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>the market equivalents/alternatives will, over time, be weakened or killed the same way as you would see with any other deep-pocketed firm selling a product for below-market prices, at a loss, to smoke out smaller competitors. What market equivalents are you talking about exactly?
The examples you mentioned are hardly the results of "oafish hands". Marriage? The free market has run amok with building an entire industry and "chic" around large elaborate marriage ceremonies, replete with gratuitous mark ups on relatively everyday services. As far as the institution goes, marriage in the colloquial sense is fine. Couples form and union all the time. Legally speaking, you may have a point, but I've always held the State being involved with marriage in anything more than a record keeping capacity, and acting as a neutral arbiter of inheritance, dissolution, or adoption/parental status quo setting is a terrible idea. As an example, the practice of not getting on paper married for the benefit of welfare or food stamp eligibility is one such example. >Bulldozing of poor neighborhoods for car dependent housing projects Welcome to real estate as investment, and the tendency of all idle capital to seek forms that facilitate rent extraction. The lack of "public transit" has more to do with the fact that nobody wants to be burdened with actually giving up a piece of their pie for it, but expects everyone else to. The only "oafish hands" there are the councils who are continually courted by moneyed interests in the free market. >Healthcare Welcome to insurance in a nutshell. It completely destroys any semblance of coupling between producer and consumer of service; but is also the inevitable out one of a "captive" consumer population. The combination of service provider cartelry, consolidation of insurers, and perverse incentives created by the free market in terms of businesses becoming targets for
Investment funds; it's really the market you should be blaming there. |