[QatzelOk]

The invisible hand of Adam Smith is expected to, not only move things around, but also to make important decisions regarding the allocation of resources.

Many people, especially in the USA, are inclined to say "let the market decide" many things.

And in some things, I agree.

Let the market decide who gets to drive a Ferrari. ..Agree

Let the market decide: who gets to wear a diamond tiara. .. Agree

Let the market decide: who gets to spend four weeks vacation in Thailand. .. Agree
...

But then there are other more controversial areas of regulation

Let the market decide where people live and how they get there. .. Not sure

Let the market decide what energy sources we use. .. Not sure

Let the market decide whether property is public or private. .. Not sure
...

But my main concern is the areas of jurisdiction where "letting the market decide" can really do a lot of harm

Let the market decide who gets a decent education. .. Strongly Disagree

Let the market decide who has safe drinking water. .. Strongly Disagree

Let the market decide who gets medical care. .. Strongly Disagree

Let the market decide which children get raised and which don't. .. Strongly disagree
...

For the last point, I am citing a graph from the Calgary Herald entitled "Study details fast-rising child care fees in Calgary":

...
Notice that the five Quebec cities on the chart are way down at the bottom of the price heap. This is because Quebec alone has subsidized daycare for kids - $7 per day is all you pay. Toronto and Calgary (and most of the rest of Canada) let the market decide which kids go to daycare and which kids stay home with their unwilling parents and watch Spiderman and torture cats.

This is obviously one area (child rearing) where letting the market decide is like letting Jack the Ripper decide which women get slashed and which don't.

[D Z]

When it comes to things like drinking water and medical care, it's not that the market is some entity making a moral decision on resource allocation. The point is that in the process of allowing unfettered voluntary exchange, clean drinking water, medical care...etc. will become most available and affordable for the masses. For example, 18th century European states had the same dilemma with food, claiming that the market shouldn't decide who starves and who's fed. I sympathize with the _intentions_ you display with state guidance, I just don't share the same confidence in central planning to be more effective (or as effective).

I would look into just how unfettered preschool markets are in Canada. In the U.S., there are strict licensing constraints regarding capacity, equipment, structure, staff...etc. that make it difficult for small time money to compete. It's not a surprise that prices have been rising as women have shifted into full-time jobs driving demand for child care up...the supply won't catch up as long as barriers to entry are too high. Preschool can't really scale since there needs to be local options.

[Suska]

Letting the market decide is a way of saying we are not an organized society in this respect.

[XogGyux]

All modern "capitalist" countries have substantial regulations and manipulation in their markets. And that is by design because in the past when "market ran free" it almost invariable ended up f**king up the society. Great depression, companies (such as GE for instance) selling equipment to both axis and allies powers in WWII (and in turn having a hand at killing citizens from its own country,) accidents (poisoning, defective devices, etc) and the list goes on and on. Many if not all of those "pesky" regulations that all of the sudden have become our enemy now at some point or another came up to protect us from corporate greed. Pure capitalism, if let to its own will result in few company-monopolies that squeeze the life out of smaller companies and then squeeze salaries from its workers, keep a false supply scarcity (read on De Beers corporation and how they kept an artificial scarcity to sell a fairly abundant and worthless product for billions of dollars while at the same time contributing to African conflict) to keep prices up just for the sake of getting more money.
To illustrate this better just watch this

Thanks to all those "pesky"regulations (also known as market control) the american driving this car might survive while the Mexican driving the other car is instantly dead. But the mob is mindless and follows the loudest voice.

Anyhow regarding the original post.
I do agree the government should (and must) impose some restrictions and allocate certain resources in vital parts of the society. In a perfect world where there is no scarcity there would be a communist government and that would be the best way of government (keep in mind that the original philosophers that gave birth to communism they acknowledge that true communism cannot exist while scarcity exist and therefore no country in history has ever been a real communist country, not Russia not china, not any other). Since we are certainly very far from eliminating scarcity communism is obviously not a realistic option.
I think governments should aim to cover as many of the "BASIC" needs as possible based on their importance.
In no particular order i would include (this list is not exhaustive): Military defense, policing, public infrastructure (roads, etc), healthcare, basic education (which i consider high school/college to be basic in today's word), some sort of social security net (e.g. IF NEEDED some very basic income to cover shelter/food).
I do not think government should offer childcare (at least until the very basic ones are 100% covered). If government guarantee a decent education (any decent education will include sexual reproduction education and family planning at some point) the number of unwanted pregnancies should be relatively small (NOT non-existent because accidents do happen, etc) and/or social security net help might be appropriate on a per-case basis of those few instances.
Any other instance i feel is the parent's obligation as "educated" citizens to make their best decision about when to have children and how to care for them. And I mean BOTH parents. This is not something that should be dumped on the mother alone while the father does whatever the heck he wants.
Again that is my view but i do understand that real world is a bit more complex so even though i don't think the government should have a significant help in daycare I am not 100% opposed to it IF most other "basic needs" are covered first and the government's plan to tackle childcare is reasonable financially.

