How Free Market Economics Really Works

While reading comments on Salty Droid’s blog, I came across one of the most cogent, well-written, and helpful comments I’ve ever seen on his blog.

It was written by the user “Free Market Economics.” He said I could republish his comment, but that he preferred to stay anonymous. Here is his comment in full (keep in mind it was written in response to the comments of certain individuals on Salty’s blog):

It’s time to set some of the posters here straight.

“Free Market Economics” has been bandied about as a justification for what the Syndicate criminals are doing.

Allow me to school the Syndicate apologists on a few issues:

1. There is no free market economist alive who would say there should be no regulation of the markets. Even the most extreme recognize that one of the valid roles of the government is consumer protection. When a business sells a product that is fraudulent, defective, deceptive, or dangerous, it has the right, and need at times, to step in.

2. You say step away and let the market decide. We ARE the market. A market is a conversation. Further still, most of the posters on this board are people who have done business with these criminals and been burned.

3. The market correcting itself is a complicated process. If advertisers were 100% honest, the market would correct itself by lower sales. Lower sales is only part of the equation. The other part is market education and sometimes (only when necessary) government intervention. What is happening on this blog is in fact a MAJOR market correction (and a very justified one) happening right before your eyes.

If we expect consumers to just stop buying without education, you’ll wait forever. If you expect the government to step in and make things better, good luck.

We need to keep up this campaign of education of the market. And we need to alert the proper authorities.

I also think that there should be an effort to help the more honest businesses out there play the game correctly. I’m not in any way shape or form asking for peace with the syndicate. I think the evidence of their premeditated attacks on people in their moments of weakness are so well documented that they could never be trusted. People change, but people who are that calculating and insincere have more or less excused themselves from the big kids pool.

What I am saying is that while the Syndicate boys should (and almost certainly will) serve time, there are other Internet businesses that can be healed. We should make that part of our campaign.

Business is not evil. When evil people get into business it just becomes yet another vehicle for them to express their evil.

There are some excellent points in this comment:

• Consumer protection laws are essential even in a free market economy. This is why we have “lemon laws.”

• We are the market. As such, we have the right and responsibility to self-police the activities that happen within the market.

• We’ve witnessed a “bubble” in highly organized Syndicate product launches. We’re now witnessing the collapse of that bubble. This is a market correction, just like the market correction in stock prices, house prices, etc.

• Consumer behavior can’t change without education. In the absence of objective third-party publications (like Consumer Reports), certain bloggers have stepped into the vacuum.

• Business is amoral; it’s the people running the business that make it good or evil. More often than not, business is a “mixed bag” that incorporates both good and evil elements.

Do you agree? Disagree? Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

-Ryan M. Healy