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Re: About Adam Smith ...? Yep, creating and maintaining free open competitive markets is a choice we have, if we want to achieve the benefits that can come from them.
Author: BOB2
Date: 11-17-2024 - 14:51
Dragoman Wrote:
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> "Adam Smith and ... free trade in free and open
> competitive market economies" only works well
> where there is free flow of information and
> more-or-less equal power between buyer and seller
> (i.e., a "level playing field"), as Adam Smith
> fully acknowledged in his writings.
>
> That is rarely the case in large economies.
The theory works a lot better than some of the outcomes, but that's usually because of that "asymmetry' in the "real" world, where many lack the information and/or the resources to act upon it. That's one reason many of our most effective remedies to prevent the negative consequences of that reality have been to try to level the playing field and rules to make the marketplace more open/transparent and make the players with those natural and/or insider advantages, play by the rules.
I can come from good old-fashioned uncontrolled human greed and/or corruption of those free market values by folks willing to pay for the privilege of having a monopolistic or dominant position in modern kleptocratic systems of governance.
None of us are better off for the bad outcomes that come from this failure.
Meanwhile, I'm quite happy that Baldwin sold all of those choo-choo's to Japan, and generations of folks, and their children, grandchildren, both here, and there, and even some of us who descended from those folks lived better and better for all of that industry and effort, as a result.
But it is a "choice" to observe and enforce those market principles in order to achieve those positive benefits, and there's no shortage of folks who can and will gain from cheating, if they have the chance. And there also just do seem to be a whole lot of "lemmings" on the various "fringes" running around these days, that just seem to be upset with the terrible world they seem to think we are living in and seem to want to keep just drilling a lot of holes in this boat we're all on to express their anger over it.
-------------------------------------------------------
> "Adam Smith and ... free trade in free and open
> competitive market economies" only works well
> where there is free flow of information and
> more-or-less equal power between buyer and seller
> (i.e., a "level playing field"), as Adam Smith
> fully acknowledged in his writings.
>
> That is rarely the case in large economies.
The theory works a lot better than some of the outcomes, but that's usually because of that "asymmetry' in the "real" world, where many lack the information and/or the resources to act upon it. That's one reason many of our most effective remedies to prevent the negative consequences of that reality have been to try to level the playing field and rules to make the marketplace more open/transparent and make the players with those natural and/or insider advantages, play by the rules.
I can come from good old-fashioned uncontrolled human greed and/or corruption of those free market values by folks willing to pay for the privilege of having a monopolistic or dominant position in modern kleptocratic systems of governance.
None of us are better off for the bad outcomes that come from this failure.
Meanwhile, I'm quite happy that Baldwin sold all of those choo-choo's to Japan, and generations of folks, and their children, grandchildren, both here, and there, and even some of us who descended from those folks lived better and better for all of that industry and effort, as a result.
But it is a "choice" to observe and enforce those market principles in order to achieve those positive benefits, and there's no shortage of folks who can and will gain from cheating, if they have the chance. And there also just do seem to be a whole lot of "lemmings" on the various "fringes" running around these days, that just seem to be upset with the terrible world they seem to think we are living in and seem to want to keep just drilling a lot of holes in this boat we're all on to express their anger over it.