[One Degree]

The market decided small business should be eradicated. The government instead of protecting us as is their legal responsibility, assisted them. At this point, the discussion becomes mute, because you have already destroyed the basis of society and of a free market.

[XogGyux]

The market decided small business should be eradicated. The government instead of protecting us as is their legal responsibility, assisted them. At this point, the discussion becomes mute, because you have already destroyed the basis of society and of a free market.

In a way, a market-controlled is an outcome of a system that lets the "market" decide. Government protecting anyone (large or small) is the opposite.

[One Degree]

In a way, a market-controlled is an outcome of a system that lets the "market" decide. Government protecting anyone (large or small) is the opposite.

Sorry, but this statement makes no sense to me. A free market does not decide whether or not it is controlled by the government, unless you mean it's abuse leads to government control. Obviously, a totally free market would have no government control at all.

[XogGyux]

Free market -> very large corporations -> lots of money into politics -> politics that favor free market and stump on the small people.
That is a reasonable outcome of a full free market.

You said the government's legal responsibility is to protect us (I agree). If the government was to interfere to protect us then its no longer a free market. Better explained?

[One Degree]

Yes, thank you.

[QatzelOk]

All modern "capitalist" countries have substantial regulations and manipulation in their markets. And that is by design because in the past when "market ran free" it almost invariable ended up f**king up the society.

Yes, this is true. But I am wondering just how many jurisdictions should be primarily private, and which should be primarily public.

I think education, health care, housing, and child-rearing are the basics of life, and unwitting people should not have to grow up ignorant, physically ruined, psychologically damaged, or homeless... because of the vague notion that "free markets" will take some future generation to heaven.

The free market has almost made it so that future generations might not even exist. And they have also decided that they feel more comfortable with weak, incompetent, and dishonest governance.

The only defenders of "free market" are the parasites who benefit from it. But they control media and finance.

Thanks to all those "pesky"regulations (also known as market control) the american driving this car might survive while the Mexican driving the other car is instantly dead.

The fact that drivers are free to put the lives of pedestrians and cyclists along with the health of the environment and their own communities at great risk... says more to me about the lack of good regulations.

When it comes to things like drinking water and medical care, it's not that the market is some entity making a moral decision on resource allocation. The point is that in the process of allowing unfettered voluntary exchange, clean drinking water, medical care...etc. will become most available and affordable for the masses.

Not "the point is," but "the theory is." And the theory has been proven false many times. It's just our rich masters who keep hammering us with their dead social theories as they encourage us to destroy other nations like Serbia and Libya which have had much more interesting experiences with balancing private and public jurisdictions.

[XogGyux]

The free market has almost made it so that future generations might not even exist. And they have also decided that they feel more comfortable with weak, incompetent, and dishonest governance.

I have a less pessimistic view. Sure we could finish our world soon with a nuclear war or something but I think your statement reflects more about environmental pollution/destruction more than nuclear war (which i don't deny is also a possibility).
Though i advocate for greener technologies and clearer industries i believe future generations will be better equipped to deal with the disaster we are leaving them behind. They will develop technologies to clean the pollution and to slow/revert global warming. Make no mistake this is not an excuse to continue the path we are going, but rather a result of it in combination with human ingenuity. I think we will eventually develop CO2 scrubbing installations, genetically engineered plants more efficient in CO2 consumption, perhaps even solar lenses to disperse some energy and slow warming. The point is we have reasons to remain a bit optimistic (though we still have to slow/stop the all the f***ing we are doing).

The only defenders of "free market" are the parasites who benefit from it. But they control media and finance.

If only... If that were truth we would be 1 revolt away from eliminating them. Nah, the "system" has managed to convince a substantial portion of the population that we can all be billionaires and the only thing stopping everyone from becoming a billionaire Trump is mexicans, china, communism, and regulations when the reality is very far from that.

[QatzelOk]

I have a less pessimistic view. ...
Though i advocate for greener technologies and clearer industries i believe future generations will be better equipped to deal with the disaster we are leaving them behind. They will develop technologies to clean the pollution and to slow/revert global warming. Make no mistake this is not an excuse to continue the path we are going...

Virtually every other society has destroyed its natural environment. And the "less pessimistic" always believe their gods will save them.

In our case, you are saying that technology - the god that our elite has marketed to the point of destroying the Earth's livability - will save future generations. You are saying that "the market" will fix itself.

Let the market save us after it decides what to do.

