Is There a Viable Conservative Alternative to Markets?

[Chris]

The market is a means not an end. All too often we mistake the opposite as true.

[Mister D]

The market is a means not an end. All too often we mistake the opposite as true.

That's a good way to put it.

[Sergeant Gleed]

Short answer:

No.

Free markets are the best and most efficient means of determining the cost of goods and services satisfying both producer and consumer, and providing the widest distribution, thereby benefitting the greatest number of people.

The alternative to free markets are command driven markets, and those are less efficient. Say "Solyndra".

[Sergeant Gleed]

The market is a means not an end. All too often we mistake the opposite as true.

The market IS the means to the end.

It's where the seller meets the buyer.

[Sergeant Gleed]

What I appreciate about Tucker's stance is that he calls attention to the human cost of economic changes and dislocation. This is too often overlooked or even dismissed by the liberal right. A presupposition off the OP appears to be that the economic efficiency should always be our primary concern. Should it?

Economic change always produces dislocation in labor markets.

So does stagnation, because stagnation is never static.

Death ends the process of change.

It's the only thing that does.

Change is a sometimes uncomfortable part of living.

What usually makes things worse is when the government tries to interfere. Just look at how Hoover and FDR screwed up the Great Depression.

[Captdon]

The paragragh beginning "Markets, and market rationality… " seems muddled. It's not markets that undermine traditional relationships in community, for they bring communities together, or could, but economy on a larger, global, anonymous level where it becomes primary over even political society, which ties in with the preceding paragraphs.

Anyway it raises some interesting topics for discussion.

Markets are necessary, ofcourse. The problem is that economic giants can control the markets today in a way they never could before. Walmart destroys local stores with loss pricing and then they are the market. I may be on the wrong track for this. If so, just politely tell me to go away.

[Chris]

The market IS the means to the end.

It's where the seller meets the buyer.

Yes, I know what the market is.

[Chris]

Markets are necessary, ofcourse. The problem is that economic giants can control the markets today in a way they never could before. Walmart destroys local stores with loss pricing and then they are the market. I may be on the wrong track for this. If so, just politely tell me to go away.

Markets as a means of exchange are necessary. Anthropology shows us that primitive tribes who became isolated from trade reverted evolutionarily or died out.

Thing is Walmart doesn't destroy locals, we do in choosing where to shop. All Walmart does is figure out what we want and gives it to us good and hard. As HL Mencken put it: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

[Chris]

Economic change always produces dislocation in labor markets.

So does stagnation, because stagnation is never static.

Death ends the process of change.

It's the only thing that does.

Change is a sometimes uncomfortable part of living.

What usually makes things worse is when the government tries to interfere. Just look at how Hoover and FDR screwed up the Great Depression.

Markets mixed with technology isolate. We exchange with unknowns. Trust that would normally bind people is absent.

[Sergeant Gleed]

Yes, I know what the market is.

The OP says otherwise.