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- Path: sparky!uunet!mcsun!uknet!newcastle.ac.uk!turing!ncmh
- From: Chris.Holt@newcastle.ac.uk (Chris Holt)
- Newsgroups: alt.philosophy.objectivism
- Subject: Re: Evidence for the market
- Message-ID: <C17LHA.BEB@newcastle.ac.uk>
- Date: 21 Jan 93 14:55:58 GMT
- References: <C140Lo.C03@newcastle.ac.uk> <C14CK1.1CM@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>
- Organization: University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, NE1 7RU
- Lines: 30
- Nntp-Posting-Host: turing
-
- violett@indiana.edu (Andrew J Violette) writes:
- >Chris.Holt@newcastle.ac.uk (Chris Holt) writes:
-
- >>Hee hee. Then why do I have such faith in the free market, in
- >>limited circumstances?
-
- >I am a little bit confused as to what your definition of free market is. A
- >free market defined only under "limited circumstances" is not a free market,
- >it is a regulated market.
-
- It is possible to have a free market in beans and a regulated market
- in medical care, side by side. It is possible to have a free market
- in porkbelly futures, regulated by the constraint that one cannot
- leverage beyond a given percentage. The point is that modelling a
- free market, one makes assumptions (sufficient diversity among
- suppliers and buyers for supply/demand curves to be continuous and
- monotonic, sufficient information about a product that the buyer
- can act rationally); the less likely the assumptions are to hold,
- the less accurate the model, and the more it is necessary to add
- other constraints.
-
- > I guess in this context Gorbachev, Clinton, and
- >anybody else more liberal than Stalin, is pro-free-market.
-
- Not particularly relevant.
-
- -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Chris.Holt@newcastle.ac.uk Computing Lab, U of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
- -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
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