"Free Market"

Author: Nd24007

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Nd24007
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It's no secret that governments hate the free market. At its base, every single government tax, license, regulation and restriction is an implicit rebuke of the idea that humans should be able to interact freely with those around them.

Purveyors of socialist dogma to believe that free interactions between sovereign individuals is a scourge that must be eradicated. Because, you see, the fact that food, clothing, shelter, health care and the means of production don't magically rain from the sky into the lap of every person on the planet means that any attempt to exchange your skills and services with another in return for compensation is slavery. (No, this is not an analogy, it's LITERAL SLAVERY, guys!)

The words "free market" have become so tainted in modern economic discourse that their very mention tends to evoke a slew of supposedly related and equally hated terms. "Capitalism" and "big business" and "banker" are thrown together in a stew with "free market" so that anyone who talks positively about voluntary transactions between free people in a positive manner is obviously a poor-hating fat cat who lights his cigars with $100 bills and dines on the tears of beggars.

But here's a puzzler for the socialists in the crowd: Why is it that the very banksters that they so rightfully rage against are in fact their biggest allies in the fight against the free market?



As I've already stated, we know that the very raison d’être of government is to undermine, skew, and otherwise hamper free exchange among its citizens. Government, after all, is a claim of ownership over a geographical territory by a cartel of crooks. That claim (according to the cartel and its defenders) gives the mafia the right to set rules for and impose restrictions on the inhabitants of that region. To understand how the gang of crook wields this power over the free market, one merely has to examine the history of the creation of the FDA or the ugly truth about the minimum wage or the nitty gritty details of how the financial regulators really operate.

But it would be folly to conclude from the simple observation that government is put in place to fleece the public that the politicians are the ones who benefit from this extortion scheme. Quite the contrary. The politicians are the punching bags that are put out for the public to lay into, expendable fall guys who are put in place merely to allow an enraged populace to let off steam without ever threatening the real rulers of the system. As Quigley observed long ago:

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.

So if interventions in the free market aren't merely about lining the pockets of the political puppets, then who does this system really benefit?


Nd24007
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Well, the big business monopolists, of course. Not only do we have the examples cited above (the FDA, the minimum wage, etc.) of big businesses benefiting from governments regulating their competitors out of the marketplace, you can watch Big Oil documentary is a case study in how an entire industry can grow up in conjunction with governmental institutions whose function is to cement big businesses in place as ruling monopolists. Oh, how the Rockefellers fell when the Supreme Court split up Standard Oil, hey?
But more to the point, the foundation of our economy lies neither in the politicians nor in the big business monopolists whose back pocket they rest in. It's in the bankster class that creates the money out of nothing and loans it out (at interest, of course) to those cronies they wish to succeed in the phony baloney economy. And it is for this very reason that the central bankers are always the ones arguing for greater "governmental" power over the economy. Because, in the end, the government is just the mask that they wear to conceal their true face from the public.

Century of Enslavement" documentary will already know all about this. When Morgan and his fellow Wall Street moneylenders knew that the public was fed up with the amount of control that they wielded over the country, they willingly put on the "chains" of a centralized, governmental institution. Rather than chain them down, though, the Federal Reserve that they created in fact benefited the banksters class. With the imprimatur of "government" behind their owned and controlled Fed monstrosity, Morgan and the fat cats now had control of a privately-owned central bank that could effectively privatize their profits and socialize their losses.

In the early years, the Fed was used to underwrite the military racketeering of the First World War and oversee the expansion of the bubble that was the Roaring Twenties. But with the Great Depression (which they helped to engineer), the banksters now found a new rallying cry for even further intervention in the markets: Keynesian engineering of the economy! For, you see, it was "free markets" that failed in the 1930s, so the answer was only to be found by greater "governmental" (bankster) control. This fallacious argumentcontinues to influence economists to this day, so that the crisis of 2008 was down to a "lack of government regulation" or "the demise of Glass-Steagal" or whatever other scapegoat could be found. But the idea that the crisis was caused by government interventions in the free market? Why, that's unthinkable!

