There's one line in there which is very important.
Markets work well as long as they're in, as we call it in engineering, the "continuous control region," that is, the part far away from any weird outliers. You need no participant in the market to have too much power. You need downside protection (bankruptcy, social safety net, insurance). You need fair enforcement of contracts (which is different from literal enforcement of contracts).
Right there is what's needed to make capitalism work. I've mentioned previously that a European Union study (I need to find the reference for that) indicated that it takes about four substantial players in a market before price competition works. Three or less becomes oligopoly. The US has three big banks, three big cell phone services, and three big pharmacy chains. All act like oligopolies.
There's an over-regulated edge case, too. The US used to regulate who could be a trucker, or where airlines could land. That ended in the 1980s.
We need criteria for when things are getting out of the stable region. This is a quantitative thing, and law doesn't do quantitative very well. So we have a philosophical problem in how to regulate into the continuous control region region, where price signals work.
This is at least a PhD sized problem and possibly a Nobel Prize in Economics sized problem.
Markets work well as long as they're in, as we call it in engineering, the "continuous control region," that is, the part far away from any weird outliers. You need no participant in the market to have too much power. You need downside protection (bankruptcy, social safety net, insurance). You need fair enforcement of contracts (which is different from literal enforcement of contracts).
Right there is what's needed to make capitalism work. I've mentioned previously that a European Union study (I need to find the reference for that) indicated that it takes about four substantial players in a market before price competition works. Three or less becomes oligopoly. The US has three big banks, three big cell phone services, and three big pharmacy chains. All act like oligopolies.
There's an over-regulated edge case, too. The US used to regulate who could be a trucker, or where airlines could land. That ended in the 1980s.
We need criteria for when things are getting out of the stable region. This is a quantitative thing, and law doesn't do quantitative very well. So we have a philosophical problem in how to regulate into the continuous control region region, where price signals work.
This is at least a PhD sized problem and possibly a Nobel Prize in Economics sized problem.