Please, talk in marginals and not categoricals!

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Thats pretty cool. Part of me wants to get rich and move to another country and immerse myself in that culture. Ok, all of me wants to get rich, but part of me wants to do the second part. Not because I have anything against the US, but I read somewhere that new experiences extend your perception of time and I think having a 2nd half of life where I am Eduardo from Uruaguay would make my life feel longer and more interesting.

Probably the US isn't all that diff from the UK.

Keep in mind that a state's obligations have expanded quite a bit since that era. States tend to be much more interested in spending that pays for itself these days.

Carbon emission laws and en mass expropriation of farmers in Holland. That is purely distopian.

I believe that the market provides. Although there may be cheaters in the market they are poised to fail in the long run facing competition. The market forces producers to provide quality. You don't need parasitical government agencies acting as if they are doing something. Thats when you get lobbying and other forms of corruption.

This is a pretty good illustration of the points the OP was making.

For example - does the market “force producers to provide quality”? Not necessarily, no. The market forces producers to provide what consumers want, but that isn’t necessarily the same as “quality”. For example, often cheaper goods will outcompete “better” ones.

I think it’s usually right that we allow the market to decide what goods and services are provided, and the qualities they have (such as cost vs effectiveness). But sometimes that doesn’t actually work. For example, given the choice between a cheap home heating system and a low-carbon one, most people will choose the cheap option. The market then fails to stop climate change, leading to issues for people around the world and for generations into the future.

I’m also not sure it’s clear that cheaters don’t win without government intervention. That seems to be an article of faith, rather than one resulting from considered evaluation of the evidence.

It seems to me that cheating represents a substantial proportion of free-market activity. Most of the advertising world is about actively pursuing potential consumers and using all kinds of psychological tricks to get them to buy stuff. A business that was driven purely by consumer demand would simply make its existence known and leave it to people to actively request product information and to buy things. But it's a rare business that confines itself to that.

So, surprise for you! I have a PhD in Applied Economics. I can prove if you want, I suppose there are ways without doxxing me.

What you are talking about is called a "perfectly competitive market" with perfect information.

Its often taught in Econ 101 and if you take just introductory econ, you come away thinking markets are magic.

But if you go on to study more complex markets that more closely align to reality, you come away thinking "holy crap we need to watch these companies more!"

What all companies try to do is gain a market power position. Without a referee to blow the whistle and occasionally impose penalties, companies will try to innovate on market power and not on product quality.

For instance, Microsoft in the 1990s tried to force everyone to use their internet browser because their goal was to take a % fee for all internet sales. Were they trying to set up websites so people could set up stores? Nope, they were trying to use their market position of being the dominant OS to take a cut without doing anything. Thankfully the US court system put a stop to that.

Regulations are also why you can switch cell phone carriers in the US without losing your phone number. Before that regulation, cell companies tried to keep customers by forcing them to change numbers if they left. There are many ways of gaining market power, and one of those is to increase the cost of switching. Apple does this today with their iTunes/AppStore universe. Leave Apple and its a lot more work to maintain your audio and video library.

Its called "rent seeking" behavior and everyone and every company attempts to get "money for doing nothing." Without an alert citizenry, companies will also try to "capture" the government regulators. One odd fact is that existing companies sometimes love regulations because it keeps competitors out!

Companies in a market definitely do not want a perfectly competitive market. In a perfectly competitive market, profits are lower and you have to work harder for them - in fact we say in perfectly competitive markets there are no "economic" profits. Really what this means is the profit will be in line with average for all other industries.

It goes for us too, we are rent seeking. We are all producers of our labor. You want to produce labor in a market where you have market power. You get market power in the labor market by getting in demand skills that fewer people have. Ideally though, you want to win the lottery and get money for nothing. So do companies - they also would want money for nothing.

But imperfect markets can also exist when there is imperfect information. In a perfect market, all the costs imposed on others not participating in the market are paid for by people in the market. Without pollution regulations, polluters can dump waste into rivers and have the cost paid for by society. The result is the producers get an artificially low cost structure.

There is no natural incentive for the free market to internalize costs imposed on others. The only mechanism for that is a legal system and an attentive government that (hopefully) doesn't get bought out by industry.

Spinning off from what you're saying here, this might be a good time for everyone to consider all of the different externalities that exist in a modern economy.

There's all sorts of ways that businesses offload what might fairly be judged as their costs simply because they're able to get us to ignore those costs. How exactly does a market economy address those concerns without state interference? What real incentive do they have to behave differently if it's not imposed upon them? I don't mean hypotheticals like 'oh, customers might do business with...' what, the other company that does the same s**t?!

It seems like issues of that sort always receive an ideological answer rather than a pragmatic answer that might actually be relevant to the real-world.

Definitely, well the mathematical definition of when to address an externality is whether the cost of fixing/reducing it less than the harm it causes.

Everyone causes externalities to everyone else, but often its so small that the cost of fixing it is higher. Technically you showing up at a stop light and causing it to go red for the other direction of traffic is an externality to the others. In a pure market system with no friction, the other drivers that are stopped could offer to give you money to let them go.

But the cost of setting that up is high and we also have decided its cheaper to just have common rules of the road, which makes sense.