In past societies, this type of optimism was spread in order to stop or delay any measures that would change the social norms and practices of society. These measures were delayed so that the elite could continue living out their fake high-status existences unchanged and unhumbled.

Why do you believe "this time it will be different?"

soundtrack

[XogGyux]

I am under the impression you think i said something along the lines of "ignore everything,we are doing great" when i fact i said the opposite and said very clearly that we need to move toward that (after all technology cannot help us if we don't develop the technologies).
Just saying that the future might not be as grimm either.

[D Z]

Not "the point is," but "the theory is." And the theory has been proven false many times. It's just our rich masters who keep hammering us with their dead social theories as they encourage us to destroy other nations like Serbia and Libya which have had much more interesting experiences with balancing private and public jurisdictions.

Commentators love to pick out events and blame on the free market, though it's always full of half truths and most claims have been refuted.

[D Z]

Letting the market decide is a way of saying we are not an organized society in this respect.

A common fallacy:

In eighteenth-century France the saying laissez faire, laissez passer was the formula into which some of the champions of the cause of liberty compressed their program. Their aim was the establishment of the unhampered market society. In order to attain this end they advocated the abolition of all laws preventing more industrious and more efficient people from outdoing less industrious and less efficient competitors and restricting the mobility of commodities and of men. It was this that the famous maxim was designed to express.

In our age of passionate longing for government omnipotence the formula laissez faire is in disrepute. Public opinion now considers it a manifestation both of moral depravity and of the utmost ignorance.

As the interventionist sees things, the alternative is "automatic forces" or "conscious planning." It is obvious, he implies, that to rely upon automatic processes is sheer stupidity. No reasonable man can seriously recommend doing nothing and letting things go as they do without interference on the part of purposive action. A plan, by the very fact that it is a display of conscious action, is incomparably superior to the absence of any planning. Laissez faire is said to mean: Let the evils last, do not try to improve the lot of mankind by reasonable action.

This is utterly fallacious talk. The argument advanced for planning is entirely derived from an impermissible interpretation of a metaphor. It has no foundation other than the connotations implied in the term "automatic" which it is customary to apply in a metaphorical sense for the description of the market process. Automatic, says the Concise Oxford Dictionary, means "unconscious, unintelligent, merely mechanical." Automatic, says Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, means "not subject to the control of the will, ... performed without active thought and without conscious intention or direction." What a triumph for the champion of planning to play this trump card!

The truth is that the alternative is not between a dead mechanism or a rigid automatism on one hand and conscious planning on the other hand. The alternative is not plan or no plan. The question is whose planning? Should each member of society plan for himself, or should a benevolent government alone plan for them all? The issue is not automatism versus conscious action; it is autonomous action of each individual versus the exclusive action of the government. It is freedom versus government omnipotence.

Laissez faire does not mean: Let soulless mechanical forces operate. It means: Let each individual choose how he wants to cooperate in the social division of labor; let the consumers determine what the entrepreneurs should produce. Planning means: Let the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion.

Under laissez faire, says the planner, it is not those goods which people "really" need that are produced, but those goods from the sale of which the highest returns are expected. It is the objective of planning to direct production toward the satisfaction of the "true" needs. But who is to decide what the "true" needs are?

Thus, for instance, Professor Harold Laski, the former chairman of the British Labor Party, would determine as the objective of the planned direction of investment "that the use of the investor's savings will be in housing rather than in cinemas." It is beside the point whether or not one agrees with the professor's view that better houses are more important than moving pictures. It is a fact that the consumers, in spending part of their money for admission to the movies, have made another choice. If the masses of Great Britain, the same people whose votes swept the Labor Party into power, were to stop patronizing the moving pictures and to spend more for comfortable homes and apartments, profit-seeking business would be forced to invest more in building homes and apartment houses and less in the production of expensive pictures. It was Mr. Laski's desire to defy the wishes of the consumers and to substitute his own will for that of the consumers. He wanted to do away with the democracy of the market and to establish the absolute rule of the production tsar. Perhaps he believed that he was right from a higher point of view, and that as a superman he was called upon to impose his own valuations on the masses of inferior men. But then he ought to have been frank enough to say so plainly.

All this passionate praise of the supereminence of government action is but a poor disguise for the individual interventionist's self-deification. The great god State is a great god only because it is expected to do exclusively what the individual advocate of interventionism wants to see achieved. Only that plan is genuine which the individual planner fully approves. All other plans are simply counterfeit. In saying "plan" what the author of a book on the benefits of planning has in mind is, of course, his own plan alone. He does not take into account the possibility that the plan which the government puts into practice may differ from his own plan. The various planners agree only with regard to their rejection of laissez faire, i.e., the individuals' discretion to choose and to act. They entirely disagree with regard to the choice of the unique plan to be adopted. To every exposure of the manifest and incontestable defects of interventionist policies the champions of interventionism react in the same way. These faults, they say, were the results of spurious interventionism; what we are advocating is good interventionism, not bad interventionism. And, of course, good interventionism is the professor's own brand.

