this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2024
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The free market is going very well here
This is 100% capitalism. It's not free market to have a goverment-enforced monopoly.
This is textbook late stage free market ideals at work. This is how the free market always ends.
X - ~~The system is broken.~~
✅ - The system is working exactly as intended and must be destroyed.
When did it start?
You are correct. There would be no copyrights or patents in a free market.
Yeah, the huge companies would dominate over small companies even more than they already do.
Copyrights and patents are literally government enforced monopolies for huge companies. Without them, there would be a lot more competition.
Really? Calling it a government enforced monopoly seems very disingenuous.
Good luck trying to make a movie without Disney stealing it or making an invention with really effective solar panels or something without the biggest companies stealing it and bankrupt the original creator.
Copyright and patents protect everyone involved in creation and while there are a LOT of problems with the systems. Removing it entirely seems like the biggest overcorrection possible.
Or trade secrets. "Perfect information" is a bitch. Not to speak of "perfectly rational actors": Say goodbye to advertisement, too, we'd have to outlaw basically all of it.
Trade secrets don't need to be enforced much by law. You can create an ad hoc trade secret regime by simply keeping your secret between a few key employees. As it happens, there are some laws that go beyond that to help companies keep the secret, but that only extends something that could happen naturally.
To get closer to the free market there would have to be a duty to disclose any- and everything that's now a trade secret, no matter how easily kept. To not just get closer but actually get there we all would need to be telepathic. As said, perfect information is a bitch of a concept.
Being free to innovate and keep your own ideas to yourself sounds like it should be part of the free market though.
Forcing people to disclose their (mental) secrets seems bizarre.
Are you telling me that the axioms behind the simplistic model are wrong??
shocked-pikachu.jpgIt's not so much that they're wrong is that they're impossible in practice. Axioms, by their very nature, cannot be justified from within the system that they serve so "true" or "false" aren't really applicable.
The model does have its justification, "given these axioms, we indeed get perfect allocation of resources", that's not wrong it's a mathematical truth, and there's a strain of liberalism (ordoliberalism) which specifically says "the state should regulate so that the actually existing market more closely approximates this mythical free market unicorn", which is broadly speaking an immensely sensible take and you'll have market socialists nodding in agreement, yep, that's a good idea.
And then there's another strain (neoliberalism) which basically says "lul we'll tell people that 'free market' means 'unregulated market' so we can be feudal lords and siphon off infinite amounts of resources from the plebs".
Wrong as in not sound. An argument can be valid assuming its assumptions are true. The argument is the model, which really is a set of arguments. Its assumptions which are taken axiomatically are as you say impossible, therefore they are not true (which I called wrong). So the argument is not sound. I'm not saying anything different than what you said really, just used informal language. ☺️
What's government enforced about it? Is ARM the only allowed chip designer for cellphones?
Copyrights and patents
That's not a government enforced monopoly. A government enforced monopoly means nobody else is allowed in the market. Like utility companies.
Lots of Utilities are consumer cooperatives which is funnily enough Socialist, but the people working there wouldn't like to hear that.