[therobot24]

>> In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result'

> I think it only appears that way if you take small quotations like this out of context.

Can you help me understand this. Like the purpose of using logic to deduce decision making is because there's a fundamental structure in assuring the result from those deductions is accurate (or enough to continue manipulation of the problem data). When you try to predict market reaction to a decision and ascribe harm or success based on the decision you're creating causation out of correlation, often incorrectly. Again, not an expert in economics, but when i view theories of free market forces and how they're part of the logic of business decisions i can't help but think the people using this information are assuming their knowledge and logic aren't fundamentally flawed and as a result are essentially just guessing without thinking they are.

[ch4s3]

Yeah, Friedman would clearly agree that you can't have perfect knowledge but he argues that bad business decisions are punished with losses and firms' owners will fire bad managers or they'll lose their investments.

You're actually touching on why he argues against efforts to regulate negative harms, because the government has an imperfect ability to predict the outcomes and there isn't a great feedback mechanism.

[AnimalMuppet]

So businesses have faster/better/more accurate feedback than government? That's probably true.

But history has shown that business feedback sometimes takes us to undesirable places, and government regulation is sometimes necessary.

[ch4s3]

Friedman doesn't argue against all kinds of government regulation, specifically he approves of regulating positive harms.

[therobot24]

ok i think i'm starting to get it a bit, the double edged sword is essentially the reason for focusing on emergent results which (i'm guessing in Friedman's mind) have more options for mechanisms for good results than a constrained market might.

[ch4s3]

I think that's a fair summary.