Yaron Answers: Does The Best Product Always Win In The Free Market?

[eggory]

One significant way in which the market churns out the best products, is in comparison to the products churned out by centralized economies.

[TeaParty]

Yes, Im hopeful. See Peikoff's DIM Hypothesis. In an earlier book, he said change could be rapid in an unusual nation like America. In DIM, he predicted two generations, I believe. An unusual event might trigger America's implicit rationality and individualism. Americans are certainly talking about important values these days.

[TeaParty]

Youve said that things are what they are and act accordingly.

[eggory]

The market is a great institution, a great idea, because it leaves us free from each other's coercion. It doesn't guarantee, as nothing can, any positive benefits from other people. It is hard to imagine a scenario where it is not beneficial to live freely among other free people, but freedom never guarantees the best products. The idea that it can, is akin to the idea of democracy in that it places excessive trust in other people, underestimating how often wrong is the majority.

[eggory]

The false dichotomy between producers and consumers is actually part of what I was trying to dispel.

[eggory]

I am using the word democracy metaphorically; as such, I am not saying that markets are actually democracy, only that they share some of its limitations. Force is not a limitation of the market. It is an immoral aspect which markets do not share with democracy. The point I am making is not that markets are immoral. They are not. However, they are limited in what they can do for the individual, and to expect that they do anything more than allow freedom is immoral. That is the point.

[TeaParty]

I believe that I agree except for your first sentence. A consumer could buy from an incompetent business w/o knowing its incompetent. But you may have meant something else.

[TeaParty]

Freedom guarantees the best products by the standard of freedom.

[TeaParty]

If your rejection of independent judgment does not depend upon something that transcends independent judgment, ie, the supernatural, what is its basis?

[LucisFerre]

Actually, I should have said VHS, but you caught my drift. What I'm saying is that the Betamax was the better product system, but VHS was better marketed.

[GeorgWilde]

Free market decides which product is best - by definition of best product in free market.

[eggory]

The marketplace is a democracy, and any product which succeeds in the market does so by merit of popularity. That neither means it is objectively the best, nor subjectively the best to a given individual consumer. It is subjectively the best, by the average opinion as acted upon by the market as a whole. Democracy, as such, is not avoidable in any social setting, even though it is a compromise for the individual, even though it is tamable by an anti-coercive institution of government.

[eggory]

Selfless producers lose money only in the long run, as their irrational consumers keep them afloat by purposely squandering their money. The process leads to death, but it is not only a slow death, it is a partial death. Just as men may live rationally except when they are in church, by manner of hypocrisy, so may they spend all their money selfishly except for a few thousand dollars each year, so that they may still prosper on the whole, and their suppliers too.

[TeaParty]

The stagnation of the Soviet economy prior to their rejection of Marxism suggests that centralized economies have a tendency to zero production. I suppose, tho, that local bartering may cause a smalll counter-tendency.

[TeaParty]

When It Will Happen: 338, 340/¶1.
M2 and Environmentalism: 326.
Form of an American M2: 336.

[TeaParty]

>Does The Best Product Always Win In The Free Market?

Whatever the free market produces is the best product. The best product is not defined by anything beyond the market. Claiming a Rolls-Royce is the best car is an evasion or ignorance of the best car for a poor person who would be financially ruined trying to pay for a R-R. Best for whom, for what purpose, by what standard?

[TeaParty]

A given product will win in its sub-market. Thus people who can only afford a low-price used car will seek the best in that market rather than being limited to Rolls-Royces.

Yes, Objectivism will win in the long run. There is no competition.

[fakjbf]

You have to have the best mousetrap, in the best spot, with the best bait

[TeaParty]

I dont understand.

My point was that market failure by an anti-market standard is irrelevant to a market. A market which caused unequal incomes is a failure only to egalitarians.

[TeaParty]

Philosophy guides, however implictly, parent-child relations. When I was a tadpole, I observed the most bizarre irrationality in many parents, my own and those of my friends. W/Objectivism, I know the cause.