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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: maceng2 who wrote (37560)	8/30/2003 9:51:41 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 74559

PB, Re: What? Are you saying there should be no free market? First of all, one needs to make an intelligent observation about the disconnect between the rhetoric of the "free market", and the actual condition that results from rampant de-regulation. The notion of transparent markets, with comparative advantage flowing to the lowest cost producers is, to say the least, an ivory tower theorization and a fantasy. The reality of markets is far different. I'm afraid that you've fallen into the trap of those who accept "free markets" as a religious article of faith. You seem to express a remarkably sterile Manichean either/or with the "free market" on one hand, and total command and control economics on the other. That's silly. There is a well studied and successful model that modern economies have operated with for most of the last century. That model goes loosely under the rubric of the "mixed economy". Certainly free markets ought to be encouraged in many aspects of economic activity. I have no complaint about that. What I do find to be an egregious and devastating mistake of the "free market" true-believers is that they turn a blind eye to the vast devastation that free markets have caused in various segments of the economy. The electricity/energy sector is one where there are no longer any legitimate arguments to made that it is a success. Enron is the poster child for free markets and California's rape by Enron, Dynegy, Sempra, El Paso Gas, etc. is a perfect example of how to wreck a system that was working, and replace it with chaos, criminality and crisis. In the case of electricity, almost all sane parties are in agreement that deregulation is failing. That more regulation and control is required in order to stabilize the system. The other aspects of "free market" religion that need to be eradicated are the propensity of free market types to use their clubs like WTO, NAFTA etc, to create a race to the bottom for wages, and a cavalier disregard for the ecology of the planet. The free market mantra is designed by and for large multinational corporations to turn them into vast winners in economic competition at the expense of labor across the planet and actually, the planet itself. There is not one shred of evidence that those who use the WTO do so because they want to sustain the planet. To the contrary, they seem determined to use up the planet's finite resources at the fastest rate possible, while suppressing labor in order to maximize profits. With free markets as a dominant economic force, we can look forward to a future with more and more despoiled environments and a larger and larger underclass of poorly paid workers acting as indentured servants for a tiny elite of corporate honchos. Many of whom would be considered criminal predators in a fair trade system. Fair trade Campaigns are starting to attract a lot of attention. For good reason. The "free market" system for coffee, for example, is a shocking mess. Coffee growers across the planet are being impoverished and their lives ruined while coffee purveyors like Nestle, Starbucks, etc. rake in vast profits from their exploitation of a market run amok. The same thing applies in wheat markets, where we find in the U.S. that a one pound loaf of bread, costing $2.89 in the supermarket contains $0.07 paid to the farmer for the wheat. This is a wacky and distorted market that no longer rewards those who make it all possible. Fair Trade Initiatives: globalexchange.org