this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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Are we in a "free market" or we not? The answer is "depends on what lobbyists want."
Free market goes to the highest bidder.
Free for me and not for thee.
Might as well be the offical preamble of the Constitution (or at least the more conventional "rules for thee, not for me").
Lol without all the subsidies gas would be $12/gallon. And burning fossil fuels (40% is automotive) kills more than 250,000 Americans per year. Whats the cost of a human life brah?
I think they're more commenting on how the supposedly "free market" champions constantly interfere with the market when it suits their agenda
Exactly. Those people tend to be extreme hypocrites.
Yeah but in this case (EVs) it’s way better for public health and the “interference” is still a fraction of the scales tilted in fossil fuels favor.
That depends on if grandma is being evaluated by an Obama Death Panel (life is precious and invaluable) or by the stock market in 2020 (she has, what, a couple years left anyway, let her die).
In the US there is only one metric: Dow Jones death panel. The insanity of our culture is that Obama Death Panels were an invention of the Dow Jones death panel board to rally the lemming brained right against the concept of public healthcare (the horror!). Oh yeah, obligatory fuck Joe Lieberman.
Yes, that's the point. These politicians interfere and meddle and cry "free market" when it is convenient for them.
Would have been far easier to just type “there is no free market”
Exactly I am not getting all this subsidy unfairness nonsense that stops Chinese firms from selling cars here. The only difference I'm seeing is that we're subsidizing cars on the back end through oil subsidies, and they are subsidizing cars on the front end with production subsidies.
Free market involves pluralism of systems and distribution of power as important preconditions. Lobbyism requires monoculture of systems and power being sufficiently centralized to be controllable.
Also, the free market is a tool, not a utopia. It optimizes for whatever the people setting the limits of it make it optimize for.
Hence things I said. Otherwise the wheel is free for taking for the worst people.
Not.
Only when it helps to keep the poors in their place.
Not even only. The recognized goal of the modern marketplace is to achieve monopoly. Billionaires write entire textbooks on the subject.
To play devil's advocate for a moment, is it really a free market if we are incentivizing one technology over another?
When the oil industry doesn't have to pay to clean up their externalities we already don't have a free market. You break it you pay. Fixing the externalities by incentivizing better technology is at minimum a correction to the market.
That argument can be made about the tax incentives.
However, regulations about emissions are intrinsically something we want, and we shouldn't hold back on that just because gas cars can't get to the level of emissions we need.