zlacker

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+(OP)
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+ol
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+1n
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.