> Money is a unit of exchange that exists to compel action
Not in a free market. In a free market, people have the option to refuse to accept your money if they don't want to give you what you want to buy from them with it.
It is theoretically and practically impossible that free market could exist. Every unregulated market will be quickly monopolized by a biggest player and it will stop being free by definition.
It's like saying that humans can fly unassisted. Sure, we can jump in the air and for a few milliseconds remain completely in the air. But we can hardly call that process a flight, if it can last for extremely short period of time. Same with free market.
A free market is not unregulated. It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants.
The alternative is to have the market regulated by those who aren't participants--i.e., who have no skin in the game and who suffer no consequences if the regulations are bad. That's basically the situation we have now. Anyone who thinks that's a good thing isn't living on the same planet as I am.
> will be quickly monopolized by a biggest player
The claim that this is a problem of free markets, as opposed to non-free ones, is historically false. Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players. THe original meaning of the word "monopoly" was permission from the king to be the sole seller of a particular product or service.
> It's regulated by the voluntary choices of all market participants.
So, what do you think would happen when the biggest market participant makes a choice incompatible with choices of the smaller participants? I can tell you - the biggest player would win. Or it would slowly destroy competitors (slowly mean just a few years), and then start imposing it's rules. Basically any free market would turn to feudalism, which would then turn into a bloody and crude proto-government. Basically the same we have today minus any pro-human and pro-free market policies we have managed to carve for ourselves over centuries. It is impossible that free market would be anything different.
So yeah, because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control.
> Virtually all monopolies, historically, have been due to government intervention in markets to give special privileges to certain players.
Correct. And do you know why that happened? Because there was no control and biggest market players could simply buy the poor politician they wish. And in the free market you describe these two step would be simply combined into one - the biggest market player would also perform as a pseudo politician, ultra monopoly with zero oversight.
> because humans are shit at governing, the only viable way (until someone invents something new) is external control.
No, that's even worse, because, as you admit, humans are shit at governing--and the "external control" is just more humans being shit at governing, but with a much bigger negative impact because the scope of their shitty governing covers many more people.
Advocates of free markets, like me, don't advocate them because we think they solve all problems. We advocate them because, given the fact that humans are shit at governing, free markets are the least worst of the alternatives open to us. Big market players who still have to make money through voluntary transactions do less damage than governments run by humans who are shit at governing. That's the lesson of human history. Unfortunately most of us still haven't learned it, and continue to cling to the foolish belief that somehow calling a bunch of humans a "government" magically makes them no longer shit at governing. It doesn't.
My point was not that government is better or worse than corporate oligarchy in a question of governing. It's all the same people, same humans, just with different labels.
My point was that free market is kinda like unstable isotope, it can't exist for any significant length of time and will decay into a government. As soon as some corporation starts dictating its rules to an unrelated people, we can call it a proto-government. The department responsible for those unrelated people would be a proto-executive branch, the law department would be a proto-legislative branch etc.
And to address your second comment, about competition:
Competition can't work in the free market. The instant external control ceases to exist, the most shrewd and smart players would start employing all kinds of currently illegal shit. They will buy out all media and platform to blast their ads 24/7 and disallow all competition. They will swithch to currently banned practices and materials to save costs and undercut competitors. They will switch to slave work to save costs etc. As soon as one player becomes relatively bigger the rules of free market will allow him to accumulate more and more benefits of the kind I've described. Any competition would be woefully behind, outdated and overpriced relative to the bigger player. And that's assuming elastic market. As soon as market for some goods becomes inelastic, bigger player can do even more damage. For example they can completely buy out some resource or manufacturing capacity of a crucial component or resource and completely deny it to the competitors.
Basically the whole human history and law corpus is a list of examples how free market failed and how humans had to fix it via restrictions.
> My point was that free market is kinda like unstable isotope, it can't exist for any significant length of time and will decay into a government.
If this is true, I think we're screwed.
I don't think it's actually true, but it is true that in our current world, the number of people who understand the downsides of government and are willing to truly support a free market is miniscule, not even rounding error in the overall numbers.
> Competition can't work in the free market.
You're forgetting that in a free market, all transactions are voluntary. And in a society where that had been true for a long time, and people upheld that principle and acted accordingly, institutions would evolve that are very different from our current ones. David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom is a book length attempt to imagine what such a society would be like, in some detail. It would not be at all like what you would get if you took our current society and just eliminated the government. Of course that's a stupid idea, because our society has evolved for a long time under the assumption that it has a government, and its institutions have evolved accordingly.
> The instant external control ceases to exist, the most shrewd and smart players would start employing all kinds of currently illegal shit.
To paraphrase David Friedman in a similar context, unfortunately this sentence remains true if you take out the first seven words.
You're describing what happens now, in our current world, which has "external control" up the wazoo--just external control that does what the most shrewd and smart players want it to do. Google, Amazon, Walmart, etc. have all done "all kinds of currently illegal shit", and paid no real price for it. True, they've also made a lot of shit that should be illegal, technically legal, by buying the laws and regulations that favor them. But they've also broken the law, straight up, numerous times, and the government never makes them pay the proper price. They always get away with what for them amounts to a tiny slap on the wrist.
