It's not that that's bad. It's that if everything is viewed only though this particular lens, a wide range of human experience is lost.
What is the most important human experience that is lost by markets?
ETA: looks like you edited your comment. The original (and rather tone deaf) comment was: "I'm curious what is lost by people doing what they want to do."
Your examples are not examples of a properly set up market system. They are spinning off what are called "externalities", which are costs not born by either the buyer or the seller. A properly set up market would apply those costs to the producer.
An example of this is CO2 emission should be taxed, not regulated.
We are not blessed to be living in a perfect world that can be set up for an ideal market system. For the last four decades, these externalities have gotten ramped up to fever pitch. I'm interested in your take on how, in this world, we get to a point where ALL of the above consequences can be forestalled through HN's favourite hard-on: deregulation and market forces run amok.
Basically, taxing the externalities is the market based solution. Banning is a ham-fisted inefficient method.
Also, many people will argue that if a market is subject to such taxes, then it is no longer a free market. Perhaps you're not one of them and would consider such people misguided ideologues (we'd agree on that). However, the existence of such participants in the discussion needs to be acknowledged, and it very quickly feels like you're pointless talking about semantics.
It isn't considered that by economists. It's a means of internalizing the externalities, not deciding what, when, how and by whom to provide goods and services.
> many people will argue that if a market is subject to such taxes, then it is no longer a free market.
They're wrong. Externalities are pushing costs onto other people without their consent, which is not free market.
Every market has rules, and the term "free market" tends to degenerate into "market with rules that I happen to like", which isn't particularly useful.
Same for the "central planning" thing. It's always a matter of degree.
Well, yeah.
“Free market” doesn't mean “free of regulation of which I personally disapprove”. If government has a thumb on the scale deliberately skewing outcomes, it's not a free market.
> Perhaps you're not one of them and would consider such people misguided ideologues
What does ideology have to do with that? One can oppose l’aissez faire capitalism (which Info, heartily) and recognize that Pigovian taxes are contrary to it.
1989 called, they want their dichotomies back.
Two things governments are good at: taxing, and starting wars. Why not take advantage of the first?
It even has the advantage of being a revenue source for the government, rather than a revenue sink. The government has to tax something, why not externalities?
Around here, the government decided to tax plastic shopping bags. Geez, just put a tax on it instead. Raise the tax until plastic shopping bags become scarce enough. Then if someone really wants a plastic shopping bag to use, say, to clean up after their dog, they can if they're willing to pay. Much better than being charged with a crime.
> What is the most important human experience that is lost by markets?
This is still the wrong way to look at it IMO. It's not that markets lose or destroy human experience, it's that it gets lost when we organize our society only via markets.
It's also a bit of a silly question because everybody will have a different answer depending on their personal moral and value system, but generally it will be things that are not easily priced.
Sticking with the theme of literacy of the overall discussion here, poetry comes to mind.
Poetry has notoriously low market value, and really poems are almost inherently not a good to be traded on a market. They are rooted in an oral tradition of poems being shared in social settings. At least in my personal experience, this is still largely the case. And yet many (obviously not all) people value poetry to some extent, perhaps because there are some poems they find beautiful, or they tickle the brain in just the right way.
But again, poetry is just one example and I'm not even saying that it's the most important one, it's just that they fit particularly well into the larger discussion here.
> not a good to be traded on a market
Sure it is. Mostly in the form of music lyrics, but also people make and sell poetry books all the time.
> And yet many (obviously not all) people value poetry to some extent
I don't know anyone who doesn't like poetry in the form of a song. People still sing along in social settings, too, like concerts, church services and birthday parties.
> It's also a bit of a silly question
Not at all. I would expect someone posing the theory to at least have something at the top of their mind they're regarding as a problem example. For you it's poetry, and I showed that poetry isn't suffering in the least under the yoke of a market system.
Right, but people end up writing and sharing poetry despite the market, not because of it. Poets tend to be rather poor, they aren't incentivized by money.
If we organized our society in a way where money and markets were the only incentives, then poetry would be lost.
That's what I keep repeating in the hope that maybe it will sink in eventually: It's not that markets actively destroy things like poetry. It's that markets don't help those things thrive despite people valuing them highly (which can of course lead to destruction indirectly by crowding out, but that's a separate point).
This is because the correlation between what people value and what ends up having monetary value is too weak.[0] In theory one could try to fix that, but that has never worked in practice and there are good reasons why it never will. Trying to make it so is the same type of folly as trying to implement pure communism: it doesn't take human nature into account.[1]
[0] As was also observed in a sibling thread where the discussion went to pricing externalities.
[1] For what it's worth, this is a very common criticism of traditional microeconomics, i.e. humans really don't "work" in the way that traditional microeconomics says they do. The theory is built on a broken foundation. This is actually really well known among economists and why subfields like behavioural economics exist. For some reason this knowledge just doesn't percolate to the wider public.
People are not machines, we are members of a community and just because someone will pay you to do something doesn't mean you should.
In any case, the example is not compelling. It seems that making drugs illegal exacerbates the crime problems associated with drugs. It doesn't fix things. The War on Drugs is a near total failure.