Think about hourly workers at a fast food place. The managers of a fast food place want to send you home when they don't need you but they don't know that until they see there are no customers.

So the externality there is paid by the worker - the worker gets less pay and because they don't know their schedule, they can't schedule another job (even if the other job were open to sudden scheduling).

The business saves money, and the worker loses out. It only is a benefit to both if the worker wants to go home.

Look at how the tech sector has hoisted externalities on us - many providers of software and media are so paranoid about piracy that they make the customers - who already paid - do extra work by verifying who they are. It adds up over a lifetime, and its absolutely stolen labor from you. Currently, I cannot log my kid's iPad into Amazon prime because despite having the correct password, I can't pass the dang captcha!

Everyone wants to offload costs to others, and reap the benefits of activities that others' are doing that benefit you without paying. My neighbor's trees fell into my yard and took out a whole section of the fence. Now he has the nerve to demand I fix my fence to keep his dog in his yard! I checked, the law says he is not responsible.

You have a PhD in economics, so what? You have an immunity to bias? Keynesianism was the dominant economic theory for half a century and it was nonsense. Same nowadays, there is plenty of nonsense in the academia.

There might be cases when government intervention is needed like with cartels and externalities. I'm not advocating for anarchy. But when we talk about regulations we talk about cases when the government intervenes in voluntary mutually beneficial transactions. Like the case of raw milk, if someone prefers to buy or sell raw milk, why should the state intervene? Also ceiling and floor prices laws that interfere with fair competition. Also regulations like with construction which makes housing unaffordable, and the everybody blames capitalism. And of course taxes, and the federal reserve causing inflation.

https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/rawmilk/ ... swers.html

tl;dr - It's a serious enough risk to public safety to justify having at least some laws in place. Ultimately people still drink it and still get sick.



Personally, I don't see this issue as a huge priority, I wouldn't advocate for cracking down on it, but the state does have at least some obligation to be involved in matters related to consumer safety.

Personally I wouldn't use raw milk, but I don't think the government should penalize people who prefer to use it. Where I come from a big portion of the population prefer raw milk, inclouding my parents. Nonody is dying. I find such interventions a prime example of statist do gooder ridiculousness. And an example of your personal bias that you rush to scavenge for "proof" to justify them.

I linked to what the CDC has to say because you should hear why they feel it's an issue.

My personal view is that I don't care whether it's restricted or not, solid arguments for why they do so exist but I'm not sure I actually care if you want to drink milk laced with cow s**t and fentanyl (let alone raw milk, which probably has neither of those in it).

I can understand restricting your ability to sell unsafe milk to others or feeding it to your children.

Your argument of but no one I know! is just resorting to anecdotal evidence because you don't like the CDC's facts. Those facts don't care about your feelings unfortunately.

Keynesianism is mainstream economics. Sorry there bud, if you want to say its nonsense, go get a PhD and publish some papers convincing the field. You got to be pretty out of it to say "was" because it still is.

I went to a low tier school so all my views on econ basically come from generally accepted views of the field. I am humble enough to know that I contributed nada to the field. I have zero publications so in the PhD Econ world, I am an abject failure and not worthy of the PhD.

Seriously, thats how they see it. So I actually only am reminded of its worth when I run into people who are just... man arrogantly clueless about it. Its the curse of being an economist - everyone has a strong opinion about economics and thinks its as valid if not more than an expert. And they react the same way, "your biased!" Its so consistent that I can almost predict what you'd say next, and that is frankly boring and I hate boring more than anything else.

So, this isn't worth my time. Until your work that convinces the field of economics and changes textbooks, you are the biased one that is close minded.

Previously you said that you wouldn't advocate
for cracking down on it. But you also say that you don't really care because it's unimportant to you. It is important to people who get penalized because they prefere to consume raw milk. This is an example of where regulation zealots are leading us. But you wouldn't like to admit it because you might lose "talking points".

I'm just trying to make sense of things like everybody else. Until now I've come to see that the Keynesian model has been universally abandoned in favor of Monetarism. Even new keynesian economics apparently comprise of two thirds Monetarism plus what could be salvaged from Kaynes ideas and others. In short Keynesianism was a pseudoscience.

And please, don't get bored. That's a big concern of mine.

I know we need some level of taxes.I just prefer a much lower level of taxes than we have now.However I am against the national income tax and the IRS.I wish we would just do the fairtax instead.Hopefully that bill passes but I highly doubt it.I am not anti-regulation.....I just think we need a lot less of them.I dont like how it takes about 2 years for aa church plant to start meeting because of all the red tape.I also dont like how theres so much red tape involved in starting a business.I just wish you could get your business or non-profit incorporated in one day in this country like you can in other countries like maybe Hong Kong.I also dont like how they regulate buskers in some cities and they have even made them audition in front of city officials to get the permit to perform on the street.I also dont see why a kid's lemonade stand has to be illegal in most of the US.But I do believe that we need some level of regulation and taxes.One regulation I dont like at all is how its illegal in many states for kids to hunt even with adult supervision.

Last edited by Texasmoneyman300 on 24 Feb 2023, 10:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.