This mentality has now pervaded society to the point where the public simply accepts that there is a central bank whose very mandateis to "foster economic conditions that achieve both stable prices and maximum sustainable employment." And the only way it can possibly live up to that mandate is by interfering in the markets with their magic money out of nothing. Trump knows this; that's why he decried the banksters' interventions in the markets before he was president and now muses about how nice it would be if they intervened more now that he's the don of the governmental mafia.

Many, many other examples can be cited showing how the bankers love to hate the free market, but perhaps no more shocking example exists than that documented in Antony C. Sutton's book, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. In that work, Sutton demonstrates in meticulous detail how the Wall Street financiers aided and abetted the Bolsheviks, not because they had particular affinity for the communists' professed ideals of equality and well-being, but because both groups shared a hatred for free markets and free peoples. After laying out the documentation of Wall Street's support for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 over the course of 11 scrupulously documented chapters, Sutton concludes:

 The financiers were power-motivated and therefore assisted any political vehicle that would give them an entree to power: Trotsky, Lenin, the tsar, Kolchak, Denikin — all received aid, more or less. All, that is, but those who wanted a truly free individualist society.

This is the plain truth of the matter: The bankers love whatever ideas, systems, beliefs and revolutionary movements will allow them to have more power over the lives of others. Central banks, regulatory bodies, rules, regulations, taxes; all of these are meant to constrain the bankers' competition, not the bankers themselves. Having been created by and for the benefit of the bankers on the beliefs of the naive socialists who think that they could create a utopia if only they were the ones making the rules and intervening in the voluntary interactions of others, how could these market manipulations do anything but line the pockets and increase the power of the monopolists?

It's the oldest trick in the book, but it still works. Every. Single. Time. And that's why the bankers continue to use it.

Greyparrot
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Lawyers have been, and always will be, the quickest and most efficient way to regulate the free market.

All government needs to do is supply courtrooms and enforce the laws on the books regarding contracts and liability.

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@Greyparrot
 "Lawyers have been, and always will be, the quickest and most efficient way to regulate the free market."


That  a true statement...  Can't actually argue that...

Lawyers and judges are essentially to up hold the rules of the law. And more specifically what you just mentioned 
contracts and liability are essentially the most important factor to regulate the so called "Free Market".

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free market = might is right
good luck
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@Nd24007
More importantly, Lawyers eliminate power abuses and the typical "might is right" crap you see in Eurotrash nations.
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@Nd24007
I like what you're saying in general, government bad, banks bad.

But how do you propose we protect the hard-working-self-made-rugged-individualist-entrepreneur?

Like in the classic 1971 movie "McCabe and Mrs. Miller"?
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@Greyparrot
More importantly, Lawyers eliminate power abuses and the typical "might is right" crap you see in Eurotrash nations.
Lawyers can't do anything if the laws themselves are the problem.

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@3RU7AL
That's very true, which is why a constitutional right granting the freedom to associate without government restrictions is vital.
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@Greyparrot
That's very true, which is why a constitutional right granting the freedom to associate without government restrictions is vital.
Ok, freedom to "associate" is one thing, but isn't commerce supposed to be taxable?

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@3RU7AL
Taxes are fine. Free trade works as long as the taxes are fair, like sales tax. 
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@Greyparrot
Taxes are fine. Free trade works as long as the taxes are fair, like sales tax. 
What are your preferred parameters for "free trade" and what enforcement mechanisms do you imagine would be ideal?
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@3RU7AL
The existing parameters in the USA are fine. The only part that needs repealing is the Commerce Clause in the Constitution and have it rewritten as it was intended to prevent states from imposing state tariffs and state restrictions on interstate trade.
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@3RU7AL
Spiritual{ morals }, State{ regulation }, Free Market{ rape and pillage Earth }.

1} Spiritual { morals } recognizses we live on a finite planet with a finite set of resources and that if we donot  respect planets ecological systems, we all perish in our toxic waste and wasted resources.

2} State { regulations aka governor } recognizes spirit-of-need for reasonable standard-of-living and  spirit-of-freedom as the initiative-the-individual,

3} Free Market { rape and pillage of Earth } initiative of the individual with no morals  and unregulated.

Trump stated to colleges students, if you see a concrete wal in front of  you to go over or around it.

Drug cartels { dark-free-market } individual-initiative choose digging tunnels under the concrete wall, under USA highways, railroad tracks, airports etc to be the best approach.




