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Comment by edmundsauto | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't this depend on how you define productive? If GDP is your metric, I think it probably correlates well - despite the fact that the 50s and 60s weren't particularly free market (wage restrictions, high taxes, etc.) when compared to say 1930 after the free market collapsed.

But my larger point is that I think "free market" eras also correspond with worse quality of life for the majority of citizens. I'm thinking things like pre-safety-regulations industrialization in the US; the environmental catastrophe that was the 60s (so bad that it led Nixon to create the EPA); the affordable housing catastrophe that has been the past 15 years.

We can obviously produce more if we don't have to worry about externalities like "worker safety", "being able to afford rent", or "habitable environments". Free markets create conditions where externalities aren't as important.

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> 1930 after the free market collapsed

What collapsed were the banks, due to mismanagement by the Fed (the government). In particular, it was trying to maintain a fixed (government specified) exchange rate between gold and money while inflating the money 2:1.

Like all such pegging schemes, the result was a run on the banks, leading to their collapse. This (finally) stopped when FDR made it illegal to exchange gold for money.

Man why must Hacker News be so chock full of the most devoted followers of right-libertarianism

> We can obviously produce more if we don't have to worry about externalities like "worker safety", "being able to afford rent", or "habitable environments". Free markets create conditions where externalities aren't as important.

You're conflating two different things here.

Pricing externalities is part of a functioning market, but most of those things aren't externalities. Pollution is, but free markets where emitting pollution is priced can still be competitive, they just take into account the cost of internalizing the externalized cost into the market price of the end products. Environmental regulations can be inefficient if they're poorly conceived or impose excessive administrative burdens, and that's a problem, but you can have simple rules like "no leaded gasoline" and "no dumping mercury in the river" without destroying the free market.

Whereas the reason housing is expensive isn't any market externalities, it's regulations that restrict where and how much of it can be built, and the supply of trade labor with which to build it.

"Free Market" here refers to "free from economic rent"

That is not a common definition of free market.

Whenever I hear people talk about free market it is usually not in the sense of economic freedom or free software. So you are correct. It generally refers to free as in free beer aka the government is supposed to subsidize the private sector and average citizens are supposed to pay for it. I'm not talking about socialists here, I'm talking about neoclassical economists and neoliberals in business and politics.

Almost nobody wants to pay for the pollution they cause via CO2 taxes. Meanwhile income taxes are considered efficient despite their dead weight loss. Everything is upside down on this planet when it comes to economics.

I’ve literally never heard of someone defining a free market as a market with government subsidies.

It’s usually defined as a market free from (excessive) government control.

I think you might be trying to shoehorn domestic policy concerns into a broader definition of free markets.

That was Adam smith's definition when he coined the term...

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