[shkkmo]

Please try responding to what people are actually saying rather than inventing endless strawman arguments.

There are important functional distinctions between a government run enterprise, a government regulated enterprise and a completely unregulated enterprise.

There are different types of inefficiencies in heirarchical systems and market systems. Markets tend to duplicate effort often in unnecessary zero-sum games. Heirarchical systems have trouble routing around incompetence and corruption.

If you pay attention you'll notice that the systems that work best are hybrids that layer market and heirarchical systems.

While the army seems like a purely heirarchical system, it is really a hybrid system since interfaces heavily with the market systems which we call the military-industrial complex.

[WalterBright]

> While the army seems like a purely heirarchical system, it is really a hybrid system since interfaces heavily with the market systems which we call the military-industrial complex.

That has nothing to do with how things are run on a military base.

Besides, if you've got any evidence that the military worked better in a non-market system, like the USSR, please present.

> Markets tend to duplicate effort often in unnecessary zero-sum games.

Another word for that is "competition". Competition makes them efficient. Eliminating competition leads to gross inefficiency and incompetence, making things far worse than the duplication ever did.

[shkkmo]

> Eliminating competition leads to gross inefficiency and incompetence.

It can, especially if poorly managed. However, there is a reason why most companies are heirarchical systems.

If markets were truely the "one true way to do things" you would see markets all the way down. That simply is not the case. In fact, instead we see that "vertical integration" can be extremely successful and can multiple companies linked purely by markets.

Similarly, you don't see very many successful truely free markets. It turns out that you need the rule of law and a regulating authority to minimize unproductive competition that would otherwise swamp the benefits of the productive competitive.

We don't want companies competing for sales by blowing up each other's stores. We want companies to compete for sales by making better products.

Deciding when and how to mix markets with heirarchical and other systems is extremely complicated and hard. But it is simple minded to pretend that pure markets are always the best solution when reality so clearly shows the benefits of hybrid systems.

[WalterBright]

> you don't see very many successful truely free markets

It's been very successful everywhere it's been tried.