![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | → | Archive 5 |
I have a lot of problems with this article but I wanted to discuss them in talk.
It's not true for example that many or even most socialists are against market economies nor is it true that most socialist countries have command economies. Most socialist parties in Western Europe aren't against market economies or for command economies. Also since the fall of the Soviet Union there aren't many command economies left.
Also it's not clear to me the distinction between this article and the article on market economies.
Fixed this up a bit. One problem here is that the terms socialism and capitalism are used in fundamentally different ways in China and the West.
Removed this. Most socialist nations don't have command economies any more. Also, most nations *don't* have mixtures of market and command economies, they have state intervention in market economies which is different.
In contrast to the political terms capitalism and socialism the concept of the free market is purely economic. Nations tend to have an economic system that accords with their government's political ideology. Hence, democratic countries tend to have economies that are closer to a free market, while socialist countries generally have command economies. Despite official support for one economic model or another, nations generally have a mix of some sort.
I don't know what you're talking about. There's plenty of Western capitalism, even in high-regulatory economies like France. Trey Stone 05:01, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Capitalism as implemented in democratic countries (such as America, Canada, and most of industrial Europe) tends to be a mix between capitalism and statism (see state capitalism).
In these countries, the government routinely intervenes in the operation of the economy. Government intervention in the U.S. includes the granting of monopolies (such as franchises for cable TV or intellectual "property" rights) or the break-up of monopolies (as the dissolution of AT&T into the Baby Bells).
It might be nice to sometime have some compare & contrast between Free market and Capitalism. Followers of Ayn Rand tend to think of them as basically identical, while some radical Free market Libertarians consider such instituions as the corporation as being a state-imposed distortion against a true Free Market.
Where are all those libertariansim coming from? The ideology is called liberalism dammit! BL 00:01, 5 Oct 2003 (UTC)
Once upon a time, you were perfectly correct. Alas, these days the word has been made captive of a movement that in now way reflects the mores and values of classical Liberism- whereas Libertarian thought does.- Deliberatus
As an american, my best take on liberalism vs. libertarianism is that around the turn of the 20th century, the liberals became progressives (e.g. Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt), arguing liberalism was really defined by it being progressive and that further progress to statism is also liberal. From then on, the people you all in europe would call liberals became libertarians. Mrdthree 02:57, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
I don't think it's fair to use "free market" and "neo-liberal" as synonyms. Neo-liberal implies some sort of managed free-trade-lite system, as under NAFTA or the WTO, which many free market advocates oppose. I altered the opening line of the entry. Nat Krause 22:24, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
BL: "liberal", to Americans means "social democratic" nowadays.
The paragraph starting "in reality there are no totally free or ideal markets" is biased. A free market is simply one without coercive interference; "lack of perfect knowledge", supposedly-"monopolistic practices", "cartels", "insider trading" and "price fixing" (by non-governmental agencies) are in no way "anti-market"
(and Rothbard has shown that a "monopoly" in the sense used here is entirely a creation of coercive interference, and cannot arise in a free market)
The indentation is getting extreme, so I'm going back to level 1.
My point isn't that a monopoly can't exist in a free market. It is rather that the existence of certain types of cartels does not rule out the existence of a free market on the terms used above. This follows from the fact that persons are capable of making exclusive contracts; which follows from the fact that persons are capable of giving their word. If you wish to be a baker, you need flour. To get flour, you need someone to be willing to sell it to you. If all the flour in your district is already spoken for under exclusive contract, you cannot buy flour in your district.
I disagree with your analogy with governments. It is true that if two persons make a contract or exchange, that contract does have opportunity effects on other people. I would not, however, characterize this as the others being "bound" by the contract. If you have a car for sale and I buy it, then no other person may subsequently buy it from you -- it is no longer yours to sell. The contract is exclusive; the others have lost out on an opportunity. However, this does not mean that the car's unavailability is coerced upon them. It is simply a brute fact, like the unavailability of 30°C temperatures in the out-of-doors in Antarctica. Those who want a car must find someone who is willing to sell; those who want to be warm should consider the tropics, not the poles.
