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Comment by nickpp | Hacker News Reader

> What happens when competition with deeper pockets price dumps you into oblivion?

Funny you should ask. There was a famous case from the beginning of the last century where German bromide producers price-dumped it the U.S. in an effort to undermine Dow's efforts in the same direction. The result? They failed miserably.

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

> your apologism of capitalists is disgusting

Free market capitalism is the only system proven to work, over and over again. It brought billions out of poverty and it still does to this very day, when allowed to work, of course.

If you find that disgusting - I am guessing you are a big fan of poverty. I would prefer a world in which everyone is rather rich (or at least well off), a world that no system other than capitalism is even close to providing.

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> Free market capitalism is the only system proven to work, over and over again. It brought billions out of poverty and it still does to this very day, when allowed to work, of course.

Capitalism? Yes.

"Free market capitalism"? No.

While regulated capitalism is very effective at aligning everyone's interests, a free market operates without the intervention of government or any other external authority, and rapidly decays into a market for lemons[0] — or worse, arbitrarily negative contractual obligations, which is how serfdom functioned.

Even when the governments start off by only intervening to prevent those two issues, with minimum quality requirements and prohibitions against unfair contracts, they often find themselves having to also intervene directly in the markets, everything from the US ban on trading onion futures[1] to printing and destroying currency to keep inflation in a particular range designed to encourage the spending of money rather than its hoarding on the one hand without also preventing people from saving on the other, and even to intervene in the employment market because 100% employment drives a spiral of wage inflation that the system as a whole would not be able to cope with etc. etc.

Same deal as the Laffer curve: zero regulation is bad, micromanagement is bad, people argue about where the peak in the middle is.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onion_Futures_Act

> Free market capitalism is the only system proven to work, over and over again.

How come nobody practices it, then? In fact, right now the world's biggest economy is doubling down on trade restrictions.

It's not an on/off switch, of course, but rather a sliding scale. The free-er your markets are, the better the results. Till recently, USA was in top with both, in sharp contrast to, say, the EU who pro-regulation and anti-business.

But the tariffs are an interesting experiment, with some non-economical geopolitical goals thrown in, so we'll see how it goes.

> It's not an on/off switch, of course

Not as it is usually defined. Many places take inspiration from free market capitalism, like Javascript takes inspiration from C, but have developed their own systems. The US model is usually referred to as mixed-market capitalism and the EU model is generally thought of as a social market economy.

Of course, that's just semantics. While there is value in using shared terminology, you can make up any definition you want on the spot. You could call the old Soviet system "free market capitalism" if you really want to. The world is your oyster.

Making up one's own definition for words is a losing argument.

> How come nobody practices it, then?

Under capitalism, the rich are forbidden to rob the poor. Most elites are very unhappy with such ban.

> Free market capitalism is the only system proven to work, over and over again.

Name a country that in 2025 practices free market capitalism.

> If you find that disgusting - I am guessing you are a big fan of poverty.

An aggressively rude misreading of the GP.

There are countries that are more free market, and countries that are less free market.

The more free market ones are noticeably more prosperous.

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