[kristjank]

Your comment is greyed out, but this is a genuinely good question.

I live in a country where homes for the elderly (and the health system at large) have managed to remain profitable while overpaying doctors and severely underpaying just about anyone else. Now we're two months into a failing doctors' strike (because the doctors feel like they can extort an even higher wage from the state) and we're on the way to sign a memorandum for easier worker immigration from Phillipines because we need nursing and medical assistance staff and the (heavily subsidized and mostly state-ran) healthcare institutions can't by law pay native staff a fair wage.

What I can gather from that so far is that it sucks when you're being fucked over by a free market economy because some venture capitalist is being a miser, but it's 10 times worse when the miser is a legitimately legislated government. Immigration is not just a xenophobia issue, it's a genuine concern when an entity realizes it doesn't need to spend as much and starts mass importing cheap manpower from the other side of the globe.

[cupcakecommons]

It seems like the worst thing about free markets are changes that make them unfree or coercive beyond the baseline coercion inherit in being alive. Free markets are just the state of nature and improving on nature is difficult right?

[kristjank]

I am not so positive about your view here, I was saying that free markets can be bad, but when a government acts as a free-market entity like a corporation, it gets even worse, because you can't bet against it and economically influence it the same way you can a corporation. That's not a statement against market regulation, it's a statement against goverments getting too many economists and too little humanitarians to run themselves and trying to maximize economic markers instead of the citizens' welfare.

[cupcakecommons]

When governments get involved in free markets - isn't the thing that makes this situation worse that the market becomes even less free? I can't understand your reasoning here yet.