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Comment by vvpan | Hacker News Reader

The article is not very well written imho but I love it when conversations about free markets come up because I certainly do not understand the free market ideology. Some people really love free markets and blame regulations for their inefficiency and inequality (or just say that inequality is a normal product of efficiency). But I have never been able to see that. Accumulation of wealth on the scale of Amazon allows them to squelch any semblance of enterprise with ease which seems to defeat the original point of free enterprise. One could argue that this level of inequality is better for everybody, and it probably is for material quality of life, but is that a permanent thing and is it OK to have large chunks of our lives be at the mercy of one or two giant monopolies?

EDIT: I love enterprise by the way, in case that is lost in the argument, but it seems to me like growth and enterprise are at odds with each other.

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> I certainly do not understand the free market ideology.

You aren't expected to understand it, you are being asked to accept it as true without questioning.

If an idea can be clearly understood, say like "you need clouds to get rain" then you don't need an ideology to sustain the idea. But if you are selling "rain dances make rain", relying mere rational thinking to propel the idea into the mainstream isn't going get you very far.

Free market ideology has a lot in common with religion. Ignore all data and common sense and just embrace the idea that its true. All will make sense once the goal is achieved and until then you just have to have faith.

The idea that competition is the holy grail of progress is a similar situation. Cooperation is far superior. When two lions compete, both get covered in scratches and bites and they die of infection. When they work together they can hunt and raise a family. We are always expecting companies to compete when one look at an actual megacorp will show you how much effort they spend on avoiding competition. It's all mergers and acquisitions. Buy your competitors before they are a challenge and add them to your empire (cooperation). Why does every industry merge into a monopoly? Because its far easier to cooperate as a single unit than as separate entities sniping at each other

The pursuit of the ideal free market forces us to adopt such unnatural beliefs and behaviors, and we have to pretend they are just fine.

Free markets require lots of small players that aggressively compete. In capitalism, what you actually get is a few large actors that aggressively collude. Thus, capitalism is anti-free-market. This is free market: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_anarchism

The ideology that you're talking about should be more properly called "laissez faire", although even that is a misnomer because there's nothing hands-off about the property rights enforcement that underlies all of it.

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