The reason free markets are great isn't their speed (though they are often faster than your average politician); it's the self-regulating nature of it. You don't have to tell people to stop buying overly-expensive food, nor do you have to tell the food stores to cut their prices. Over time, they each realize that the higher price isn't working; the customer buys elsewhere (either across the street or aceoss the state), and the grocery store lowers its prices until people decide that it's worth it again.

Companies don't have to be told to improve, either, not when their competitors are improving and eating market space. At least, that's how it works in theory. A lot of industries have turned into demilitarized zones, both sides opposed but neither making a move. Telecom is the best example of how bad this gets.

Telcos are actually a great example of how the free market (eventually) routes around incumbents who fail to satisfy market demand.

The telcos have stalled residential broadband for decades, leaving most of the US stuck with early 2000s-level cable modems or DSL. None of them will make a move.

So what happened? https://fiber.google.com/about/

I wish you were right. I'm in Fremont, a half hour from Mountain View and Google. Google Fiber's still not available.

> Companies don't have to be told to improve, either, not when their competitors are improving and eating market space. At least, that's how it works in theory. A lot of industries have turned into demilitarized zones, both sides opposed but neither making a move. Telecom is the best example of how bad this gets.

And yet even telecoms have invested huge swaths of capital to get us to 3G then LTE.

The problem is that they basically habe a nonaggression pact. You'll find either AT&T or T-Mobile in any given area; not both. This means that, if you don't like their prices or their service...well, what are you gonna do? Build your own telco?

This lack of competition leads to a sort of mini-monopoly, meaning that they basically have no reason to not jack up prices.

That is, until Google comes along and kicks them out, as another comment points out.

Yeah, okay. Until you hear stories like this.....

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131012/02124724852/decad...

I'm not in the "plug my ears and yell FREE MARKETS" camp, but markets do tend to be a pretty robust solution to many problems even in the face of some imperfections. That's the key point: you never deal with a perfect world, with either markets, or some kind of government intervention.

"Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good." All these problems also impact non-market solutions. If fact many ARE non-market solutions to other problems.

The non-market solutions would be something like these:

1 - Price controls

2 - Government approval of business ideas

3 - Rationing non-essentials

4 - Licensing engineers

> - Non intervention by governments

except to define property rights and enforce them, which is kind of significant 'intervention'.

Great points. Also a "free" market in practice will always tend to lead to extremes. For example, monopolies naturally form when economic power start becoming concentrated. That's why government regulations were put in place.