And the situation now is worse than it would be in a free market, because in a free market, at least no one would believe that there was some magical "external control" that would somehow protect them. They would know that it was up to them to simply refuse transactions whose long term cost outweighed whatever short term gain was being dangled in front of them. In our current world, people still believe, even with all the evidence to the contrary, that the government can somehow protect them from all the "currently illegal shit" that the big players get up to. And that "protection" simply isn't there. Government always ends up being just another tool that the big players use to get what they want at the expense of everybody else--and it's an easier tool to use than trying to do it in a true free market would be.
Again, it might be that humans are simply incapable of doing the things that a free market requires at scale. And if that's true, I think we're screwed. In any case, it's not a problem that is solved by having a government.
> And do you know why that happened? Because there was no control
Nonsense. It was because the government had control, and could force people to accept that it was giving special privileges to certain players. For example, the railroad barons in the late 19th century US who got the government to give them exclusive access to key routes. The people had no choice about accepting that. In a free market, there would have been competition, and that would have ended up resulting in better service. How do we know that? Because that's what happened until the government stepped in and gave special privileges to certain players.
In other words, your view is exactly backwards to what has actually happened.
No, not money. The problem is not that Google, Amazon, etc. can buy special privileges from the government; the problem is that the government has them for sale. It's government power that's the root of the problem, not money. If the government didn't have the power to give out such special privileges (which comes from the power to issue regulations that all businesses must obey), it wouldn't matter how much money Google or Amazon or anyone else had.
In other words, what's "compelling action" here is the government, and its power to do that is not based on money. But since the government is run by humans, who can be bought, the government's power to compel things ends up being for sale. And even if you magically took away all that money from Google and Amazon and spread it around evenly, that would just mean government favors would get curried in other ways. (Plus the fact that, even if you spread the money around evenly once, it wouldn't stay that way.)
There are probably very few things people wouldn't do if the price is high enough. How many people would refuse to lick a boot for ten million dollars? The bigger the wealth differences become, the harder it is to resist the people with wealth. Wealth is the same thing as power, denying that is silly.
> people have the option to refuse to accept your money...
This is the contradiction, isn't it? A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them. Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.
But then the owning class has every incentive to reduce or remove the safety net. Not least because they will be paying a lot for it! But even more so because that safety net is what gives people some small amount of power to say no to them.
> A free market that you or I might define requires safeguards like a social welfare net to make sure individuals are truly free to decline an offer that is harmful to them.
That depends on how the safeguards are implemented. If they are implemented through coercive taxation, you don't have a free market, because people don't have the right to refuse to pay taxes, even if they disagree with how the money will be used.
> Without such a welfare net one is compelled to accept an offer that is harmful (to one's health, morality, etc.) because the alternative is to lose your dignity and all of your belongings, or worse.
Can you give an example?
> the owning class
What you're saying here is something different from what you said above. The problem you're now pointing to is not that rich people have power because they're rich, but that they have power because own too much other than just money. For example, they might own all the housing in the area you want to live in, so you either have to look elsewhere or accept renting on whatever terms they offer.
The solution for that isn't a "social welfare net". It's to restrict how much non-monetary property a rich person can own. And also to make it easier for people who aren't rich to own more things--for example, to own homes.
By the way, your use of the term "owning class" implies that ownership is somehow a bad thing, or that it's naturally restricted to a certain class of people. But that's not how things should be. Ownership gives you control. For example, if you own the home you live in, you're much better protected from various possible bad things forcing you to move, than if you rent. But that also means people need to be willing to accept the responsibilities that come with ownership. It appears that many people in our current society aren't--but they also don't want to accept the tradeoffs of giving up ownership. That's not a stable situation. You can't get something for nothing. And the best "safety net" a person can have is to own as many of the things they depend on as possible.
Many people decry the tyranny of capitalism, but this site tends to lean into it and defend it at every turn because capitalism is painted as the tide that lifts all boats, despite the bodies on the ocean floor. Some believe, wholeheartedly that a few regulations is all that is needed to establish a fair free market, despite evidence to the contrary. ANY niche market where a world-spanning monopoly can be established, makes a mockery of regulation time and time again.
Capitalism is not the same thing as a free market. A free market means all transactions are voluntary. That's how wealth gets built--by voluntary cooperation among productive people through specialization and trade.
Capitalism is just the view that one should try to accumulate more capital, by hook or by crook. And there are lots of ways to do that that don't involve any kind of productive work, much less building wealth through cooperation, specialization, and trade. Buying government favors, for example, which is how most big-time "capitalists" in US history did it (for example, the railroad barons who got the government to give them exclusive access to key routes). Today they do it by buying regulations that favor them.
It's like saying that humans can fly unassisted. Sure, we can jump in the air and for a few milliseconds remain completely in the air. But we can hardly call that process a flight, if it can last for extremely short period of time. Same with free market.