In what way is the hope that unfettered [tag]free trade[/tag] will enable the market naturally to come to provide all that is necessary in any way more likely to work than the [tag]communist[/tag] [tag]utopia[/tag], so frequently dismissed as being “against human nature”?
(Sorry – it’s because another film I saw the other day was this, which has made me all confused and anti-capitalist for a bit. Largely because I’m highly envious of the vast amounts of cash all these business types seem to be able to build up, the bastards…)
Depends – if your communist utopia requires people to be mainly selfless, then you're probably onto a loser. By contrast, the free market assumes that people will do what they want.
But doesn't the standard, Marx-based concept of the utopian communist society assume that everyone will do what they want, but it'll all work out perfectly anyway because all those different desires will balance each other out? Sounds pretty much like an idealised free market, only without the money…
Yes, but the free market is an actual mechanism for allowing that to happen. If you're not familiar with how a perfect market would do this, I suggest that you read a basic textbook. If you have something specific in mind, then I suggest that you spit it out.
Methinks you're missing the point, old boy. If a perfect market only exists in a basic textbook, then it's a hypothetical, right? A true "perfect market" has never existed. If it's a hypothetical, why is it a more plausible hypothetical than a communist utopia?
Because something quite like it already exists.
Perhaps you'd care to let me know where, exactly? I'm afraid I'm having a bit of difficulty coming up with any real-world examples of a properly free market…
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.
I said "quite like it." Most countries (by share of countries I pay attention to), and every country in what we would usually call "the West" has an economy that is based on markets that are quite like a true free market. Some of the (sub-) markets are quite a lot like perfect markets, because of low barriers to entry for providers, and the ease of discovering alternatives, and without anyone else carrying the costs of transactions, some less so. For example, the market for corkscrews and tshirts.
By contrast, I am not aware of any examples of a social group greater than a few hundred people operating anything as similar to Marx's utopia as those markets are to the ideal.
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Serf – That's where the whole idea falls down, though. Where the perfect communist utopia relies on everyone acting selflessly, the perfect free trade utiopia appears to rely on everyone acting selfishly. Where the communist system could survive a few people not playing ball, the free trade system could collapse in on itself if one person/company does an Enron and ends up too successful at acting selfishly. Without the checks of regulation to prevent and punish such actions, surely the very nature of the idealised free market positively encourages the sort of behaviour that could bring the whole thing down?
Marcin – the point is not about which one we've got closest to in the real world, it's about the perfect forms of the hypotheticals. "Quite like it" isn't good enough (I assumed from your earlier "spit it out" tone that you were being sarcastic, and felt that I was being an idiot for not being aware of a fully-funtioning unregulated market).
The basic question, to try to make it clearer, is "is a genuinely free market actually possible"? I can't say that I can see how it could be.
Genuinely free markets are possible, and exist all over the place. Perfect markets clearly cannot exist, but the interesting question is whether actual markets are sufficiently close to capture the essential benefits of the perfect market moderately well. By contrast, the question with a Marxist utopia is what that would even be, let alone how good an approximation would be.
Maybe free trade and markets cannot solve all problems, there are many known imperfections in them after all, but they are the best technology that we have at the moment for distributing resources. The evidence is that they do generally work well, and currently does provide for all the physical necessities (food, shelter, clothing) of millions.
The evidence is that if required the responses to other needs would emerge. For example; healthcare was provided widely (but admittedly not completely) through private charity and friendly societies before it was provided by the state, though personally I would prefer a social insurance system like the French have to this.
Not a theoretical proof, just the evidence at hand. Markets have been tried and shown to work pretty well, whereas communism has been tried and shown not to work at all, killing millions in the process.
Well, something called communism was tried. It was actually nothing of the sort – more like a bastardised proto-socialism. And, in any case, the Soviets made the mistake of not following Marx properly – they tried to jump straight from feudalism to communism, without first passing through the capitalist and socialist modes of production. Had they allowed their country the time to progress naturally towards communism, maybe they would have been more successful…
For once, someone provides a sensible critique.
However, Marx was quite clear that, even if there wasn't a violent revolution, there needed to be a phase of dictatorship of/by the proletariat before the fluffy nice bits. That is the precise equivalent of my bridge that does not withstand the construction process (if you follow my trackback).
More importantly you are overly generous in your assessment of human nature:
"Had they allowed their country the time to progress naturally towards communism, ".
In order for this ever to be the case you require a hardened class warrior with a burning hatred of any form of defined property rights to sit and wait patiently in his self-declared sub-optimal state of capitalism until the growth levels off and he can take over. That's not a fair description of most of the Marxists I've ever encountered.
Free markets = bollox, Communism = bollox. H
ows that for pith?
Free markets = bollox, Communism = bollox.
Hows that for pith?