Topic: A Resource Based Economy - page 36. (Read 288384 times)

In this example the seller was right because he had information that noone else had.
It is just an example to illustrate that there are people who can abuse the system of free market for their own personal benefit.
The question is also if this can still be called a free market. If the buyer knew what the seller knew, would he still have bought? And if not, then was it really a voluntary exchange in the first place?
You propose that if i slip a poison into your drink and make you drink it yourself then we should call it suicide because you drank the poison 'voluntarily'. See what kind of problems this word can give?
I sell you sub-prim mortgage instruments that are completely hopeless. But you don't know and gobble them up like cookies.
It was a 'voluntary' exchange. Now you go belly up from all the cookies. Was that what you would call a voluntary exchange?

Since most jobs are not really needed this 'job ladder' thing is mostly in our collective imagination.
For a large part it is something that just keeps the population busy enough to not want to revolt or pillage the neighbours etc.
It's a carrot that uses human greed to get people on the slippery slope of career making and loan taking.
And i think its only ethical to provide a save place for people who do not want to compete against such a circus.
Minimum wage is incredibly important in this role. It's a very stabilizing factor in a society. If you can ensure that everyone with a job can buy food and some other necessities from that salary then overall standard of living will increase which increases productivity etc. Overall you'll have a happier society. And i think that is a much 'gooder' goal than profit.
The fact that an employer can excert enourmous power over his workers through wage is another thing that justifies tools like minimum wage. Look at what is going on in and around India where human rights standards are upheld less well. You see frequent abuse of workers by employers. It's because it's a position of power. Without some rules and some power to uphold them this is what you get when you make your markets free. Only you propose it on global industrial scale.
Enron comes to mind.. It's a good example of how you can misuse information to game a market.
Honestly, there are many many others.
Most of these try to squeeze between the rules. Imagine there were no rules and they had free reighn in their dealings.We would be sooo screwed. Imagine a Monsanto not having to keep to regulations. Imagine a Shell that would have very little insentive to clean up their shit. Imagine an Bell was still one company ruling over their netherpeoples.
Corporate etities can become enourmous and can have little insentive to do something good for society. In fact, they've been known to suck economies dry with no thought of the people living in that region. You can wait till the 'market' corrects itself but by that time maybe many thousands of people would have lost their home. That is not something most people want so we have regulations that prevent certain dangers that markets can pose to society.

Folks, this is what institutional insanity looks like.

Just out of curiosity, which school do you teach at?

A free market is one where the exchanges that take place are voluntary. Slavery is an involuntary exchange so it is not legitimate in a free market system.

Please show me how I'm arbitrarily redefining the parameters of the conversation instead of just stating it. Are my definitions wrong?

No, no, i DO understand that free markets work very nicely when viewed in isolation as ideal mechanisms.
But the real world is far from ideal, so the very first thing you need to get something like a free market is regulations that ensure the ideal part of the idea is not destroyed. A free market basically sets a requirement on the actors to behave in a cartain way that is not natural to them. So it cannot exist without regulations.
 

How convenient to define the conversation to your arbitrary parameters. I am sure everyone in the world agrees with your worldview.

We're talking about free markets and voluntary exchanges, slavery is not a voluntary exchange.

Howabout the obvious one. Slavery.

That's such a wishy washy statement, anything can lead to pain, are you saying that the act of profit making actually inflicts pain? Can you give an example?

Until there is a multidisciplinary correlation supporting the hypothesis that profit is a measure of goodness, it appears to be a fallacy. Fallacies are the bread of authorities. It is far too easy to falsify and support the opposite view that profit leads to pain, pain leads to suffering, and someone loses a hand.

If God is playing the market, there isn't much we can do about it.  Or are you thinking of some other entity that knows the future?

In reality, someone that thinks that something is overvalued (by taking into account their predictions of the future), they sell, and their very act of selling drives the market down.  They are helping the market discover the correct price.  If they are right, they are rewarded.  If they are wrong, they are punished.  Same goes for the buyer.  If either of them is wrong, they lose their ability to influence the market in the future.