The hold that government has over territory and persons is not much like the unavailability of flour around the bakers' cartel, or the unavailability of your car after I have bought it. First off, these unavailabilities are consequences of agreements freely entered into. Except in the falsified history told by "social contract" theorists, this is not the case with government. Second, your inference that intervention is not coercion if you can leave the territory is a non sequitur. What makes an action coercion is not whether it is escapable by another, but whether it is imposed upon another. Considering opportunity costs (like the car above, or the flour) to be coercions leads to a bizarre world in which every action is a coercion of infinite scope, since every action cuts off an infinity of opportunities. Such a world is perhaps amenable to Foucauldian power discourse; it is not amenable to free-market or socialist economy. Ruling opportunity costs out as coercions avoids this absurdity.
To make this all more abstract: If Joe wishes to do things which require others' participation, then he has a number of choices: he can convince them to agree to participate willingly; he can force them to participate with intimidation or violence; he can give up on his original plan and decide to instead do things that people will go along with; or he can sit down and sulk till he starves. I propose that freedom-loving people, whether they call themselves "capitalists" or "socialists", regard the first as good, the second as bad, the third as good, and the fourth as bad. No?
-- FOo 05:33, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Mihnea re-added some stuff, so I thought I'd explain why I took it out.
I made some edits to try to come up with neutral, acceptable language. I still feel that the "consumer markets / labor market" sentence was iffy, so I changed it around some and I think I can agree with its veracity now. I'm not sure it's true that opponents of the free market refer to it as neoliberalism generally, although they do sometimes. I recall during the 2000 presidential campaign hearing Nader and his supporters say on several occasions that neoliberalism isn't really the free market at all, but "corporate managed trade". - Nat Kraus e 07:45, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Not exactly great sourcing on a very controversial matter. -- Jmabel | Talk 09:16, Oct 17, 2004 (UTC)
The article now says, 'Currently, there are no totally free or ideal markets in operation, other than in the "underground" economy.' I believe this latter phrase is wrong. How can one say that a market that may be subject to police harrassment and is incapable of freely sharing price information is an ideal free market? It will inherently be somewhat inefficient, probably more so than a typical aboveground market. I am inclined to delete that recently-added claim, but thought I'd post first and see if others have strong arguments to make a different change than simple deletion. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:14, Dec 13, 2004 (UTC)
The expression "free market" is often used to imply "perfectly free market", in the sense that there are no government restrictions to trade. Since any government activity (including national defence and policing) can be construed as interference with trade of private persons (eg in the lawn mowing business, the government impedes you from whacking all your competitors), this requires anarchy. In any case, the modern concept of an absolute "free market" ideal (as opposed to minimising unnecessary government restrictions, which could also be considered 'free market') derives from the the idea of perfect competition. Which among other things requires perfect information, so unless any (well, all) of you are omniscient, a perfect/free market cannot exist. (And if we did have perfect information, there would be no difference between a market economy and a centrally-planned one.) Rd232 21:53, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Obviously, this anonymous editor is not going to give up on this point. I'd rather not stick a "disputed" tag on an otherwise good article over part of one sentence, edit wars solve nothing, and the only other person who has weighed in is also anonymous. I'd really appreciate some comment on this. I'm going to put a request at Wikipedia:Requests for comment. -- Jmabel | Talk 03:03, Dec 17, 2004 (UTC)
It comes down to definitions of freedom. If you define freedom as "freedom from government 'interference'", then the informal economy is freer than the formal one - QED. But most people would say that's a pretty strange (and very American) definition of freedom. See Amartya Sen ("Development as Freedom") and John Rawls. Rd232 21:59, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The issue is that even under a terribly American version of free markets, an ideal free market also assumes total information: awareness by buyers of all possible sellers and vice versa. The garage sale example lacks this completely. I do not see how ducking taxes at a garage sale better approximates the economic ideal of a free market than does a stock exchange, which is subject to taxation but approximates the total availability of equal information. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:51, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)
We clearly are not reaching consensus, and we seem to have a slow motion edit war. RJII has now changed this to "There is no large free market economy in existence other than in the underground economy." RJII: what is your example of a large free market in an underground economy? You are editing without discussing, and unless you can justify what you are saying, I am going to feel very free to revert. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:33, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
It's worth making the point that much of this debate arise from the term "free market" itself, which is a very loaded term because it deliberately mixes two sense of freedom - the technical "free" (eg from added preservatives") and the politically "free", which has all sorts of connotations. So it's deliberately built into the term that in any given situation people will be on the back foot arguing against a "freer" market, because who could possibly be against that? Whereas if we spoke more neutrally of a more or less regulated market, or in terms of various economic criteria of how well a market functions (of which "freedom from unnecessary government interference" and "freedom from corruption" are but two aspects), it's quite a different context. In general, the term "free" market elevates one aspect of markets over all others for ideological reasons. Rd232 09:45, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Let me try this from another angle. My model of a rather free, aboveground market would be exchange of U.S. dollars for Euros. To what extent is that not a free market? -- Jmabel | Talk 21:02, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