Laissez faire means: Let the common man choose and act; do not force him to yield to a dictator.

https://mises.org/blog/mises-meaning-laissez-faire

[QatzelOk]

I am under the impression you think i said something along the lines of "ignore everything,we are doing great" when i fact i said the opposite and said very clearly that we need to move toward that (after all technology cannot help us if we don't develop the technologies).
Just saying that the future might not be as grimm either.

Drone technology is coming along great, as are water cannon technology, Internet spying and public manipulation through mass media.

All of these rapidly-developing technologies are aimed at stopping the public from changing the course of their own societies. And we have lots of new fake-green technologies and propaganda to fool the public into thinking their making decisions that will help the earth survive.

You seem to think that there will be an 11th-hour change in the direction of our technology, and yet it's already 11:45 and our technology is being increasingly aimed at controlling the 99%.

Imagine a horse living in a stable that's on fire. He is confident his masters will save him with their technology, and he believes this just as his masters are tying him to a post with a new, unbreakable leash. "Oh my. The market has decided to tie me up (stability) even though my home is on fire."

freedom versus government omnipotence.
...
Laissez faire means: Let the common man choose and act; do not force him to yield to a dictator.

What naive crap. "The market" uses brainwashing to ensure that private capital becomes "the dictator" that this text claims to fear.

And in a real democracy, THE PEOPLE are directly asked by the government for input into decision-making. Libya had this in spades, as did Yugoslavia.

"The state" isn't always the government. In the USA, multinational corporations tell the "government" what to do and what to say. This means the the multinationals have become the horrible, treacherous dictator that Mises warns us about because there is no regulatory government to control their abuse.

[One Degree]

I agree planning on technology to save us is a very bad idea. The result will be like the peach I just bought apparently grown with advanced technology. The outside was the perfect picture of what a peach should be without a bruise on it. I bit into and found out the perfection was only a quarter of an inch deep. After that was some macabre imitation of a peach with a pit that had totally disintegrated. Our technology is being used to increase profits, not to benefit people. It will continue to paint over the problem so we can not see the rotten core. Our only hope is to reduce the number of people on earth and find away to leave earth.

[D Z]

What naive crap. "The market" uses brainwashing to ensure that private capital becomes "the dictator" that this text claims to fear.

And in a real democracy, THE PEOPLE are directly asked by the government for input into decision-making. Libya had this in spades, as did Yugoslavia.

"The state" isn't always the government. In the USA, multinational corporations tell the "government" what to do and what to say. This means the the multinationals have become the horrible, treacherous dictator that Mises warns us about because there is no regulatory government to control their abuse.

Call it what you want. The multinationals are using _the state_ to allow them to do things they wouldn't otherwise be able to do. Always fighting for the "right" regulation that raises barriers to competitive entry. Without that outlet, THE PEOPLE, as a collection of individuals with unique consumption preferences, could exercise their ability to think and choose far more advantageously. Throwing brainwashed around is a pretty emotional defense mechanism.

[QatzelOk]

Call it what you want. The multinationals are using _the state_ to allow them to do things they wouldn't otherwise be able to do. Always fighting for the "right" regulation that raises barriers to competitive entry. Without that outlet, THE PEOPLE, as a collection of individuals with unique consumption preferences, could exercise their ability to think and choose far more advantageously. Throwing brainwashed around is a pretty emotional defense mechanism.

I don't "throw brainwashing" around. I have studied the phenomenon extensively.

By urban design and by mass media, the range of emotions of the citizen are reduced to something that can be controlled by 'the state' which, in the USA, means the largest corporations.

And unlike governments, this "state" answers to no one. Like the worst dictators of olde.

Also, since capitalism has produced so many things that can destroy the built environment, the fact that we're still plodding along in SUVS and using up all our precious oil... demonstrates that our regulations serve only the interests of "the corporate state."

This is perhaps the largest tragedy (and the most abusive power relationship) in the history of homo sapiens. And corporations are making sure we sleep through our own demise so they can keep on selling hamburgers until the earth's clock runs out.

The cold stoicism of the modern consumer is a product of mass media overconsumption. It has made us fatally numb to things that affect our survival.

[Suska]

In eighteenth-century France the saying laissez faire, blah blah blah

Can you tell how many fucks I give? If you want to join the Borg and call that a free market decision that's your affair and it's just a word. When organizations conspire to rentier the fuck out of a population that doesn't represent the little man's freedom.