www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/11/free-market-capitalism-gets-thumbs-down-in-27-countries-including-us.html
"Free Market" Capitalism Gets Thumbs Down in 27 Countries, Including US What amazes me is how a vague and intellectually bankrupt (because it is so nebulous as to be used in ways that often wind up being contradictory) term like "free markets" nevertheless gets accorded respect it does not deserve in popular discourse in the US, particularly in the media. Well it turns out that the public is not so easily swayed.
November 9, 2009 at 4:49 am Maybe so, but the US is still the most credulous in the world, by my eyeballs, while Germany shows its perennial character towards moderation. Always amused and amazed me how different things get as soon as you cross into France. The country where I would be thrilled to see the results is China. China is the most free-wheeling, capitalistic country I've ever been to, and I wonder if they like it that way. Any links to the full survey results to see if that's included? I'll predict that, over the next five years, free marketeers will find a way to turn the public's wrathful anger over the financial system and oligarchy into support for "free market capialism". There's always a productive use for a mob, and if you do it this way, it's a positive feedback loop.
November 9, 2009 at 4:59 am While I am not surprised that France comes out top, I am quite surprised to see that Germany comes out bottom. Although I suspect that Germans in general adhere more to the notion of a market economy than the French, the Germans however always seem to emphasise that they support a "social" market economy, as opposed to a "free" market economy. Perhaps there is something in which the questions to the target audiences were phrased in the different languages.
November 9, 2009 at 6:46 am German attitudes are slowly but surely changing; while in general they are still quite concerned about Sozialgerechtigkeit', taxes are quite here, and people are now also looking for relief from that. The FDP, as close to a libertarian party as Germany could ever come, had a very good result in the last election, so good that the conservatives (CDU) could form a coalition with them, rather than continue with the great coalition' with the main left party (SPD).
November 9, 2009 at 5:18 am Actually where does free market capitalism exist so that people get a feeling how it works? Not to say I'm an advocate of it but especially the US is as far away from free markets as can be, given the numerous interventions of the government. I would call it a financial oligarchy but not a free market system. But, lest you get me wrong: As far as I know some free market capitalism was prevailing during the time of industrialisation and then it showed its cruelty towards the mass of people who were working in the factories and the mines.
November 9, 2009 at 5:30 am The reason I oppose the use of the term "free markets" is that the benefits ascribed to markets, generally speaking, hold only when no buyer or seller has much (any) power, meaning they are small, buyers and sellers have equal acces to information, and goods are more or less commodities (having a specialized product that people want or need gives the seller power). So the real world of commerce bears very little to the idealized world of economists in which markets produce wonderful outcomes. Then we have the libertarian version of "free markets" where no rules apply. That quickly produces outcome like the ones you describe: the powerful exploit the weak. You get abuse of workers, shoddy, even dangerous products (think of toxic toys and toothpaste out of China, or the adulterated meat out of the old Chicago slaugherhouses per The Jungle). The use by moderates of the first view of markets is too often in the US taken as an endorsement of the latter construct.
So you get this notion of "soziale Marktwirtschaft" where the government intervenes to preserve some resemblance of true competition and a basic social equilibrium. Which is probably why the germans are rather fond of that model. Our experience with that kind of system during the last couple of decades was quite positive. But had the US government followed your advice to at least nationalise failed banks, the forces of a market would have remained rudimentary in place and I think for the better. I see a fundamental ideological change has taken place in the US government that it has somewhat given up the market economy.
November 9, 2009 at 10:23 am pigeon, You say that "I see a fundamental ideological change has taken place in the US government." There has been "a fundamental ideological change," or more likely a reassertion of values and beliefs that were always there, but hidden away. But this change has been on the part of the public, not "the US government." The US government seems to no longer represent the wishes and values of the people. Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans want healthcare reform with a robust public option, it wants healthcare reform paid for by additional taxes on the rich, it wants the US out of Iraq and Afghanistan, it wants the government to invest in jobs because "we cannot solve the deficit problem without getting people back to work and getting our economy growing again," and by more than a 3-to-1 margin believes investing in "job creation, education, and energy independence" is more important than "cutting government spending and reducing the deficit."
pdf And yet the US government is hell bent upon pandering to the whims of handful of teabaggers, who work hand-in-glove with powerful economic, political and media elites to create the fiction that greed and selfishness is the dominant ethic in America.
November 9, 2009 at 9:20 am the benefits ascribed to markets, generally speaking, hold only when no buyer or seller has much (any) power, meaning they are small, buyers and sellers have equal acces to information, and goods are more or less commodities (having a specialized product that people want or need gives the seller power). So larger businesses therefore welcome regulation, which keeps their smaller competitors smaller. You need to provide examples of regulation that has enabled competition rather than restricted it if you want your assertion to have any basis in fact rather than mere religious babble. Anti-trust regulation may be the only area where competition is enabled, but that is a small portion of regulation. The idea that regulation is such a great thing because it stifles monopolies holds little water because it more often that not merely creates oligopolies, which is some ways are more dangerous than monopolies.
November 9, 2009 at 1:53 pm I think the real point is that the term "free market" is mostly useless for analysis - what does matter are the specific markets and the rules imposed upon them. If one cannot approximate (through anti-trust) something like (and acceptable to people) the model of many-sellers many-buyers, price-taking symmetrically situated parties, facing no or little barriers to entry or exit, then a regulated monopoly is probably the best one can get. If the regulations are written to benefit the monopolizers to the detriment of the consumers, one gets the "Libertarian" kind of "free market" where being big is no sin, even if there's no more symmetry between parties, barriers to entry are prohibitive, and people either pay the price exacted or do without. An example illustrating the vacuousness of "free market" is its occurrence in "net neutrality" arguments. People like me want a "free market" wherein ISPs compete for our purchase by their reliability and monthly charges, and there's no ISP controlling of (otherwise legal) content. People like John McCain want a "free market" wherein content providers compete with one another for access to ISP's (and so, the customers of those ISPs) - because, after all, don't free people (ISPs and say, oh, Fox) have the right to make contracts even if it means that some people will have a harder time reading Naked Capitalism? We know what the solution is supposed to be in the John McCain "free market" - Yves Smith has to pony up to ISPs if she wants to be seen, or some other ISP is going to have to enter DR's market, offering it...
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