Quote Originally Posted by a500lbgorilla View Post
Economics may model reality but you've got to admit it doesn't do it flawlessly. It can't be the only thing that informs your expectations. It's silly to suggest outloud "what if we were just all perfectly rational?" like this guy is.
It models the reality you say it doesn't model as well. All the stuff you're talking about is markets. Whenever there is a price and a quantity, there is a market. Whenever we talk about things that are markets, it is the best idea to use the best models we have that deal with markets.

The virgin world point is this idea about free markets being the absolute best solution. They are when the situation warrants them, but they can't always be created and they'll never last.
Regardless, free markets are better at producing preferred results of abundance and dynamism than less free markets.

My analogy was following the evolution of life - the free market of single celled organisms have become the mega-firms of flora and fauna. In the same way, markets will evolve into mega firms that can't really be honestly competed against.
You can't compete against a market. Competition only happens within markets. Firms compete against firms. The market for coal doesn't compete against the market for natural gas. A lot of stuff that you're saying is not in a market actually is. As long as we're talking about prices and quantities (trade), we're talking economics and should use economics.

Just go ahead and share it then.
The China "miracle," many other emerging economies -- often initialized into BRICS, MINT, PIIGS (you may have seen those before), Hong Kong vs China, and many others. Every economist (except one or two kooks; there are always kooks) claims the growth of prosperity and empowerment of these poor come from neoliberal reforms made by their governments. There are multitudes of "natural experiments" on this that are running now and have been for a while. The Hong Kong vs China one is particularly interesting to some economists because the two territories are as close to the same as we're gonna get with one difference being in their degree of neoliberal reforms. The results are consistent with everywhere else and with the theory.

As for the theory part of your comment, it mostly has to do with how regulations change prices, costs, and quantities in supply and demand models. It's been a while since I've constructed the models themselves, so I don't remember exactly how to show it, but I can give examples. When you introduce a regulation to a market that reduces profits, you reduce its dynamism by reducing entry from new firms and increasing exit of existing firms. The counter is when you eliminate a regulation; entry is increased and exit is decreased. Entry and exit always happens on the margins, so regulations negatively affect the "more able than the rest" the least and affect the "least able than the rest" the most.

It's not a coincidence that the China miracle, where the people "least able" have risen faster and in greater quantities than pretty much ever seen before has come on the backs of the Chinese government's near complete deregulation of street enterprise.