All "free market" ideals require no/low barriers to entry in order for the market to be "self regulating". Said absence of barriers to entry almost never exists, hence the idea of completely free markets is completely naive - you need regulation.

Markets also cannot account for externalities. If those externalities are something you care about (e.g. the environment you live in) - you need regulation.

Economies of scale abound in most markets, and this tends towards monopolies and regulatory capture. If you don't want monopolies, because you value your freedom as a consumer - you need regulation.

This is very basic economics - I wish it was more widely taught.

I've arrived at the opposite conclusion. The root cause of conflict is decentralized power, which is the prediction of realism. Conflict occurs because of security competition, but security competition is only possible when powers are equally matched and trapped in a Prisoner's Dilemma dynamic.

You can sense check this by running through various historic eras. Consider the eras before any nation states, when power was at its most decentralized. That was also when conflict deaths were at their peak due to tribal warfare.

Then move on to the era of kingdoms and then nation-states, and conflict deaths decrease because power centralization increases. Intra-national conflict goes to zero because of a monopoly on violence over that local geography, leaving only inter-national conflict in the structurally anarchic power vacuum.

The peace of the 90s was because the United States was completely dominant and had no reason to do anything because it controlled everything. As the United States declines and power decentralization increases, moves such as denying China access to oil from Venezuela become actions that are deemed necessary in the new security environment. Or a clash between Thailand and Cambodia becomes a thing that can happen, because there is an absence of a big dog to lay down the law, as unjust as that law may be.

The analogy would be a country with multiple privately owned police forces and no single power. You're going to get conflict. It's a structural phenomenon of how power vacuums work when you plop humans inside of them, and it has nothing to do with morality or markets.

That's right. Entities must be acting as CITIZENS, first and foremost, bound by laws, norms, and shame.

Shame, the glue of civilization, as I call it, is quickly disappearing. The Nothing Matters LOL world is bound to decompose.

I had similar thoughts, and my conclusion is that competition is an inherently unstable state of affairs: at some point somebody wins, and they will try very hard to prevent any further competitors from arising.

Indeed, competition is undesirable for all participants involved: everybody wants to win and exploit the rest for their own gain. Note that this is the only way to make competition work and result in its temporary benefits (if nobody wants to win, nobody will compete).

So there must be a system to keep the competition going and preventing the rise of a definitive and exploitative winner, and the existence of this system has to be accepted by the competitors. But why would serious competitors accept a system that prevents them from winning?

This is a really interesting take, I've been thinking very similarly.

I think there's a tendency to think of 'free markets' as having a lot more scope than they do - almost no countries allow free markets to determine the flow of people and restrict who can enter the country in some way. Similarly, nobody suggests the free market is a good way to regulate child labor.[0]

Especially in the US, there's a been a rapid erosion of other power structures like democracy, law, unions, etc that might serve as checks or balances against raw material interest. I think 'capitalism' often gets misclassified as 'pure competition', but it's probably better thought of as 'pure competition through regulated trade'. Pure competition, with no regulations to define a market, sounds more to me like what predated the industrial revolution (something more along the lines of feudalism)

[0] I took both these example from Ha-Joon Chang's Economics a Users Guide.

You're comparing one leader sending special forces in to capture another leader to a free market? That's not a market, it's a brawl. Markets take place within civil societies. "Raw competition is the same as war", well OK, but that's got nothing to do with trade.

Perhaps we need the equivalent of the concept of anti-monopoly regulations on an international scale.

Stephen Miller's very recent Jake Tapper CNN interview adds evidence to the argument POWER is king and LAW is nowhere near as important.. to his .. ahem .. the Trump administration.

So, it'll continue to be reality, for as long as Trumpism reigns in USA.

When I was young, back in school, I asked my teacher why the main purpose of a company is to grow. Their response was: "Because it has to be."

I don't think we need unlimited growth. Or, better: We CANNOT have unlimited growth, because there is a natural limit to the resources that are available. We, as a society, should do better than this. And that is what worries me: The sheer ignorance (or unawareness?) people have about their surroundings. I'm not sure if it is malicious, or just a coping strategy. But instead of looking into the real cause that lead to certain events, be it the environment, economical or political, people quickly blame minorities for all the bad that is happening, breastfed by the narrative that people like to repeat over and over again - "because it has always been like that".

For the longest time, I tried to counterargue and explain, why certain things are the way they are, and offered another perspective. But ears have become deaf, more than before.

I'm tired.

Yup, markets need regulation.

Always has been. Big powers have always been meddling in other nations.

I am in the exact same camp. My belief in free markets has been completely shattered and my political stance on several subjects has changed dramatically over the last years.

I no longer believe in the free market at all.

Of course this isn't the result of a single isolated event. Our lives are poems that constantly re-write and scrutinize themselves after all, like living ink that breathes new pages anew. But if I had to pinpoint one very specific period with a very measurable effect on my position it was the whole Elon Musk saga (DOGE+"heart salute"). A lunatic billionaire seemingly doing what he wants, rewriting narratives, making up facts, history, and saying things which were so evidently false, and showing up next to a president as if he were himself president, never having been elected, was shocking.

I used to really believe that "money followed what was good for society". There would be outliers and some noise, but overall these would be well correlated. I now look back and wonder how absolutely naive of me that was. Billionaires should not be allowed. They are a disgrace to the system. It's actually vile and disgusting to have them in our society.

I'm not an american and I used to dream of going to the USA, perhaps even living there. I now want to stay as far away from it as possible, and view the supposed american dream as either a past reality or effective propaganda I bought into previously. Maybe that's better for america and it's what they need to grow, who knows.

So the only solution to this current manufactured political clown shitshow is a one world government, which is exactly the goal of the scenarists behind it.

We'll see much worse chapters of this shitshow before the last spectator admits the fallacy of dismissing this as a conspiracy theory.

There's capitalism and then there's communism. Both have proven to not work which leaves us with...

Countries are bad but even the sci-fi authors know the only way to change this is literally an alien invasion. Until then, instead of expecting good from our governments (wherever we live) shouldn't we just assume the worst and go from there? Since switching to that mentality life has been much more pleasant personally.

>The events of the past 12 months, culminating in Venezuela and now Greenland, has made me reevaluate a lot of my beliefs about unimpeded competition between free agents (i.e. a free market) leading to the best and most peaceful outcomes.

What have markets got to do with it? For as long as humans have been recording history, states have been annexing weaker states, regardless of economic system. It's absurd to blame free markets for this.

> The way I've tried to reconcile my beliefs with what are

Why are you doing this "effort" to alienate yourself in place of blaming the country and government responsible for this?