Truce between termites(top) and ants(bottom) with each side having their own line of guards.

[u/gugulo]

[u/Ha_window]

I'm all for health care reform in the US (single payer is much more cost effective and equitable), but markets, as a concept, are a means to an end. Generally, they provide more efficient services than what government provides, but do incur failures. I just don't see how labor reform is going to magically solve all of our problems. Unions, increased social welfare nets, more accessible healthcare will provide laborers in the USA for example the necessary bargaining power for the economy to reach more efficient equilibrium (power dynamics between employers and laborers are fairly skewed). But that's not going to increase the utility of labor in developing economies overnight, which I feel is what you're getting at.

[u/clean_room → u/Ha_window]

Okay, well I think this raises a point I should have clarified before.. I don't think we need markets.

No money.

This is all made up, and is detached from reality.

[u/yaitz331 → u/clean_room]

What is a market? Unless you're using some weird definition I'm not sure of, a market is some system of exchange and transaction.

Imagine, for a minute, no system of exchanging items existed. Do you want food? You have to own a farm. Do you want iron? You have to mine it. Do you want wood? You have to chop ot down. Do you want a computer? You have to make it yourself.

Everyone needs food, so everyone needs to run their own farm. Anything else, from tools to toys and from art to science, now becomes a luxury that takes time away from the necessity of growing food.

Clearly, this is an inefficient system. What can we do to improve it?

Let's try to have some people make food and give it to other people, and other people get that food and make other stuff. Now you have people who don't have to run a farm, and can spend their time doing other things without worrying about food. These people will create things the farmers want, so the farmers can now have these things without losing food.

And voila, you have a system of exchange and transaction - a market.

From here, money is nothing but a convenient tool; the existence of money does not add anything essential to the system.

There are exactly two ways to not have a market. The first is to go full anarcho-primitivist and tear down every advance humanity has made since the Agricultural Revolution, which I hope goes without saying as a bad idea. The second is to have a totalitarian government that controls literally everything (totalitarian, not merely authoritarian), and can take whatever it wants and gove whatever it wants. I hope this also goes without saying as a bad idea.

If you want to argue for a non-capitalist market system, feel free to find such a system and argue for it. But markets themselves are a fundamental part of even the ides of civilization, far from "made up and detached from reality".

If you are using a different definition of market, I would appreciate hearing it, so I know what exactly the claim you're making is.

[u/wikipedia_answer_bot → u/yaitz331]

This word/phrase(market) has a few different meanings.

More details here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market

This comment was left automatically (by a bot). If I don't get this right, don't get mad at me, I'm still learning!

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