Picking up thread: It seems to me that the disagreement I'm having with RJII comes down to this: he seems to be almost entirely focused on one way in which markets may be unfree -- taxation -- and I feel that other factors may often be far more important in distorting a market away from an economist's model of a free market. I think that the right to take this up in the article is to discuss various factors that make markets deviate from the ideal model. I believe it is little more than minarchist political polemic to focus entirely on this one factor. I also believe that governments (and other institutions such as stock exchanges) can facilitate free markets (both by preventing fraud and thereby removing a major risk of participating in such markets and by making it easier for buyers and sellers to find one another) as well as interfere in them detrimentally. I don't think that a throwaway remark suggesting that underground markets are somehow freer illuminates anything: I give several examples above of ways that underground markets may be highly subject to coercion. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:20, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
Can we at least agree that we are talking here about informal markets, ones that are basically tolerated though not strictly legal, rather than underground markets, ones that are specifically clandestine? That would reduce the disagreement, from my side at least. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:36, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
For once, Silverback and I seem to agree. But I'm not sure either of us have the patience to keep reverting RJII, who seems to prefer inserting his/her somewhat idiosyncratic views into the article, with or without consensus, rather than discuss the matter. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:14, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)
"Contract" section was kind of pointless. A free market includes other economic freedoms besides having to do with contracts. (RJII)
Please stop trying to make the intro fit your POV. The article is quite long enough to accomodate a discussion of your arguments; the intro should be short and neutral. An equation of the idea that "an economy exists in a social context" with a "command economy" is plain, outright, irredeemably dumb. (We all do dumb things from time to time; let's everyone try and keep it to a minimum.) Rd232 15:48, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 1 | Archive 2 | Archive 3 | → | Archive 5 |
I have a lot of problems with this article but I wanted to discuss them in talk.
It's not true for example that many or even most socialists are against market economies nor is it true that most socialist countries have command economies. Most socialist parties in Western Europe aren't against market economies or for command economies. Also since the fall of the Soviet Union there aren't many command economies left.
Also it's not clear to me the distinction between this article and the article on market economies.
Fixed this up a bit. One problem here is that the terms socialism and capitalism are used in fundamentally different ways in China and the West.
Removed this. Most socialist nations don't have command economies any more. Also, most nations *don't* have mixtures of market and command economies, they have state intervention in market economies which is different.
In contrast to the political terms capitalism and socialism the concept of the free market is purely economic. Nations tend to have an economic system that accords with their government's political ideology. Hence, democratic countries tend to have economies that are closer to a free market, while socialist countries generally have command economies. Despite official support for one economic model or another, nations generally have a mix of some sort.
I don't know what you're talking about. There's plenty of Western capitalism, even in high-regulatory economies like France. Trey Stone 05:01, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Capitalism as implemented in democratic countries (such as America, Canada, and most of industrial Europe) tends to be a mix between capitalism and statism (see state capitalism).
In these countries, the government routinely intervenes in the operation of the economy. Government intervention in the U.S. includes the granting of monopolies (such as franchises for cable TV or intellectual "property" rights) or the break-up of monopolies (as the dissolution of AT&T into the Baby Bells).
It might be nice to sometime have some compare & contrast between Free market and Capitalism. Followers of Ayn Rand tend to think of them as basically identical, while some radical Free market Libertarians consider such instituions as the corporation as being a state-imposed distortion against a true Free Market.
Where are all those libertariansim coming from? The ideology is called liberalism dammit! BL 00:01, 5 Oct 2003 (UTC)
Once upon a time, you were perfectly correct. Alas, these days the word has been made captive of a movement that in now way reflects the mores and values of classical Liberism- whereas Libertarian thought does.- Deliberatus
As an american, my best take on liberalism vs. libertarianism is that around the turn of the 20th century, the liberals became progressives (e.g. Presidents Wilson, Roosevelt), arguing liberalism was really defined by it being progressive and that further progress to statism is also liberal. From then on, the people you all in europe would call liberals became libertarians. Mrdthree 02:57, 25 March 2006 (UTC)
I don't think it's fair to use "free market" and "neo-liberal" as synonyms. Neo-liberal implies some sort of managed free-trade-lite system, as under NAFTA or the WTO, which many free market advocates oppose. I altered the opening line of the entry. Nat Krause 22:24, 16 Feb 2004 (UTC)
BL: "liberal", to Americans means "social democratic" nowadays.
