zlacker

>>lawles+(OP)
Larry Ellison is using his bags to purchase lies and silence.

No economy can be in true equilibrium when the consumers send profits to be spent in unforeseen and unrelated ways like this. Every purchase carries potentially immense future costs that are almost completely opaque.

Free market maximalists need to confront this fact before praying at the altar of complete deregulation, and every consumer should pay more attention to who they are buying from.

>>gmd63+Oq1
What's free market about total state regulatory capture, calling the President when your bids get rejected, or setting up wars and domestic police actions to enrich yourself with contracts using taxpayer funds?

There are legitimate criticisms of a pure free market, but this is "state capitalism" not a free market.

The Trump administration is absolutely not pro free market. They're putting fingers on the scale all over the place, taking Federal positions in private companies, taking literal bribes for regulatory favors, influencing the selection of executives and board members, and using the power of the state to attack privately owned companies for platforming speech they don't like (like this 60 Minutes segment, made by a private company). Trump/MAGA looks a lot more like the CCP than anything else.

Of course if you pay attention to the discourse, MAGA and national conservatism are an explicit repudiation of Reagan/Clinton "neoliberalism" and "libertarian conservatism." They explicitly support a large administrative state that centrally plans the economy and culture, just one they run and use to push right wing and nationalist agendas.

I remember saying back during the Bush years: if the right is forced to choose between liberty and cultural conservatism, they will throw out liberty. The right only supports the freedom to do what they think people should be doing. (Yes, there are similar attitudes in some parts of the left too. There are not many principled defenders of individual liberty.)

Edit: I'm really just arguing that we should call things what they are. Calling MAGA's CCP-like state capitalism a free market is like calling Bernie Sanders or Mamdani communism (they're socialists, not communists, these are not the same) or calling old school conservative republicans fascists. Words mean things.

>>api+fx1
The tariffs are at least partially about crony capitalism if you look how they have repeatedly played out. Announce big, broad, sweeping industry & country level tariffs. Talk to Big Tech execs, quietly delay/rescind specific sub-components or even companies from said tariffs. Rinse & repeat.

The companies left fully paying tariffs are the ones that aren't big enough to have the orange mans ear / "donate" to the ballroom construction.

>>steveB+wD1
Tariffs are not free market. A true free market would have zero tariffs.

>>victor+dK1
And it would quickly be destroyed by competing governments that don’t believe in free markets and actively subsidize their industries to capture market share.

>>tw04+bN1
The US has been largely tariff free since the 1900s and it's the largest economy in the world.

>>vmg12+2U1
Remind me where I can buy a Chinese EV?

And I assume there’s no government subsidies to allow US private sectors to compete globally because free market right?

Right?

>>tw04+u12
I forgot to put in my comment "until recently". And the US auto industry does such so using that as your argument in favor of tariffs doesn't really work.

>>vmg12+ea2
The 1960s+ chicken tax would like a word. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax