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Comment by jampekka | Hacker News Reader

> This is what happens when free market capitalism and anti-competitive rules are absent from your system.

This is what happens when free market capitalism is your economic system.

The free market is meme. We don't have one, basically never have. And Adam Smith didn't argue for one anyways. We have a highly regulated economy. One that suffers from regulatory capture to the extent that several industries have subverted their regulators and make them work in their favor instead of in the interests of the people.

Most of our problems would be fixed by liberating the regulating authorities of industry cronies. The argument over more or less regulation is red herring at this stage.

"Free market" is almost always a True Scotsman. It's "free market" whenever the outcome is good and "not-free-enough" or "not-market-enough" when the outcome is bad. Very rarely any proposals for an actual system where the good-outcome producing free market would manifest are laid out. (Extreme right-libertarians are an exception in this, but personally I see no way how their system wouldn't collapse into some private army plutocracy within days if not hours.)

Regulating the market is a really tricky business. And once regulatory reigns are lost, it becomes almost impossible, exactly due to the cronying up. To get the reigns on again things like total economic collapses (even 2008 apparently wasn't enough, 1930's was), major wars or violent revolutions sadly seem to be needed. I think we lost the reigns already in the 1970's or so.

>It's "free market" whenever the outcome is good

Good for whom?

Good for share holders, companies and investor or employees?

To whomever is saying it, or what they think is good or what they think that their audience thinks is good.

Indeed. The "free market" is an easy scapegoat, for both good and bad outcomes to give to people who are ignorant of how the economy works. Which is most people since economic education is only the most simplistic in high schools and doesn't tell you how the system we have operates.

Economic systems are educated not that differently from how psychotropic substance effects or sexual matters are often educated.

The most funny thing it's when one discover that Adan Smith was against "the invisible hand" and against rent lords (He calls rent lords as social parasites)

> This is what happens when free market capitalism is your economic system.

And here's what happens when it isn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resista...

I know which one I prefer.

Not sure where I'd take my chances.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congo_Free_State

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_India_Company_(disambigua...

East India Company is surely one of the biggest plagues ever on mankind. As the name says, it was a private megacorporation, with it's own navy and private army.

Nation states kill for the ideals. Private companies that have the power of a state kill, enslave and pillage only for more profit.

At least I don't have a sesame score.

Depending on where you live you may have an Equifax score, Experian score, Transunion score, etc though.

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