What is the Free Market?

I really didn't think I'd have to go THIS basic: what the free market is, the idea behind it, and how it

works.



Young women stopped from braiding hair in:

[shanedk]

"Bush was the most ridiculously delusional free market president since reagan."

That's like saying "Ray Comfort is the most rabid atheist since Pope John Paul II."

"the Free market doesn't work. It doesn't exist"

If it doesn't exist, how do you know it won't work?

[shanedk]

Capitalism means the private ownership of capital, absent government influence. (When it's with government influence, it's corporatism, not capitalism.)

Free Market is when the price and distribution of goods and services is governed by supply and demand, again absent government influence.

Although they're not strictly synonymous, you can't have one without the other.

[shanedk]

"Only the size of it (proft) makes it ethically acceptable or unacceptable."

No, only whether or not it's voluntary makes it acceptable or unacceptable. And every time you get government involved, you make some aspect of it involuntary.

[shanedk]

Force and fraud are NOT market activities. Market activities are VOLUNTARY interactions. You know a statist is desperate when he resorts to this.

[shanedk]

The free market isn't zero-sum. And governments all the time, throughout history, have ENCOURAGED profit-seeking by those who run it and their cronies at the expense of others.

[shanedk]

@evensgrey Summer, huh? Could the ground-level ozone be setting it off? Or perhaps the gas from your air conditioner's coolant?

[shanedk]

"I'm finding it hard to process such astonishing levels of bullshit and ignorance on such unprecedented levels"

WE'RE the ones with historical evidence and sound economics on our side. YOU'RE the one who's so deluded he thinks George W. Bush was a free marketeer!

[shanedk]

It's not a value judgement. People will seek profits. It's descriptive, not prescriptive.

They'll seek profits in corporatist or fascist states as well, just that the less scrupulous will use the government to gain them by force, instead of the market to gain them by creating wealth.

[shanedk]

You can always find exceptions. I'm working on a video that looks at the data as a whole, which is what you'd want to do.

[shanedk]

+Eugene K Then you should be able to take this challenge (like absolutely no statist yet): Statist Challenge 1: The Invisible Hand is a Gentle Hand

"thats as naive as it can get...how did that go in the recession... how did the free market keep people honest?" It wasn't the free market. The regulatory state led to the fiasco. As it always does. The financial sector is THE most regulated sector in the state, yet statists blame the free market when it fails. Riiiight.

"when the government has majority shares in all the Fortune 500 companies etc... you think the Governments law are actually about keeping them honest?" No, and that's antithetical to a free market so I have no clue what your point is.

"... its called lip service as they bail them out with public money..." Which free market advocates complained about from start to finish. And the statists cheered them on...until they went south, that is, now it's the free market's fault.

"Corporations operate in the free market" No, corporations are a legal fiction created by government. They wouldn't exist without the state!

Wanna prove me wrong? Take the challenge!

[Urbestestbuddy]

Great video. Very well put together. I like the cosmetology license example. Like people braiding hair without a license is a real threat to society lol.

[shanedk]

@cybertroll69 We were talking about the state's ROLE (if any) in the economy. It's not my fault if you can't follow the basic thread of a conversation.

[hectorae]

Free markets are perfect, as long as the businesses are under worker control, only then can it create desirable equality, I don't see ancaps like you advocating for that, even though such arrangements are very possible in a free market, they are just not highly likely in a market that has such inequality to begin with.

If you wanted it to actually work the way ancaps view it, than you'd have to push the reset button and take everything away from everybody, since that is not the case, it will be a painful and long long process to get this shit fair again.

Now, I can see you making a reason based argument against this, since you probably want a definition of fair, but I will dismiss that, since I don't need reason to make this argument, it is an argument based on feeling and human being are creatures with feelings, to ignore that and come up with reason based arguments against feeling based arguments, is not very compelling to most people.

Reason may end an argument with "O well, I guess that's just the way it is".
Feeling does not allow the argument to end like that.
If it is physically and technically possible (and it is) to feed everyone on the planet, than we should do so, no arguments accepted.

[shanedk]

And supply and demand doesn't work unless you have competition for profit, and competition for profit automatically results in supply and demand.

[shanedk]

@dmp1ce No, but there's a PayPal link on my channel page. Thank you very much!

[shanedk]

@Tethloach1 According to the studies I've seen, it's true up to a point but then there's diminishing returns.

How does any of this mean infinite resources?

[shanedk]

@QuietReckoning FYI, from Wikipedia:

"A free market is a market in which there is no economic intervention and regulation by the state, except to enforce private contracts and the ownership of property. It is the opposite of a controlled market, in which the state directly regulates how goods, services and labor may be used, priced, or distributed, rather than relying on the mechanism of private ownership."

They agree with MY definition, NOT yours.

[shanedk]

@eboyd32 Homesteading is VERY capitalistic. And how is that being vague? If you look up homesteading and how it works, ALL of your questions are answered in EXPLICIT detail.

[shanedk]

I've always thought it's interesting that when a mostly-state system screws up, it's obviously because of the market, but when a mostly-market system works it's obviously because of the tiny bit of state that was in there.

[shanedk]

Just because you can broker labor doesn't make it a commodity. It's still used for a completely different purpose, which is why it's a separate component in all production functions.