this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2024
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askchapo
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I assume you mean liberals, not capitalists. Well-regulated markets are efficient ways of maximizing happiness when distributing scarce resources, provided needs are all attended to and people have a roughly similar ability to participate.
Markets distributing scarce resources can only ever have a profit motive driving them, because that is the underpinning of the market. And so therefore they are not an act of maximizing happiness, they are an act of maximizing profit (even if the profit ceiling is imposed by regulation or not). It’s an unnatural construct that requires an incredibly dense onion of manufactured legal and social norms over time to simply maintain. I wouldn’t call that something that is done well
Yeah that's not true at all. Markets are just a medium of exchange, and they can be used under for profit or non-profit systems. For instance, coop housing exists on a market and would continue to even if all housing became coop housing.
???? Not under capitalism, well regulated or otherwise markets can only maximize one thing and that's profit, nothing else can be internalized, the minute scarce resources enter the capitalist market they're priced out of the hands of the majority of the population and subjected to unsustainable extraction processes
Nothing like this has ever been true in the entire history of capitalism, not even in the most benign subnational local markets; "attended needs" and "similar ability to participate" would be internalized in the market as a demand crash or as a crowded out market
Aggregate Neoclassical thoery is bunk dude, it's been bunk since Anwar Shaikh exploded its major fundamental precept in 1974
Also there's not much point in being a liberal if someone's not a capitalist, since the entire point of liberalism is to justify the continued existence of capitalism
When did I say it's efficient under capitalism?
(And most liberals aren't capitalists whether you think there's a point to that or not)
Do you have any other examples of existing markets?
I meant capitalist supporters