- Adherence to stuff written down in an old book that most of the adherents have never read (in this case Adam Smith's \"The Wealth of Nations\")
- Belief that the object of worship is all powerful and can solve all problems
- Belief that the object of worship is on your side and not that guy over there's
- Belief that the object of worship created the world
- Belief protection structures (e.g. if a free market approach to problem solving fails, it's because it wasn't free market enough)
Here's how Wikipedia begins its description of free markets:
\"A free market is a market in which prices of goods and services are arranged completely by the mutual consent of sellers and buyers.\"
This is simple and to the point. It also takes place in a socially constructed universe. Prices. Goods. Services. Consent. And then there's unwritten assumptions, such as \"ownership\".
You can't have any kind of market without ownership. Free markets only exist, in approximation, within an immensely complex scaffolding of social constructs. What does \"owning\" something mean? It means that the folks around you agree that you own something and are willing, ultimately, to kill people who try to take it away from you. (This is why the police carry guns.)
The assumptions necessary for that simple sentence to make any sense are enormous:
- Goods are always owned by someone. Who owns the metal in a mine before it gets dug up? Who owns the air being polluted by a factory?
- The ability to perform services is always owned by someone. If I take a picture of you for a newspaper I don't need a release, but if I take it for an ad, I do. If I make a 3d model of Julia Roberts, can I use it in movies?
- Ownership can always be established and transferred. Not only do I not know where my yard ends and my neighbor's begins (I'd need to pay a surveyor to tell me), but if I wanted to sell 10 square feet of my land to my neighbor I simply couldn't without -- literally -- fighting City Hall.
- Consent is well defined and enforced. If I hold a gun to your head and make you give me something, that's not consent, right? If I threaten to sue you or destroy your credit score to make you give me something, that's consent, right?
The first thing that folks need to know about free markets is that they're a component of a functioning society, they aren't the society. If you don't have respect for the laws of ownership (and all the required infrastructure to maintain it) you don't have a free market. And there's no evidence that once you've built your free market, you can pull away the supporting structure and expect it to continue working.
The next thing that folks, especially in the US, need to know, is that the free market is not always on your side. It's only the existence of highly non-free features of the economy (such as customs and immigration) that allow relatively unskilled, lazy, complacent Americans to live quite well in the US while highly educated, motivated, ambitious foreigners work for peanuts in developing nations. If you ignore national borders, the US trade deficit represents the transfer of assets in the US to people doing the hard work in other countries. That's the free market, baby.
Finally, perhaps most importantly, we need to know that free markets aren't the solution to all problems. Where the assumptions of a free market don't hold: where ownership isn't clear and/or transfer of ownership isn't easy to track (e.g. air pollution), where goods aren't scarce (e.g. intellectual property), where consent is hard to establish, we often need alternatives to a free market.","$updatedAt":"2024-06-05T10:51:14.121+00:00",path:"another-annoying-religion",_created:"2024-07-09T20:33:33.615Z",id:"136",_modified:"2024-07-09T20:33:33.615Z","$id":"136",_path:"post/path=another-annoying-religion"}}