> In a free-market economy, the companies that make less optimal decisions will have their lunch eaten by those that don't.

In a race to the bottom, concern for others is a liability. Ugh.

I'd say an example of not showing concern for others is, for instance, using state power to bail out banks after the executives gambled with their customers savings and cashed out. Bad corporations are given a lifeline until the next set of customers are screwed.

Sure; or spending 8 trillion dollars - well over a trillion on interest to those same banks - on a 'war on terror' that actually increases terror.

But was any of that state 'power'? Or state weakness?

The free market would have allowed those banks to fail and their customers would have lost all their savings. Personally I'd prefer if they'd bailed out the customers instead, but that still counts as a state intervention.

The idea that businesses operate with laser focus on revenue is fantasy. Businesses are filled with individuals acting mostly on emotions and vibes, people who waste time empire building, etc.

That is true, but it eventually catches up with them. On the whole, large organizations with this kind of internal environment stagnate and are unable to innovate any longer. They then resort to buying startups to acquire products or talent.

Yes and they lurch on sucking the life out of parasitized host after host for decades.

> In a free-market economy, the companies that make less optimal decisions will have their lunch eaten by those that don't.

When the downfall of some of these companies takes more than a life time, who gives a hoot?

Lots and lots of companies are starting to be too big to (fully) fail.

It's the end consumer that has to pay for every extra bit of overhead accumulated along the way.

And the bill isn't delayed by a lifetime either.

Who pays venture capitalists and executives?

Did you confuse my comment with someone else's?

When it becomes too big to fail, it feels to me something other than the market is intervening to keep it alive.

What do you think a free-market is? Something where the company could harvest the organs of the employees instead of firing them to maximize profits?

I'd say that's quite an uncharitable interpretation. Free market doesn't mean breaking laws and violating social contracts.

Disregarding externalities is the essence of free market dogma. Whether it's pollution, cheating customers, forcing unpaid overtime on employees, unsafe workplaces, collusion and price fixing. It's a disastrous race to the bottom unless "Big Government" puts rules in place to get companies to engage in positive-sum behavior.

And that's the key issue. Positive sum (along with "first, do no harm") behavior is what makes societies healthy and prosperous. Laissez faire free market capitalism rewards extractive actions over positive sum actions with predictable catastrophic consequences.

> Free market doesn't mean breaking laws and violating social contracts.

You mean like firing the union bargaining team or laying off half your workforce?

> In a free-market economy, the companies that make less optimal decisions will have their lunch eaten by those that don't.

And that's one of the reasons we don't have free market economies in general; because they are extremely harmful to society as a whole.

The USSR collapsed because of imbalances caused by decades of centralized planning and control.

China survived communism because it implemented free-market reforms (while retaining autocracy in the political structure).

I'd say generally, the free market is what makes economies work.

No, some amount of "free market" leaning is useful. But absolute free markets are catastrophic to society. I'm not aware of any major countries that have an actual free market. They all have laws limiting what companies are allowed to do.