The rule of law is important for free markets and breach of contracts needs to be punished to have a vibrant market.
That's the point. "Deregulation" is code for taking hundreds of laws and dumping them in a garbage bin. "Privatization" is code for stealing tax dollars and hiding it in offshore accounts.
I only care about the actual, real world material reality that has historically factually happened. The champions politic in a way that tends strongly away from rule of law as quickly as possible.
It's a framework that gets invoked to go both ways. It's a vendor's "freedom" to not have to label, say, gmo, but then it's the vendor's "rights" to prohibit soy milk from using the label "milk".
"Freedoms" and "rights" get interchanged to rationalize the preconfigured results. The dogma is a general tool.
It was the "freedom" of agrobusiness to flood mexico with corn after NAFTA and run the local farmers out of business and then it was their "rights" to the marketplace when mexico pushed back. The farmers didn't have that same right to the marketplace, they didn't have the same freedoms, only international capital does. How convenient.
That's why the zealots always think it's the right answer - it can be reshaped like a mound of clay to justify and rationalize whatever they want.
For instance the sanctity of contract matters when it's with the gas pipeline company but not when it's with the american tribes
When instead it's a pipeline of people via a subway through a wealthy neighborhood like the purple line extension in Beverly hills, all of a sudden the free market gets invoked to guess what? Reach the opposite conclusion.
It's fundamentally a convenient power tool of capital. They used to use the Bible, now they use Friedrich Hayek. Skullduggery with the purest, most heavenly goals. Sure...
In practice, free markets are lawless raw power that bend the state to do their bidding like some feudal king, but now it's wearing a bowtie and a cardigan instead of a sceptre and a robe.
Same thing, different era.
Or regulation is taking things from the garbage bin and make them into law.
> "Privatization" is code for stealing tax dollars and hiding it in offshore accounts.
If tax dollars are being stolen, it is the government that is doing both the tax collection and allowing the tax plundering.
> For instance the sanctity of contract matters when it's with the gas pipeline company but not when it's with the american tribes
What you really want is more free markets: that is, more rule of law, law that can be applied systematically and with no discretion and discrimination. You mention the enemy over and over: the coerced state that does terrible biddings. But you then exempt government as if it were innocent first and corrupted later.
It is the mechanism by which you decide on economic matters by power that produces the vast majority of the issues you mention, way above the famous "market failures" and unaccounted externalities.
Capital and governance (CG) have been the internal organs of the body politic forever.
Hacker news, facebook, an elementary school, every institution is CG.
The theoretical framework of free markets requires the fiction that they are somehow separate and independent!
It's imaginary rubbish.
Corporations were started by the crown and modern political empires grew because of their corporate needs.
They expanded together. Every. Single. Time. Always.
The free marketeers think they can ignore all history and merely, through zero evidence intellectual exercise, derive absolute truth that needs no confirmation, measurement or testing because by logical deduction alone they know The Truth.
They use rubbish homo economicus behavioral models, rubbish ideas of clean governance and capital separation, and the rubbish assumption that companies win by playing by the rules instead of the reality where they find a new exploit.
That's why it's a scam. It's based on a classic scapegoating shell game and then uses classic cult systems to ignore evidence or question a priori assumptions.
It's the same internal logic as astrology and horoscopes. Complicated models, no reality check, cherry picked evidence, projected interpretations, same thing.
Total nonsense. It belongs in the spirituality section
In any case, I see the same corruption you see, and the question is how to go about it. If the state is powerful and corruptible, I want a smaller state, with less surface to be corrupted. And it is surprising how you can reveal most corruption by just the simple application of freedom: that's whats appealing of the free market framework.
"Smaller state, larger state" no... Those are answers without considering the questions.
Heterodoxy, material analysis, material goals, provable statements, methodologies of measurements and metrics...
That and not disconnected faith based theory opinions are what matter. Labeling things as whatever-alist is a just a silly sports game for tribalists as if it's more important to pass a purity test than it is to construct a positive functioning society.
Whether a solution makes the state bigger or smaller is irrelevant.
What is the efficacy for the effort trade-off, that's really it.
Any commitment to a theoretical purity sets one up for a blindness and bias of analysis and an easy way to be exploited.
That's why televangelists can so blatantly and openly rip people off. The purity theory blinds the faithful. This is true for socialism, capitalism, syndicalism, anarchism, all of them
The best way to beat a company that has market power is with other companies that fight in the same space or around it. And if there is one last man standing to reap profits from the victory, its again not necessarily bad. Market monopolies are overblown ghosts.
