use violence or you can seduce (or, to use a less pejorative term, persuade). Those are all we have. Which would you prefer?

8

obviously yes. hence the evolutionary argumentation of hoppe and david gordon about the free-market. cooperation is always more productive than fraud. however we still have mountains of banks and insurance companies that try to constanly prick their patron. u have competing PC brands that misadvertise and trick people. u have aol that had put spyware on people machines.

9

there is two types of persuation- saying things you believe yourself and spewing warm BS.

10

You are conflating the current business practices which exist under a regulatory, statist market to those in a free market. The situations are simply not analogous.

11

i knew that. however a pure free market hardly changes the rules of the game. better is not always more expensive. look at gov’t schools. companies just love sell useless and expensive junk to boards of ed. when granted gov’t monopolies these guys run amok like little devils. haluburton is probably the classic example of crony contracts.

12

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice…

I don’t really know what you mean by ‘subpar’. Most times ‘factory replacement’ parts are way overpriced and are simply a marketing gimmick unless you need them to stay whithin your warrenty.

Both of these examples assume away a businesses’ desire to have repeat customers.

So?

Do you believe that people have a right to perfect information or perhaps you ascribe to the fallacy that markets are only efficient under that?

Once again, so?

Like they say, ‘the lottery is a tax on people who are bad at math’.

We’d have a society of educated consumers?

Or we could have the opposite where people rely on the State to externalize the costs of this ‘education’ by forcing everybody to pay for all the bureaucratic agencies needed to ensure a ‘fair and equitable’ marketplace and you end up with corporatism.

Does your shift key have a random fault or something?

13

How exactly are government schools or Haliburton examples of what would happen under a purely free market system?

14

It’s obvious to me that you have never owned a business. You’re speaking exclusively from the jaded consumer experience.

I ran a business from 2002 to 2006. I served very intelligent and discriminating people. That was my customer base. The market did not have idiots due to the complexity of the product. And the entire model was built on return business. I had to provide great stuff at low prices and keep my service level high. I did quite well, and my customers were fanatically loyal.

“Many if not all” is complete drivel.

I would not have bought many of the products I sold, it was not my area of interest. But that didn’t mean I was dishonest to sell them, or trying to take advantage of a customer.

If entrepreneurs were truly so horrible, the world would be falling down around you. On the contrary, we progressively have more and more durable goods with longer lifespans. In fact, the market evolves so quickly, many goods become obsolete before they suffer breakdown.

And a word about Marxism which is a system of excuses for the lazy and stupid. The man who can’t teach himself how to fish, or find another food source, or set up a competing business, is a waste of space. Everyone is waiting for someone to teach them, to show them, to give them a loan, to appropriate some property for them, to loosen or increase regulations for them.

Where are the frontiersmen who go out and make the world as they want it to be? Where are the people who self-educate, who better themselves, who meet challenges head on?

The flaw in the Marxist fish tale is that it presumes that the proles cannot eat without the bourgeois. Those dirty filthy bourgeois pigs owe the proles either a market to buy from, or education to undermine their own enterprise. It’s the classic looters vs. producers. I would be ashamed to make that argument on this forum, even in jest (because it is not funny)

15

An argument against human nature is not an argument against free markets. No matter what rights people are granted, human nature will still be there.

16

Hi there.

See my signature.

17

No, actually the “rules of the game” change fairly substantially. Artificial barriers to entry and restrictions on competition are removed, making existing and not-yet-established competition more viable. As nameless, Anonymous Coward, and liberty student have all pointed out, businesses are kept honest by their desire to keep their customers coming back and maintain a good reputation.

The two examples you gave were of governments buying “expensive junk.” Can you really not understand the difference between a tax-funded organization and a voluntarily-funded organization? Of course the former will be irresponsible with its spending, because it has no need to fear bankruptcy.

18

Considering there is no one to bail you out (at least no one will be coerced to) in a free market, things do change, radically. Either consumers become active, and without government to “protect” them (i.e. lull them into a false sense of security) they have every incentive to, or they remain passive drones. Firms selling junk to a buyer spending other peoples’ money do not constitute a good argument, BTW. It does speak volumes of the sort of consumer they’re dealing with though, i.e. the government.

-Jon

19

The flaw in the Marxist fish tale is that it presumes that the proles cannot eat without the bourgeois. Those dirty filthy bourgeois pigs owe the proles either a market to buy from, or education to undermine their own enterprise. It’s the classic looters vs. producers. I would be ashamed to make that argument on this forum, even in jest (because it is not funny).

you misunderstood me. The point is not that they owe consumers anything, but that they want to actively not help them by giving them wrong or misleading advice. many companies are actually honest and tell their clients that their cars, bikes, or PC are “not worth fixing”. small stores however, almost never tell them that. incidentally their argument always not of a moral high ground, but a measly “gotta eat”.

20

Incorrect, those dirty filthy proles owe the bourgeois for their cunning in the market and their risk taking to invest in the prole’s valueless labor before they even see a return on that investment.

It’s the classic ingrates vs. risktakers.