Quote from: Rassah on July 01, 2011, 02:39:26 PM

Quote from: 4v4l0n42 on July 01, 2011, 10:20:00 AM

OK, let me rephrase then.

1. How does the free market avoid the destruction of the inhabitable planet from which we depend on to survive?
2. How does the free market ensure that no people will starve unnecessarily?

Quite eager to hear.

1. Actually, this one is kind of easy. Market prices are based on supply/demand. Destroying things reduces it's supply. The more of something is destroyed in the free market, the more expensive it becomes, and the less people want it or are willing to pay for it. Eventually the market will get to a point where continuing to destroy some things is just not profitable any more.

On the contrary, it's exactly how the market works.

I'll take an extreme example, and you'll see how that turns out.
Take water, or air. Nobody used to pay for clean water, now we do. Nobody pays for air now, but if the profit-based economy keeps polluting to the point air becomes unbreathable, like some part in China, it would be a huge boost for the economy, because people would have to buy oxygens bottles, gas masks and respirators to survive.

The more scarse a resource is, the more profitable it is, the better for the economy, the worse for us.

Quote

UNLESS we have a non-free market player, such as the government, deciding that some things are needed for the general good of the population, and subsidizes that good. Example is corn, which we use in many of our foods, which is subsidized to the point where it costs more to grow it than it's sold for, and which is screwing up our land with overfarming.

This is circumstantial example, and that's not the reason they subsidise corn.

Quote

As for companies polluting, the bigger issue is the lack of a legal recourse for people to defend their property against polluting factories. I would argue that that's more a problem of the legal system than a free market.

And how would you change the legal system, if the politicians are paid and corrupted by corporations, whose interest is not to be sustainable, but to be profitable?

To say that this is a problem with the legal system completely ignores that it's the profit based system that drives politics, not the other way round.

The problem is that the interest of those who produce, the corporation in this case, should not be to make a profit, but to maximise the well being of people.

We have become so brainwashed to think that our activities have money has goal, while in fact it should be to maximise the well being. Profit is often an obstacle to that.

Quote

2. People are greedy. They want things done to make them rich. If they are freely allowed to have other people work for them to make them richer, and pay those other people competitive wages, those other people will have money to buy food and not starve if they chose not to. That's not the case in Africa, where greedy free-market people are being kept out by greedy gun-toting people.

Africa is the perfect example of how the free market in reality creates corruption, war, unnecessary violence and suffering. The reason greedy gun-toting people exist is because all they want is to make a profit, by using socially darwinistic mechanisms, allowed by the fact that we are "free trading" with those countries, allowing those who have power to gain even more at the expenses of the population, because it's profitable for us.

As long as your bottom line is profit and not maximising well being, you'll never solve these two problems.