Re:Medicare will require hospitals to post prices online
by themagician on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @03:20PM
(#16925078)
> You can have a free market where this isn't even approximately true, of course, but the farther it is from true, the weaker the argument for the desirability of free markets is.
That's debatable. In some markets (Veblen/Giffen goods, goods with a price elasticity that approaches zero, etc.) you could say that information doesn't matter because price is irrelevant, but I personally would say that you don't have a free market or any approximation of such without at least reasonable information. Which, you know, is up for interpretation.
Re:Medicare will require hospitals to post prices online
by dragonwriter on Wednesday April 25, 2018 @06:26PM
(#16926881)
I think there is a semantic issue where some people use free markets to mean markets run by mutual exchange by agreement between participants, and see the conditions that make such markets efficient as separate factors which may or may not be present, and other who use “free market” to include the combination of voluntary exchange with some or all of the conditions that make such exchange efficient.
No, but information (specifically perfect information about cost and all benefits, to an infinite time horizon, of economic decisions among all market participants) is a (but not the only important) central assumption in the theory underpinning the conclusion that free markets are optimal in terms of economic efficiency.
You can have a free market where this isn't even approximately true, of course, but the farther it is from true—ceteris paribus—the weaker the argument for the desirability of free markets is.