[c54]

Common misconception, examples are the 40hr work week and banning of payment in scrip in the 1800s.

Another example is that monopolies require legislation or they have the effect of “seizing up” the dynamics of a functioning marketplace and turning toxic.

Semiconductor patents being made public and telecom copper being made open to use by other companies are both pretty well understood examples of legislation that helped bring about the computer era we live in now. Not free market in a pure ideological sense, but a kind of curated open market dynamic.

Markets are created by governments and don’t just spring from anywhere whole cloth. Markets are useful for many many things but need to be gardened, in effect.

In our current world labor “markets” are really not that at all— if a participant does not have the ability to withdraw their offer of labor then price signaling doesn’t work.

I’ve been reading the book Freedom From the Market, it’s well-researched and a literature review of sorts. Would recommend.

[wallacoloo]

> Markets are created by governments and don’t just spring from anywhere whole cloth.

ok, then what of the cryptocurrency drug markets? those were created by govt?

no. there’s so many instances of unorganized humans doing trade. markets are just a more organized form of trade, and goverment is but one way to achieve that organization.

[freeflight]

> ok, then what of the cryptocurrency drug markets? those were created by govt?

Indirectly yes, right now one of their biggest selling points is not being in the legal realm of government regulated markets.

If the government were to legalize drugs/endorse crypto that dynamic would heavily change, the black variants of these markets would lose quite a big part of their appeal and thus the demand for them and ultimately their market share.

> goverment is but one way to achieve that organization

There has to be some form of authority enforcing rules, or else you end up with a very anarchistic form of "market" where everything goes. That "everything" ranges from mundanities, like making a "business model" out of cheating people, to selling people like property because when there's a buyer, who has the right the stop me from selling?

[t-3]

> There has to be some form of authority enforcing rules, or else you end up with a very anarchistic form of "market" where everything goes. That "everything" ranges from mundanities, like making a "business model" out of cheating people, to selling people like property because when there's a buyer, who has the right the stop me from selling?

Your anarchy already exists, and they fight with lawyers to decide the winner. Businesses with exactly the vision you describe exist everywhere. Government enables this kind of trickery.

[freeflight]

> Your anarchy already exists

I never disputed that, but there's a difference between embracing it as a "true market" vs setting the kinds of limits that governments can set and enforce.

Because contrary to your claim;

> Government enables this kind of trickery.

There is no "trickery" going on and equating the modern day state of things, with let's for example 200 years ago, it's very easy to show how things have gotten all around better.

Selling people used to be a very wide-spread, and even government endorsed, practice. Now it's generally considered very bad thing to do and criminalized by most nations.

Sure, that does not mean it completely stopped, but claiming it only exists because governments regulate it, is just backwards logic that makes no sense: The practice of slavery was there first, it's regulation and ultimately criminalization were acts of regulation that could never have happened without some form of authority enforcing them.

[c54]

Cryptos are interestingly the one example of this, and they’ve been around for a really short time.

One of the fundamental reasons this is the case is because trading requires enforcement of property ownership, whoever is doing the enforcing is de facto the government. Private keys and smart contracts allow for ownership which need not be defended, though admittedly only over things in a limited sense. Your keys mean you own your wallet, but an NFT of a bridge doesn’t mean shit.

Most crypto volumes aren’t drugs at all, but are people buying and selling other cryptos using cryptos.

It’s going to be interesting to see if web3 bears fruit but so far that has largely not happened

[selfhoster11]

I mean, they kind of were created by the government.

[c54]

The truth is that government is fully capable of being exploitative and abusive, but so is private enterprise.

We dont want either to be exploitative or abusive, but the ideology that the “free market” is our savior and that “government bad” is just played out un-nuanced propaganda at this point

[kkjjkgjjgg]

What do you mean by the 40h work week as an example? Example for what? It was an idea by Ford, but I guess then the unions jumped on it?

Who is forcing you to work 40h? I personally don't do that. You are free to negotiate your own contracts.

[c54]

Sure! The work week and similar working legislation is a form of negotiating for one’s own contracts. It’s just that people got together and negotiated for their contracts in a group, and then wrote down that rule so that we don’t have to go on strike like they did.

It’s all part of the history of people getting together to negotiate for their own contracts, worth reading about: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_labor_law_in_the_...

[kkjjkgjjgg]

People getting together to negotiate is not incompatible with capitalism. It is actually forming monopolies, which socialists usually try to make illegal.

So I am still not sure what that example is supposed to demonstrate?

[dgfitz]

> Who is forcing you to work 40h? I personally don't do that. You are free to negotiate your own contracts.

This is such a privileged and arrogant stance to take. The VAST majority of people are NOT free to negotiate.

[kkjjkgjjgg]

Of course they are. Why wouldn't they be free to negotiate? Of course if you have few skills that are in demand, you are in a worse negotiating position compared to people who are in demand. You can try to acquire skills that are in demand, though.