zlacker

I think you and I might agree on "how things should be", but have different definitions for the term Free-Market. I understand that there are many different ways of defining this term, and that there is no right or wrong answer here. When I referred earlier to the ideals of Free-Markets, I was referring to the economic ideal of one with Perfect Competition. This is an ideal that can never be realized of course, but I believe that the closer we come to this ideal, the better off we will be. Banning of price-fixing, false-advertising, and trust-busting, are all examples of public policy that betray Libertarian principles in order to further Perfect Competition, and that's something we need a lot more of today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition#Idealizing...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_information

>>whack+(OP)
Yeah, I think we agree on how things should be. But Perfect Competition and Free Market are two very different things. I think a lot of free market nutjobs would think of perfect competition as socialist interference in free markets.

>>CalChr+n
Err sort of... perfect competition is an ideal that has reasonably close analogues in the real world--otherwise the idea wouldn't be very useful. For example, some agricultural products are this way without the kind of government interference you are suggesting.

And your assertion about information asymmetry having nothing to do with free markets is actually addressed in the economic literature on perfect competition.

>>wallac+Ll
Perfect competition is actually not a very useful concept in the real world. In Silicon Valley, we live and die with patents which are term limited monopolies. That's as far from perfect competition as you can get. The entire concept of intellectual property is anti-competitive.

>>CalChr+on
There are a lot of examples where markets are far from perfect competition; actually most markets are like this. It's just useful to the extent we can see markets that come close to this appear to function well, and so we should use regulation to bring markets closer to this.