[littlestymaar]

Free market enthusiasts' reasoning is literary the same as Communists': when their grand theory fails to deliver its grandiose promises, it's nver because their believes where nonsensical, but because “it isn't real Communism/free market”.

[emtel]

Communist regimes, especially the USSR, had nearly unlimited power to impose exactly the policies that supposedly would help.

Open societies, in contrast, must balance many competing interests and voting factions, meaning that free market supporters have limited power to enact their preferred policies, meaning they rarely can be implemented in a “pure” form.

[intalentive]

That’s a nice story. In reality the “open society” is open to takeover by international finance capital. It’s like running a server with “admin”:”password” SSH credentials — a security vulnerability that cedes control to outsiders. Imagine China and Iran allowing Larry Ellison to own their media, or allowing Larry Fink to control a big chunk of their markets, or allowing George Soros to manipulate their currency and operate NGOs within their borders. That would be plainly idiotic and suicidal.

“Open society!” coos the fox to the henhouse. LOL, no thanks!

[0x3f]

Seems pretty reasonable to me. Is your contention that we _have_ achieved some pure form of free markets or Communism?

[littlestymaar]

The thing is none of the “pure forms” are realistic outside of books.

If your system needs absolute theoretical purity to work, then it's worthless. And that's true of both communism and free market.

[0x3f]

I'm not sure this is true. What you're describing is the local optimum problem. Yes, the local optimum is better if you can't push through to a better one, of course. And heading merely 'towards' the better optimum often makes things immediately worse. But that doesn't make the better optima worthless, or ever-unreachable.

It seems a bit like saying humans will never fly. It's a question of technology level, in the sense that governance is a form of economic technology. Which is what leaves it open to people saying it can be done better.

The best solution changes over time, essentially. It's a question of fitness to the current context.

[littlestymaar]

Until you get a technology that makes people acting perfectly rationally, with perfect information and getting marginal cost equal to average cost[1], free market is never gonna work.

And until you get a technology that prevents leadership to be egoistic and corrupt, Communism is never going to work.

I'm not holding my breath for any of those tech to happen.

[1]: interestingly enough, such a condition is pretty much antithetical to capitalism as it requires capital to be free.

[0x3f]

I'm not sure I really understand. What do you mean by "never gonna work"? Because markets obviously do largely work, despite the fact that people are not perfectly rational and there are other inefficiencies at the edges. They have their degenerate cases, of course, but I don't think anyone would say markets "don't work" in general.

Most successful economies are largely market-based, as things stand today. Even the successful command economies (i.e. China) use markets extensively.

Unless you mean perfectly free markets will never be perfect resource allocators. Well yes, perhaps, but what does that matter if there's no perfect solution? The nudges required to 'fix' markets are a form of technology, as discussed. As such, it either exists and is effective or not.

[littlestymaar]

With enough regulations, subsidies, strategic planning and government interventions when things turn bad, mixed economies do the job pretty well, that's right. And when the regulation is lacking the outcome is as well.

And even these economies are structured around monopolistic and oligopolistic actors.

They are as related to “free market” as northern European countries welfare state is related to Communism.

[thesmtsolver2]

Totally, tons of govt. regulation and interference is what defines a free market. /s