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This is a totally normal thing to find on your food's packaging
(startrek.website)
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this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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But a free market specifically focuses on the removal of regulations. And a lack of regulations is exactly why other countries are able to use slavery in the first place. Ultimately, these companies are are exploiting the free market of lower-income countries that can't afford to regulate their businesses in order to maximize profits.
That's capitalism, not a free market.
A free market requires regulation to keep it free, otherwise monopolies take over.
Capitalism is simply the focus on allowing businesses to gain and maintain capital, which is not directly tied to regulation, though you're right in that it strongly incentivizes lack of regulation to truly maximize capital gain in spite of its negative impact on consumers. A free market specifically focuses on removing government intervention. Who do you think is meant to have the power to prevent a monopoly otherwise?
Capitalism is rule by whoever owns the most capital. Its not in the capitalists' interests to allow a free market - competition is dangerous to whoever currently owns the most capital and gets to make the rules.
For a market to be free, it specifically requires enforcing anti-monopolist, pro-competitive regulation. Furthermore, the decision making efficiency of a free market is enhanced by regulation that allows individual decision makers to have something closer to perfect information.
The idea that deregulation leads to a free market is capitalist propaganda that only benefits the billionaires.
That's just flat-out wrong. I got this from Wikipedia, since it explains the concept in a pretty easy-to-understand way:
Free markets remove all corporate regulations, and allow for companies to do whatever they want, including using predatory pricing against the competition to run them out of business and create a monopoly, or price fixing, working together with competition to ensure they both get inflated profits at the expense of the consumers. Any regulation that currently keeps companies in check, however poorly it works, would be completely removed if a free market is adopted.
Do you actually believe that though? Think about it. Would a lack of regulations really prevent monopolies, or would it enable them? And is a market that has been captured by monopolies "free"?
It's free from regulations. That's why it's called that. It's not about freedom for consumers, it's about the ability for companies to freely influence the market without worrying about silly things like ethics and fairness. Lack of regulation would enable monopolies, correct; that's what a free market would do. We need a regulated market, which - as I explained in the last post - is the opposite of a free market, in order to allow for regulations that prevent monopolies.
Currently, we have an effectively free market in the US. The regulations we have put in place are dysfunctional at best and completely broken at worst, which is what is currently allowing companies to form effective monopolies and benefit from slave and child labor. We have far too few real, impactful regulations, and half the US population thinks we need even fewer.