Most ET conservatives in worlds Top 1% . ET lefties... not so much

[Slartibartfast]

What about monopolies created by the largest in the industry, to the detriment of potential competitors and customers?

What about blatant oligopolistic price collusion to the detriment of consumers? (More so than usual.)

What about the safety you referred to? Product safety? Environmental safety? Employee working conditions safety?

What about false claims? No oversight? Let the consumer take it to the courts and be bled dry by deep-pocketed corporate interests?

And so on. And so widens the wealth gap.

Things would be back to the days of the company store in no time.

Sigh.. better explain that to the great right-wing economists. Mines and other companies isolated workers so they could only buy food and such at the overpriced stores they monopolised. Allowing them credit meant that people never built any savings and were usually hugely in debt to their employer. Functionally slaves.

 

[Frederick Foresight]

In my view a free market is free of Monopolies and oligopolistic collusion and govt controlled pricing.

You're moving the goalposts now. How do you prevent the creation of monopolies and the practice of blatant price collusion without government intervention?

 

[Slartibartfast]

Thomas Piketty has written an entire book on the wealth gap in developed nations. It turns out that a wealth gap is the normal state off affairs and a large and growing wealth gap is also normal The prosperous period 1950-1970 in the U.S. was accompanied by an abnormally low wealth gap. However, it turns out that a very large wealth gap is socially destabilizing. It's is a case were normal can be bad. So when the wealth gap is extremely large and growing still larger , as it is today in the U.S., there is reason for concern. Ironically, an extreme wealth gap is not only bad for the minions of poor, it is also very bad for the small number of super wealthy -- think guillotine!..

The thing frustratingly few on the right seem to take into account is the 1950-1970 rosy period was because Europe and Japan were re-building after the war and the US had no competition, just customers.

If America was great then it was only because of exceptional circumstances.

All they remember was an easy life.

 

[piezoe]

But it’s not truly a free market and certainly not fair play.

On a national scale, there is virtually no such thing as a free market. Small local markets can be, on occasion, essentially free markets, but often not for long.

 

[TJustice]

It is in the definition.

I asked for you definition. I was not advocating for anything really.
I know the debate. There is no one answer. It was part of my major.

You're moving the goalposts now. How do you prevent the creation of monopolies and the practice of blatant price collusion without government intervention?

 

[piezoe]

The thing frustratingly few on the right seem to take into account is the 1950-1970 rosy period was because Europe and Japan were re-building after the war and the US had no competition, just customers.

If America was great then it was only because of exceptional circumstances.

All they remember was an easy life.

This is absolutely true!

 

[Frederick Foresight]

If America was great then it was only because of exceptional circumstances.

You think maybe this is what is meant by "American exceptionalism?"

 

[Slartibartfast]

You think maybe this is what is meant by "American exceptionalism?"

 

[Frederick Foresight]

It is in the definition.

So your definition of a free market implies government intervention. How splendid.

 

[TJustice]

In addition to the US being great because we had great people who emigrated here and lived here and the rule of law and good govt...


Lets get back to reality..

American crushed it after the WW II in part because the bankers were also scared of the Soviet Union. They / we needed America to be strong.... so it was. After the fall of the Soviet Union the extraction of American began in earnest. Assets went out people went in. The extraction did not happen by accident.