i find it surreal to think you teach economics sometimes, not once in my years of university or business did anyone state that the free market stops humans from making mistakes or problems from occurring..Endovelico wrote: Which utopia are you referring to? That which states that free markets solve all problems and always lead to beneficial situations for all parties?... You just have to look around you to realize that in "no place" has that occurred.
the free market is about *correcting* mistakes the quickest, not avoiding them.
in a free market europe you would have had all the crashes and readjustments during the original gfc and all the people that couldnt pay their debts would be bankrupt and all the banks that had too much exposure to bad debt would have gone broke and all the chaos and anger and temper tantrums would have happened back then and be over and done with.
by now, many years later, the driving mechanism of the free market which is cooperation and consent would had allowed you to create your southern european prosperity sphere away from the meddling intrusions of remote government (EU/German et all)
you dont have a free market, you have centralised socialism with 2 competing layers of government doing everything they can to stop the corrections from happening and all they care about is maintaining the status quo.
so.. im totally confused, you spend your entire time on this forum bitching about centralised government and demanding that you should be allowed to create your own structures based on people you can cooperate with and yet you hate liberty and free markets ???????"?????????????????
ill try a simple example.
in a free market if businessman bob buys too many "thingamies" because he misjudged the demand for them, its businessman bobs problem to deal with... maybe he has to suck up the losses, maybe he has to go bankrupt, maybe maybe maybe.. the market has corrected, bob learnt his lesson and its only bob that suffers.
in a socialist market, the government will step in - either with a law to force everyone to buy "thingamies" or using tax payer money to get bob out of trouble by purchasing them itself... in this case bob happily keeps buying more "thingamies" and the market has not corrected and everyone keeps on suffering indefinately.
the entire west is currently doing the second thing at the moment and all the little people are suffering because our governments keep propping up bobs mistakes.
the governments just use fear to justify it, promises of destruction if the bobs business fails, however its their destruction they are so scared of, its not ours.
--edit--
and yes its painfully obvious a "free" market requires government rules that keep it "free" .. without them its called anarchy or fascism or something else.
the heart of the matter is how you deal with the fear of change and how much you trust your socialist safety nets.. its easy to laugh at the americans with the stashes of beans and ammo but .....
maybe its the word "free market" that confuses people.. maybe it should be a more left friendly word like "fair market"