[Apocryphon]

On the other hand, countries with more regulated markets such as European nations, the U.K. and Commonwealth nations, and Japan and some of the East Asian Tigers might have less pollution than the United States. You get Americans importing EU baby formula because they are more restrictive about what chemical additives can go into them.

Couldn't it just be argued that free market extremism is as much folly as a pro-central planning position?

[WalterBright]

> Couldn't it just be argued that free market extremism is as much folly as a pro-central planning position?

The trouble with calling free markets folly is they are enormously successful, in every place and time where they have been tried. The trouble with central economic planning is it always does badly.

BTW, one of the functions of government in a free market is to regulate the externalities - costs of doing business that are not borne by the business. Pollution is the most obvious one of those externalities, so calling a polluting business "extreme free market" is incorrect.

[Apocryphon]

The paradox of maintaining free markets is that you often need state power to ensure competition is being done fairly. That means regulations, and intervention from time to time. That’s at least the ordoliberal line in Germany, at least, the Freiburg school. They seem to have built a quite successful postwar economy there. Endorsing free markets does not have to equate with an unquestioning obsession, bordering on fetishistic, with liberty.

[WalterBright]

That is not a paradox. A free market presumes the existence of a government to protect rights and enforce contracts.

> Endorsing free markets does not have to equate with an unquestioning obsession, bordering on fetishistic, with liberty.

Question it all you like!

[Apocryphon]

I don't question it. We are agreement that a strong hand is necessary to reduce externalities that arise in the course of commerce; we are simply quibbling about what is within that purview.

[nec4b]

>> Couldn't it just be argued that free market extremism is as much folly as a pro-central planning position?

You shouldn't have a problem demonstrating this then? It's easy to enumerate all failed central planned economies, there really never was one that succeeded. Why don't you give an example of country that failed miserable with millions of deaths because of too much free markets.

[aguaviva]

Why don't you give an example of country that failed miserable with millions of deaths because of too much free markets.

The beauty of capitalism is that it works (or seems to work for some people, for the time being) by externalizing its true costs to other countries, other social strata -- and indeed far into the future.

Though mortality rates seem not to have risen (and may in fact declined) in the U.S. during the peak depression years (1930-1933) -- as a global phenomenon, the collapse of a system based on "too much free markets" is generally seen as one of the primary drivers of WW2, so we would have to attribute some share of its 70-85 million fatalities this market-driven collapse as well.

And not just by accident. There's also the fact that "free market" interests and Western financial support were key to Hitler and Mussolini's rise to power in the first place, as the former saw the latter as a perhaps unsavory but ultimately necessary bulwark against the rising spectre of a global socialist movement (whether on the Bolshevik model or otherwise).

Plus the whole European colonial project in Asia, Africa and the Americas, and the several hundred million deaths that it brought to the table. Though to be fair, this wasn't so much a matter of any collapse of the free market system of the time -- but rather of it working exactly as it was intended, from the very start.

And of course now we're headed for a much larger disaster with likely at least as many hundred millions of deaths looming on the horizon -- in the form of climate change and its attendant disruptions, also very much a direct result of "too much free markets".

So there you go.

[WalterBright]

> The beauty of capitalism is that it works (or seems to work for some people, for the time being) by externalizing its true costs to other countries, other social strata -- and indeed far into the future.

Are there any sustainable socialist economies by any metric?

> European colonial project

Colonialism is not free market.

> also very much a direct result of "too much free markets"

Again, communist countries are the most polluted ones. The reason is straightforward - their economies produced so little, they couldn't afford environmental protection costs.

[aguaviva]

Are there any sustainable socialist economies by any metric?

China has hit it out of the park, I think it's quite fair to say. (Could easily name a whole bunch more, but gotta keep this short. It's also a moot subject, per my last item below).

Colonialism is not free market.

That's the thing -- "free market" societies have never really been free, once externalities are accounted for. But the multi-century European colonial project was no mere externality. Its genesis, ideology and economics were inseparable from the development of Western-style capitalism as we know it.

Again, communist countries are the most polluted ones. The reason is straightforward - their economies produced so little, they couldn't afford environmental protection costs.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. But this also gets into a much more important topic we've been leaving out: there's no dichotomy between "socialism" and "capitalism" -- and never was. Nearly every modern, large-scale economy has been a working hybrid of both systems.

Even the good ole' USA.

[WalterBright]

China abandoned communism and turned free markets. That's why they "hit it out of the park".

> "free market" societies have never really been free

Of course. But the free'er they are, the better they work.

> has been a working hybrid of both systems

The socialist part flounders along, supported by taxes on the free market. The bigger the socialist part, the worse the economy as a whole performs.

[aguaviva]

China abandoned communism and turned free markets.

We weren't talking about communism, but rather socialism. Also, its markets are very far from free.

That's all I have time for. Good luck.

[nec4b]

>> or seems to work for some people, for the time being

It seems to work for any country that embraced free market ideas the same way socialist policies predictably don't work in any country that tried them.

You are seriously claiming WW2, colonialism and climate change is a direct consequence of people having too much choice? If only Germany had a strong dictator preventing people to be too free to choose, oh wait,...

[aguaviva]

Of "people" having too much choice, no.

The vast majority of folks have comparatively few meaningful choices available to them. About things like Android vs. iPhone, sure. But about things that actually matter -- like the fact that they have to work so hard all their lives; and that they probably have to drive a car to get there; that the oceans are filling up with microplastics, and their drinking water with something called PFAS that very few people had even heard of until very recently, and so on -- not all that much.

What I mean is that these bad things are the result of centuries of the elites of these partially "free" societies having too many choices available to them.

Or more specifically: of not having to account for the true costs of their choices.

[nec4b]

Do you think the elites of central planned economies are accountable for true cost of their choices?

[aguaviva]

They aren't either, but that's a different topic.

[Apocryphon]

1990s Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union? Crash in standards of living, skyrocketing alcoholism and suicides, societal immiseration.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how...

https://www.britannica.com/place/Russia/Post-Soviet-Russia

https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/alcohol-blamed-ha...

An infestation of pyramid schemes (also happened in post-communist Albania, too, leading to civil war).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Albanian_civil_unrest

[nec4b]

How are the events you listed a consequence of too much free markets? You just proved my point with your examples. Collapse of the Soviet Union was literally a direct consequence of failed central planing. It didn't work that is way it collapsed, hence crash in standard of living. Pyramid schemes were also very popular in the eastern European countries before the fall of communism as well.

[Apocryphon]

And what replaced central planning in those countries, and proved unable to stop the crash?

[WalterBright]

The various Soviet republics each tried differing approaches. The most free market one was Poland's, and Poland had the most success with it.

[Apocryphon]

That is interesting to hear and would be worth looking into.