Businesses should be allowed to turn away women, gay and black people

[SpontaneousOrder]

VLook at the ideal of communism - lovely principles where everything is held in common and all power is shared

Er...what? How is that lovely principles? It's disgusting.

[SpontaneousOrder]

Probably a free market society with strong government regulation is the best we will ever get. Great if we had more democracy too, like mandatory referenda to force governments to respond to long term public concerns, as in Switzerland.

Why strong government regulation? Surely regulatory services provided by the free market would be better? If you think the free market is more optimal in general, then why not when it comes to regulation?

[SpontaneousOrder]

Any handwaving argument for how a particular market does or doesn't operate can be modeled in the form of a game. In general when considering a market one considers a repeated game precisely because a repeated game provides for concepts such as punishing people who don't adhere to contracts and so forth. Game theory provides all of the mathematically rigorous arguments in favour of free markets, so I'm not sure why you dismiss it as "more often than not giving answers interventionists like to hear" when it's actually one of the main weapons in the non-interventionist arsenal. I can only assume it's due to ignorance which is understandable as most strongly opinionated people have never got beyond the handwaving.

Anyways, the simple fact is that in most markets power is asymmetric, because the payoffs are asymmetric, because buyers and sellers are different. You aren't going to change that unless you make the payoffs for buyers and sellers the same, which is very interventionist indeed.

You seem to think you can make power simply vanish, and you can't. Even if you destroy or redistribute all accumulated wealth new wealth will be created and it will be distributed asymmetrically.

That's nonsense. That asymmetrical power you keep referring to is as a result of the state, not the market.
Free markets, like most natural systems tend to do, comprises of complex feedback loops such that a spontaneous order emerges. It's only forceful interference which disturbs the tendency towards equilibrium.

Enterprises can only profit by enriching their fellow men, and monopolies on the ownership of particular resources are virtually impossible in a free society. It's only economic ignorance of the masses, with a zeal for forceful arbitration which allows enterprises to profit by doing harm.

[doodab]

That asymmetrical power you keep referring to is as a result of the state, not the market.
Free markets, like most natural systems tend to do, comprises of complex feedback loops such that a spontaneous order emerges. It's only forceful interference which disturbs the tendency towards equilibrium.

You're clearly confused. An equilibrium point will be reached regardless, it may well be different in a market in which the state interferes than one in which it doesn't, but there will be equilibrium. That really has nothing to do with the distribution of power (i.e the ability to influence where that equilibrium point is) at all.

[SpontaneousOrder]

I was referring in particular to mathematically rigorous arguments in favour of free markets,

You'll find that the vast majority of free market advocates reject mathematical models for the same reason that Austrians reject the idea that there is such a thing as macro economics. A great many, if not most free market advocates will have based their arguments on the same kinds of theory you'd find in Von Mises' 'Human Action'.
I think you're very much missing the point when it comes to examining the reasoning of real free market advocates ('real' as in NOT your Greenspans etc).

[doodab]

You'll find that the vast majority of free market advocates reject mathematical models for the same reason that Austrians reject the idea that there is such a thing as macro economics. A great many, if not most free market advocates will have based their arguments on the same kinds of theory you'd find in Von Mises' 'Human Action'.
I think you're very much missing the point when it comes to examining the reasoning of ('real' as in NOT your Greenspans etc).

That may well be so, but their arguments are not going to be mathematically rigorous, by definition, and I'm not examining the reasoning of what you describe as "real free market advocates" anyway, as it appears to consist entirely of what I refer to as "handwaving".

I'm making the point that the arguments in favour of free markets that are mathematically rigorous (not to mention any analysis that could actually be used to build a useful quantitative models) are reliant at least in part on Game Theory, which is in part the mathematically rigorous treatment of human decision making. You perhaps need to appreciate that this branch of mathematics didn't really exist before the second world war, if it had then Von Mises and other handwaving philosophers would most likely have seized upon it as a useful tool.

[SpontaneousOrder]

You're clearly confused. An equilibrium point will be reached regardless, it may well be different in a market in which the state interferes than one in which it doesn't, but there will be equilibrium. That really has nothing to do with the distribution of power (i.e the ability to influence where that equilibrium point is) at all.

With a national debt of substantially more than 1 trillion pounds something very volatile in nature is going to occur some time soon which I wouldn't imagine many people would ascribe to a state of equilibrium.

[doodab]

With a national debt of substantially more than 1 trillion pounds something very volatile in nature is going to occur some time soon which I wouldn't imagine many people would ascribe to a state of equilibrium.

Which is rather a different meaning of equilibrium than intended in the sense of a market finding an equilibrium isn't it?

[SpontaneousOrder]

I'm making the point that the arguments in favour of free markets that are mathematically rigorous (not to mention any analysis that could actually be used to build a useful quantitative models) are reliant at least in part on Game Theory.

And 90% of free market advocates would describe those arguments as hogwash, believing that human action is not mathematically predictable and as such a natural price mechanism - which we couldn't hope to match with all the computational power in the world today - is the best way to see to it that scarce resources with alternative uses end up where they are valued most, in the most efficient way. It's a bit of a straw-man, but an understandable one you might expect from someone who does more handwaving than that have done study of the subject.

[SpontaneousOrder]

Which is rather a different meaning of equilibrium than intended in the sense of a market finding an equilibrium isn't it?

No. Prices signal the relative desires of billions of people around the world when it comes to bidding for scarce resources with alternative uses. Free from forceful manipulation, equilibrium is found at the point where resources find their way to where they are relatively valued the most, in the most efficient manner possible. We're a long way from finding a more efficient model, and when we try to the market finds an unnatural and relatively unsustainable, and hence more volatile, point of equilibrium.