Quote Originally Posted by Jack Sawyer View Post
Indeed, and yet I advocate for a mix. Extremes on all sides are bad mmmkay in pretty much everything in life, why would markets be any different?
The "market" is a model of how people interact in terms of prices and quantities of goods and services. When we think in terms of level of competition, there are essentially three types of markets: monopolistic, monopolistic competition (most goods/services are here), and perfect competition (only things like wheat are here). These markets have endogenous function that provides them to "correct" to a shock. Government is an exogenous variable that can shock the market with policy and change the price and/or quantity in a market. The "free" market position is the idea that the government shouldn't do this. The reasons boil down to the claim that when government does this, it disrupts endogenous market function enough that the price and quantity in each market as well as the creation of new markets becomes subdued. Free market advocacy is to allow markets' endogenous qualities to work to reduce price and increase quantity; government intervention advocacy is to use exogenous shocks to reduce price and increase quantity in spite of sketchy effectiveness.