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Originally Posted by jbouton
Ic. What about Hayek tho. Its a non touchy example of a steelman (as opposed to us speaking to conservative arguments we both would agree are dumb) counter to what you are saying.
Hayek explains that the prices of the markets are to be comprised of all of the individual information of the markets participants. That no central controller could ever have the knowledge of all of the participants. And that those prices are critical coordination signals for the markets.
The central authority sees certain prices that they determine are 'wrong', and then they mean to control them and make them right. Hayek argues such intervention only serves to distort those signals.
So there is a weird hypocrisy in regard to intervention for the good of the markets that I think you might not have been previously introduced to.
I don't know how to poke holes in that logic, but what seems clear is that that logic presupposes that 'the good' is made up of efficiency and the markets performing at their peak. This serves to mean that money, or 'the market', effectively become the players that stands to benefit most from that. Big corporations, who have effectively tied their fortunes to the market, stand to benefit when the market does well. But in the same way that it's possible to look at a country's GDP or the global economy and say 'yep doing well' that's ignoring the huge sections of the population that are immiserated, spending more hours working for less money, spending more of their money on rent and travel, and the corresponding rises in homelessness, crime and suicides of despair, all the while thinking 'yep doing well' just because the richest are doing better than they were.
What we have in practice right now in parts of europe, the UK in particular, and the USA, is sometimes referred to as 'socialism for the rich'. The very thing that economic libertarians profess to hate, i.e. state capture, has been enacted over the last ~40 years. So if in actual fact the markets were allowed to do what they're supposed to do without interference, subsidies to fossil fuel companies, lobbying by big corporations to tie up small businesses in more paperwork in order to create effective monopolies, and so on and so on, we'd be in a better situation. But we can soften the worst edges of capitalism by saying 'yes, market forces,
for some stuff and then figure out where it doesn't make sense. Rent controls, minimum wages, socialised healthcare i.e. single payer and/or free at the point of care. These are all compatible with a capitalism that is less like a wild horse doing it's own thing with a few hangers-on doing incredibly well out of it.