The paragraph starting "in reality there are no totally free or ideal markets" is biased. A free market is simply one without coercive interference; "lack of perfect knowledge", supposedly-"monopolistic practices", "cartels", "insider trading" and "price fixing" (by non-governmental agencies) are in no way "anti-market"
(and Rothbard has shown that a "monopoly" in the sense used here is entirely a creation of coercive interference, and cannot arise in a free market)
The indentation is getting extreme, so I'm going back to level 1.
My point isn't that a monopoly can't exist in a free market. It is rather that the existence of certain types of cartels does not rule out the existence of a free market on the terms used above. This follows from the fact that persons are capable of making exclusive contracts; which follows from the fact that persons are capable of giving their word. If you wish to be a baker, you need flour. To get flour, you need someone to be willing to sell it to you. If all the flour in your district is already spoken for under exclusive contract, you cannot buy flour in your district.
I disagree with your analogy with governments. It is true that if two persons make a contract or exchange, that contract does have opportunity effects on other people. I would not, however, characterize this as the others being "bound" by the contract. If you have a car for sale and I buy it, then no other person may subsequently buy it from you -- it is no longer yours to sell. The contract is exclusive; the others have lost out on an opportunity. However, this does not mean that the car's unavailability is coerced upon them. It is simply a brute fact, like the unavailability of 30°C temperatures in the out-of-doors in Antarctica. Those who want a car must find someone who is willing to sell; those who want to be warm should consider the tropics, not the poles.
The hold that government has over territory and persons is not much like the unavailability of flour around the bakers' cartel, or the unavailability of your car after I have bought it. First off, these unavailabilities are consequences of agreements freely entered into. Except in the falsified history told by "social contract" theorists, this is not the case with government. Second, your inference that intervention is not coercion if you can leave the territory is a non sequitur. What makes an action coercion is not whether it is escapable by another, but whether it is imposed upon another. Considering opportunity costs (like the car above, or the flour) to be coercions leads to a bizarre world in which every action is a coercion of infinite scope, since every action cuts off an infinity of opportunities. Such a world is perhaps amenable to Foucauldian power discourse; it is not amenable to free-market or socialist economy. Ruling opportunity costs out as coercions avoids this absurdity.
To make this all more abstract: If Joe wishes to do things which require others' participation, then he has a number of choices: he can convince them to agree to participate willingly; he can force them to participate with intimidation or violence; he can give up on his original plan and decide to instead do things that people will go along with; or he can sit down and sulk till he starves. I propose that freedom-loving people, whether they call themselves "capitalists" or "socialists", regard the first as good, the second as bad, the third as good, and the fourth as bad. No?
-- FOo 05:33, 26 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Mihnea re-added some stuff, so I thought I'd explain why I took it out.
I made some edits to try to come up with neutral, acceptable language. I still feel that the "consumer markets / labor market" sentence was iffy, so I changed it around some and I think I can agree with its veracity now. I'm not sure it's true that opponents of the free market refer to it as neoliberalism generally, although they do sometimes. I recall during the 2000 presidential campaign hearing Nader and his supporters say on several occasions that neoliberalism isn't really the free market at all, but "corporate managed trade". - Nat Kraus e 07:45, 28 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Not exactly great sourcing on a very controversial matter. -- Jmabel | Talk 09:16, Oct 17, 2004 (UTC)
The article now says, 'Currently, there are no totally free or ideal markets in operation, other than in the "underground" economy.' I believe this latter phrase is wrong. How can one say that a market that may be subject to police harrassment and is incapable of freely sharing price information is an ideal free market? It will inherently be somewhat inefficient, probably more so than a typical aboveground market. I am inclined to delete that recently-added claim, but thought I'd post first and see if others have strong arguments to make a different change than simple deletion. -- Jmabel | Talk 20:14, Dec 13, 2004 (UTC)