This is, of course, ignoring fraud, coercion, etc.

You have funny ideas about what prices are, and what markets do.  You can probably blame your parents and teachers.  It is hard for people to grasp that such important mechanisms in our daily lives just emerge without having been planned.

What if the bitcoin seller is wrong? There are no certainties, yes there are problems with asymmetric information but there is nothing that government can do to solve this, politicians game the political system regularly by using asymmetric information e.g. minimum wage law, despite the vast amounts of evidence that shows minimum wage laws create unemployment and raise the cost of living politicians have managed to fool the general populace that the minimum wage law is good and prevents exploitation when in fact it is the politicians that are exploiting the people for votes as they prevent people from getting on the job ladder and make them dependent on government handouts. What do you mean by game the free market system? Give me an example

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE6aq_zvuck

Some inspirational sustenance for those that may need it.

You make a capital mistake here.
You assume that because an exchange was made voluntarily it means that the outcome is per se good for the exchangers.
What if, in your example, the bitcoin seller knows that the price will drop sharply in a few days?
Would that still be considered a 'good' deal by most people? It sure looked that way when the exchange was made.

The fact that most people would seek protection against such deals means that these kinds of deals were not as good as we wanted them to be.

The problem is that we, as humans, cannot have a free market simply because some humans will game that system.
That is why we have regulations.
And in that respect these regulations are like laws, which is another element in creating a stable society. Humans are just bastards when they are faced with an opportunity to get ahead of other humans. We're pretty egoistical by nature.

While it is true you cannot have an objective measure of a subjective quality like "goodness", I believe profit is the closest thing we will ever get to measuring it. Profit in a free market signifies wealth created in society as the producer has gained a greater amount of money than their investment and the consumer has been able to improve their wellbeing by gaining a good that enriches their life, in a voluntary exchange it is assumed that both sides believe they are benefiting from the exchange because otherwise they wouldn't exchange in the first place. When you buy a bitcoin for $650 you value the bitcoin more than the $650 and the other guy values the $650 more than the bitcoin.

Out of curiosity, how are you linking "profit" and "authority?"

So, how good is it, in objective terms, to be able to get milk in the shops?
How many points for owning a car?

What nonsense.
The word 'good' is by itself completely subjective.
You cannot have a objective measure of a subjective quality.

People are still arguing over this post?! I remember this from like 2012.

Lobbyists only lobby because government has the power to hand out unfair market advantages to lobbyists, if people don't lobby government then one of their competitors will, it is government that always poisons the incentives in the free market, the government is the source for all the problems because it is government that makes the rules.

So if government is too small, private companies can fuck you in the ass right? SO why are lobbyists not lobbying for smaller government? Why is it regulation is growing year on year and smaller businesses are driven out of the market?

This is all just emotional bullshit, I have no idea why you hate business so much, all a business can do is ask you to buy their product, government is the one pointing a gun in your face. From what I can see government is way more popular than multinational companies, very few are protesting big government, most are protesting big business. Governance is how most civilisations die, governments always get too fat and tax their populace to death

When you use words like "goodness" and you define them as subjective, you have already dismissed any objectivity. Measuring phenomena is multidisciplinary. There is no need to rely solely on "subjective measurements." It is easy enough to measure objective qualities of goodness. Qualities such as pleasure, nutrition and health, productivity (in general terms), social connectedness, etc. could partially define goodness. I would not interpret goodness in any moral sense, but in the overall wellness of people that tend to be generalized as good. This way we can independently measure factors that discern perceived goodness from acceptable norms. I'm not talking about a "school of thought," but demonstrable quantities subject to falsification and used for making useful predictions. This is an oversimplified explanation, but that's what science is. A truth can be told easily, but it's explanation is almost never easy when it comes to epistemological terms.