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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Hunger and the Free Market: re to Cramer
Message-ID: <951@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 22-Jul-85 09:07:44 EDT
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.951
Posted: Mon Jul 22 09:07:44 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 24-Jul-85 06:02:04 EDT
References: <375@kontron.UUCP>
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 33

In article <375@kontron.UUCP> cramer@kontron.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) writes:

>> You have got to be *kidding* Mr. Cramer!  Go to Third World countries
>> throughout the world and see how many poor people are *starving* while
>> a landed aristocracy controls the vast majority of the land.

>Mr. Sevener: Do you know what a free market is?  A free market is unheard
>of in the Third World.  Most Third World governments distribute franchises,
>licenses, and business permits to those with friends in high places.  (Try
>Somoza's Nicaragua for a good example.)

It seems to me that there is a serious problem here.  Actually, two problems.
Some of Cramer's remarks seem to imply that a market in which the economic
forces are unrestrained is still not free if the distribution of wealth is
not sufficiently equitable.  This seems to me to present a problem because I
don't see how you are going to get to a free market in any current society.
Coupled with this is a more serious problem; in the absence of any coercive
force outside of the market, there's nothing to prevent tremendous
inequities from developing.  There seems to me to be a persistent trend
towards greater size wherever there are not natural boundaries to check that
growth.  Larger corporations tend to be better able to weather bad times
than smaller ones, and can recover from their mistakes more easily.  This
growth is partially checked in this country by a combination of political
boundaries, restrictive laws, and regional differences.  By virtue of
anti-monopoly laws, we have a market which is not sufficiently free to
permit this growth to continue unchecked.  This distinction is important, by
the way.  It is simplistic to view market freedom as being all-or-nothing.
The current US market is much less free than the markets of pre-antitrust
law were, but I don't think that anyone is especially worse off as a result.
I'm willing to live with a fair amount of law in exchange for some reduction
in the economic power of the rich.

Charley Wingate  umcp-cs!mangoe