The expression "free market" is often used to imply "perfectly free market", in the sense that there are no government restrictions to trade. Since any government activity (including national defence and policing) can be construed as interference with trade of private persons (eg in the lawn mowing business, the government impedes you from whacking all your competitors), this requires anarchy. In any case, the modern concept of an absolute "free market" ideal (as opposed to minimising unnecessary government restrictions, which could also be considered 'free market') derives from the the idea of perfect competition. Which among other things requires perfect information, so unless any (well, all) of you are omniscient, a perfect/free market cannot exist. (And if we did have perfect information, there would be no difference between a market economy and a centrally-planned one.) Rd232 21:53, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Obviously, this anonymous editor is not going to give up on this point. I'd rather not stick a "disputed" tag on an otherwise good article over part of one sentence, edit wars solve nothing, and the only other person who has weighed in is also anonymous. I'd really appreciate some comment on this. I'm going to put a request at Wikipedia:Requests for comment. -- Jmabel | Talk 03:03, Dec 17, 2004 (UTC)
It comes down to definitions of freedom. If you define freedom as "freedom from government 'interference'", then the informal economy is freer than the formal one - QED. But most people would say that's a pretty strange (and very American) definition of freedom. See Amartya Sen ("Development as Freedom") and John Rawls. Rd232 21:59, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The issue is that even under a terribly American version of free markets, an ideal free market also assumes total information: awareness by buyers of all possible sellers and vice versa. The garage sale example lacks this completely. I do not see how ducking taxes at a garage sale better approximates the economic ideal of a free market than does a stock exchange, which is subject to taxation but approximates the total availability of equal information. -- Jmabel | Talk 23:51, Dec 20, 2004 (UTC)
We clearly are not reaching consensus, and we seem to have a slow motion edit war. RJII has now changed this to "There is no large free market economy in existence other than in the underground economy." RJII: what is your example of a large free market in an underground economy? You are editing without discussing, and unless you can justify what you are saying, I am going to feel very free to revert. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:33, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
It's worth making the point that much of this debate arise from the term "free market" itself, which is a very loaded term because it deliberately mixes two sense of freedom - the technical "free" (eg from added preservatives") and the politically "free", which has all sorts of connotations. So it's deliberately built into the term that in any given situation people will be on the back foot arguing against a "freer" market, because who could possibly be against that? Whereas if we spoke more neutrally of a more or less regulated market, or in terms of various economic criteria of how well a market functions (of which "freedom from unnecessary government interference" and "freedom from corruption" are but two aspects), it's quite a different context. In general, the term "free" market elevates one aspect of markets over all others for ideological reasons. Rd232 09:45, 21 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Let me try this from another angle. My model of a rather free, aboveground market would be exchange of U.S. dollars for Euros. To what extent is that not a free market? -- Jmabel | Talk 21:02, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
Picking up thread: It seems to me that the disagreement I'm having with RJII comes down to this: he seems to be almost entirely focused on one way in which markets may be unfree -- taxation -- and I feel that other factors may often be far more important in distorting a market away from an economist's model of a free market. I think that the right to take this up in the article is to discuss various factors that make markets deviate from the ideal model. I believe it is little more than minarchist political polemic to focus entirely on this one factor. I also believe that governments (and other institutions such as stock exchanges) can facilitate free markets (both by preventing fraud and thereby removing a major risk of participating in such markets and by making it easier for buyers and sellers to find one another) as well as interfere in them detrimentally. I don't think that a throwaway remark suggesting that underground markets are somehow freer illuminates anything: I give several examples above of ways that underground markets may be highly subject to coercion. -- Jmabel | Talk 22:20, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
Can we at least agree that we are talking here about informal markets, ones that are basically tolerated though not strictly legal, rather than underground markets, ones that are specifically clandestine? That would reduce the disagreement, from my side at least. -- Jmabel | Talk 21:36, Dec 21, 2004 (UTC)
For once, Silverback and I seem to agree. But I'm not sure either of us have the patience to keep reverting RJII, who seems to prefer inserting his/her somewhat idiosyncratic views into the article, with or without consensus, rather than discuss the matter. -- Jmabel | Talk 07:14, Dec 22, 2004 (UTC)
"Contract" section was kind of pointless. A free market includes other economic freedoms besides having to do with contracts. (RJII)
Please stop trying to make the intro fit your POV. The article is quite long enough to accomodate a discussion of your arguments; the intro should be short and neutral. An equation of the idea that "an economy exists in a social context" with a "command economy" is plain, outright, irredeemably dumb. (We all do dumb things from time to time; let's everyone try and keep it to a minimum.) Rd232 15:48, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)