The first instinct is to buy, then shut it down, then smother it out with sheer capital, then retreat either up or downmarket.
That's why when you go in to the supermarket to look at commodities, they're often owned by either 1 or 2 companies that are mutually invested in each other.
You see a bunch of brands, but the capital ownership structure is almost entirely consolidated. Better products get dragged to court by existing players who try to shut them down or legislatives get greased palms for new regulations ("protected" terms).
In instances where this can't happen there's cartel systems which is why the dominant grocery store changes city by city.
The Austrian model of how humans work is dead wrong, how markets work is dead wrong, how capital flows is dead wrong, they're just wrong wrong wrong.
That's why they never use any examples and only have theoretical exercises, because there's absolutely zero evidence for their claims. Any observation of reality would show they're incorrect in a multitude of ways at every step.
That's why when you look at economics texts before the classical liberalism hubris, it is full of actual historical events, actual earnings and economic history to use as evidence and it's why the Chicago quacks had to tear those parts out, because their ideas don't work when you look at reality. If you look at evidence, their theories don't agree with it. They know this and that's why they don't use anything more than broad non-specific folksy anecdotal stories, because narrative fiction is the closest thing to reality they can get.
Enter any store in a free market economy and you’ll see a plethora of excellent products brought about by competition-driven innovation.
Enter any store in a planned-economy country and you’ll see empty shelves.
The ideal "free market" requires an insane level of planning.
Perfect knowledge. Perfect competition, no friction to switch loyalties, oversight of m&a to avoid the different classes of -opolies. Securing those rights are insanely complicated.
It's extremely bureaucratic and has vast overhead costs. Regulatory bodies, thousands of pages of rules, committees, it's insanely mind bogglingly planned.
That's why you need certified specialists to do anything in free market societies.
It's planned but this planning is not based on reality which is why everything keeps going crazy all the time.
The free market is a purely dogmatic ideological project, not based on any actual material evidence.
So I totally reject that bogus Hoover institute style premise.
These theoreticians set up a fraudulent spilt that doesn't exist, then states a false thing about them, and says 'ho take that'.
It's like someone trying to prove things with astrology charts. There's an internal logic to it but that actually doesn't matter because it's all disconnected fakery to begin with.
And its not binary, either. You can have it completely free, freer, free-ish, all the way to lightly regulated, heavily regulated, planned and completely locked down.
Finally, I am not talking from economists' perspective, but from that of the regular guy on the street who is just able to see policies and their result. But my conclusion is extremely simple: the freer the market is the better everybody (other than profiteers, bureaucrats and politicians) is.
Ban all forms of community governance, municipal ownership, or a people doing something for their community without using a for profit private company middleman.
Defund and gut any form of a social safety net. Disallow people to challenge a company polluting their drinking water and shut down the agencies tasked to inspect it. Forbid places from passing clean air laws or having the power to say no to any predatory company that wants to come to town
Allow companies to sue entire countries in secret tribunals if a country decides to not eviscerate their health and safety standards. Disallow countries from preferring local industry or keeping out vulture capital doing pump and dump schemes on their water and food supply. Protect these companies by international private militias that have an authority which overrides the country's own military.
Enshrine this right in treaty law so no sovereign people can possibly override it or fight back without severe consequences. Embargo, tariff and boycott them if they don't join in.
Permit companies to hide how their products are produced, lie about abusive and child labor and hide their profits in tax shelters without any consequences whatsoever.
Allow banks to defraud customers with phony accounts, car companies to lie about emissions, energy companies to crash entire state economies, insiders to manipulate the libor rates, and create shell companies using tobashi schemes to hide losses and reverse tobashi schemes to hide profits, and then bail them out with public money when it doesn't work out.
And finally destroy public education and replace it with whatever influence peddler with deep pockets wants to pass off as curriculum so that the public doesn't ever catch on to how much they're getting robbed."
Then there's this slight of hand where the advocates talk about the theoretically heady version of free market and then do mental acrobatics to bridge the policy and theories together. It's a distraction so that all the effort to combat the chicanery is instead exhausted on debates and theory discussions so obtuse intellectualism instead of meaningful directed focussed political action occupies all the time of thought leaders.
It's just coercion exploitation and oppression based on raw capital wrapped with the union busting techniques that keep the con game going without any consequences. It's a giant hustle to snatch and grab profit while turning our back on centuries of progress all under a fraudulent banner labeled "freedom".
Even the right wingers on gab and parler are seeing this now. It's so clear.
Such a scam.