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The problem is Capitalism, not 'the free market' (really, just 'markets').

Most of the smoke and mirrors happens because of a muddying of the definitions during the Cold War. The reason that people are against capitalism on a visceral level is because the term capitalism was historically coined to describe the conditions during the onset of the industrial revolution in many English-speaking countries, whereby the control of capital accumulated into a few hands. The huge influence that these people then wielded was used to corrupt every facet of society and cripple the majority of the people living in the country (who had recently been evicted from their families land after the Reformation caused the collapse of feudalism). Markets, of course, had existed for centuries in some form or another, and not many people have a principled loathing for them. But they existed in a context of ownership/access which made the market work for the common welfare of most people. Under the feudal system, a family didn't own their land, but they could not be evicted from it either, it was guaranteed to remain in the family. This system was backed up by the church, who also stymied the formation of large, centralized banking institutions by heavily penalizing usury. Then a lot of stuff happened involving mercenary companies, bankers, and standing armies, and a few ambitious princes took advantage of potential reformers in the Church to break away from the rest of Europe.

Immediately, they started breaking all of the 'rules' that the church had established. Banking exploded, and a process known as 'enclosure' started in Britain. The feudal lords who had supported Henry were rewarded by huge swathes of formerly monastic land. This immediately gave them a huge jump ahead in power, and they realized that they could earn a lot more money on 'their' land if, instead of having peasants pay them a portion of their produce in rent, they just combined all the land and farmed it as a business. The problem is that under feudalism, it wasn't 'their' land in the capitalist sense but in the feudal sense. Often, generations and generations of men had made improvements to that land because the system under which they lived guaranteed that their ancestors would have their lives improved through access to those improvements. If you ever see the jaw-dropping display of a sweeping hillside vineyard terraced in stone when travelling through Europe, that is the system under which such improvements developed, slowly, generation by generation. So what the Lords of England did was basically tell the peasants 'this is our land now, get off' and combined it into the English 'manor house' system.

The same newly rich men often began to take advantage of technological advancements. Contrary to how history books would summarize it, most of the technological developments which lead to advancements in productivity predated industrialism as a system. This newly minted powerful and rich clique had two conditions at play: new advances in machinery, and a newly homeless mass of people desperate for any means to survive. So they founded the first big businesses, and exploited the former peasants whom they had essentially robbed of their land. This is what originally drove urbanization, and the squalor and horror which accompanied it in Dickensian Britain. When you read the anti-Capitalist writers from the following century, the most popular and effective ones are not anti-market or anti-property. In fact, the equation of 'Capitalism' to 'markets' would seem utterly unintelligible to them; that redefining of the word took place in the context of the Cold War and makes sense in no other context, including our current age. They supported the extension of property to the men who had been robbed of it en masse. Their question was 'why is it okay for the rich to declare land which we lived on, which we improved, which we cared for for centuries? If we are suddenly to end feudalism and have property, why does all of the property start off in one man's hand?'

These people made a good point. Under feudalism, there was no proletariat class. The land was the means of production, and it was widely distributed in a way which gave every man access to the means for his survival. The proletariat class came into place through massive, inherently violent dispossession which has never been rectified. The creation of this class created the preconditions for the rise of socialist and communist movements. Any modern defender of Capitalism who refuses to see this root problem as a problem will never change society for the better. His every argument in favor of markets will just be kindling piled on his own pyre. What he says about big business corrupting regulatory agencies is very true. What he says about the disasters brought about by demand economies is very true. The arguments that he makes about collusion and monopoly are very true. But just adopting 'the free market' will not fix the economic structural problems that exist. At this point, with the means of production concentrated in a few powerful individual hands, allowing 'the market to take its course' would likely lead to a full-on communist revolt. A market only functions as a market when people can play on an equal playing field. That means a redistribution of land. It means that corporations do not exist. It means an equal access to existing intellectual capital (in the medieval system this was managed through a guild system which adopted apprentices to train). Because, ultimately, the class struggle doesn't result from socialist propaganda, or 'evil', or envy, it results from the existence of a proletariat class. The only way to end socialism is to end the proletariat class, and the only way to defend property is to make sure that every person has access to it. If those conditions were in place, no sane person would object to the market, and the insane persons who did would not be listened to.