But not a "free market," and therein lies the point.eRv wrote:
Nice goal post shift. They don't need to operate under the same regulatory system. While ever there is voluntary trade, there is by definition a market.
But there is coercion, coercion by the dumping government to produce goods at a below-cost level by initiating force and fraud upon its own workers in order to gain an unfair advantage in the international marketplace. In places like China there is no "free market" precisely because the state controls not only wages but actually enslaves its own citizens, a quintessential anti-free-market tactic, to wage economic warfare.
It's free as long as there is no coercion.
You see, a free market also happens to include as a necessary part of that freedom the freedom of the workers to set the costs of production through the free market operations of the labor market. This is where Communists and socialists, particularly government-protected unions, skew the costs of production in one market but not in another. In the US, the costs of production for GM were unsustainable (and still are) because the government put its thumb on the scales of the wage/benefit negotiation between workers and employers to benefit the workers at the expense of the employer, thereby causing GM to go bankrupt because it was compelled by government interference in the free market for labor, to pay outlandish wages and particularly pensions for workers who spent decades longer drawing pensions from GM than they did actually working for the company, which "defined benefit" pensions were the result of government (National Labor Relations Board) threatening GM if it didn't accede to the auto worker's union's demands.
No one is forcing anyone in the US to buy those "dumped" goods. Dumping is a good example of how free markets don't really work.
Only for those who cannot understand how free markets are actually supposed to operate.
Monopolies cannot exist without government sanction and support for very long because in a free market, the minute a monopoly becomes abusive of the marketplace and consumers by raising prices beyond that which consumers find reasonable some other entrepreneur comes along and offers a better (if perhaps different) competing product at a lower price...where the government does not legally prohibit or interfere with such competition.The same with the need for anti-trust laws in relation to monopolies.
Dominant market share (which is not a "monopoly") on the other hand is nothing more than consumers making the decision that they prefer the products of the market-dominant company and that there is no better, cheaper product that satisfies the particular consumer need involved. That was the case with Standard Oil when the Progressives enacted the anti-trust laws that broke it up. Standard Oil held the dominant market share in the oil business precisely because it invested huge sums of money in research and development of efficient methods of locating, extracting and processing crude oil. It created many new products, like petroleum jelly, and created markets for those products by advertising the benefits of these new products that consumers found useful. But Standard Oil was "too successful" for the tastes of the Progressives and Marxists in government so the government made up the fiction that Standard Oil was a "monopoly" and sold that bill of goods to the public at the behest of, and to advantage, smaller oil companies who could not compete in the free market because they didn't have the knowledge, skill or interest in spending what it takes to create innovative and valuable products, which is the result of entrepreneurs having venture capital available to them (therefore capitalism's benefits). The same thing happened to steel and railroads, among other government interference in the free markets intended to produce political results desired by the Progressives and Marxists of the time. And little has changed since then, as Obama and the EPA have proven.
In other words, you're trollishly pettifogging.In any case, I didn't say it was a free market.
Clearly he was talking about free markets since that's the OP. You're pettifogging again.You claimed it wasn't a market at all. I was debunking that point.
As has been pointed out to you many times, "free market" does not mean "entirely unconstrained, unregulated and anarchistic market." This is a strawman you're well known for trotting out whenever you want to diss free markets, but it's still, and always has been, a lie.Regarding free global trade, once again, the more tariffs that exist, the less free a market is BY DEFINITION.
Could not expect anything else I suppose.
