OK, you have repeatedly said central planning is required because you don't trust the people to make their own decisions. "Who do you think is in the government vs the citizenry - different species?"
Corruption comes from power.
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Why? Again, you make claims without any plausible explanation.
A plausible explanation would be agriculture required protection of a state, so the state formed as a power structure. The power was then seen as a means to attain what one wants, so rather than compete in the market, people started rent seeking favors from the state, and the state, needing to fund it's armies, sold out to the highest bidders. That is the emergence of corruption.
Things don't just magically turn into capitalism.
Half of the global market is comprised of multinational corporations that for all intents and purposes own governments. Hardly representative of 'free trade'. They have a habit of buying up all of their competition with resultant oligopolies. So much for the 'invisible hand' in competitive pricing. They conspire among themselves and with governments to set prices. The other half of the market either trades according to negotiated trade agreements between nations, which includes price setting or absent trade agreements, subject to stiff protectionist duties. Again not really fitting the definition of a free market. So where exactly is that elusive global free market?
That is a false liberal/socialist narrative. You give it away with your hedging "for all intents and purposes." You speak in metaphors because the truth is corporation do not own the government. They collude together because the corporations need the political power and the politicians need to corporate wealth to keep getting elected. You even stray into the truth of the matter: "They conspire among themselves and with governments to set prices."Quote:
Half of the global market is comprised of multinational corporations that for all intents and purposes own governments.
Negotiated trade agreements are the fixed market, not the free market.
Your string of disconnected premises is false.
Let everyone note that the post of mine Who quotes has to do with a challenge to her previous false argument, that contrary to here opinion no government controls the global market, but she does not address that at all.
Multinationals own people in government, a lot of people - either on the direct payment plan or on the deferred payment plan. Thus for all intents and purposes, they own government(s). I'm speaking internationally here. Who said they didn't collude? Of course, they collude. That is all made possible because elected representatives can be bought either through campaign funding, promises of well-paid post-political positions or good old-fashioned envelopes full of money. At the end of the day, the ones with the bags full of money end up calling the shots. To the multinationals, that's just the cost of doing business. I don't understand where this was unclear or where we are really not in agreement.
You still haven't stated where this global free market exists. All you did was to pretend that there really is some error in my argument. There isn't. Politicians are for sale. You can call it mutual backscratching if you like, but the only free market that exists is in the prices for political favors.
I think that we are being systematically brainwashed to be consumers first. Perhaps that's the place to start. People have to have some currency other than unchecked materialism. All that mental effort spent finding ways to earn money to spend impulsively because we have become Pavlov's dogs when it comes to advertising and within a couple of years, we are tossing those items for new items because we don't have enough space for all of the junk we buy. TBH, it's crazy how much western society wastes, but it's integrated into the current economic model.
But there is not multi-national government, no global government, none. Your argument was there must be for the market to function. That is false, completely and utterly false.
I've also explained how under state capitalism, as opposed to free market capitalism, governments and businesses collude. Politicians sell out power for the money to support their re-election. ower corrupts. There's no argument there.
"You still haven't stated where this global free market exists," is a puzzling statement. It exists as we all know well and good in global international trade.
Your premises are unfounded. They're merely opinions based on imaginative possibilities, not plausible realities.
The free market is what the government tries to manage for the sake of politicians and buinesses that seek political favors. As Franz Oppenheimer put it in 1922
The economic means is the free market. The political means is a corruption of the market.Quote:
There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others… I propose in the following discussion to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others, the “economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.”
Anyway, your initial premises simply do not hold water in light of the global, internation market where there is not government in power.
Global oligopolies are not free market actors. They control markets internationally. They set prices internationally. How can a market be free if there are actors who are so powerful that they can literally control international competition and set global prices? That's capitalism on steroids, not a free market. The international market is every bit as corrupt as domestic markets.