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Anyone who believes that "the free market" is the best way to allocate resources should read up on Hotelling's Law, which demonstrates that, in a purely market-driven system with two sellers of a good, the sellers will move to reduce their own perceived--but not actual!--risk at the expense of buyers. Even worse, if you add more sellers, the dynamics become chaotic (literally so in the models) and pricing goods becomes impossible (Edward Chamberlin's PhD dissertation argues this).
Sure, there might be ways to tinker with the market dynamics to avoid these issues, but who is doing that tinkering? If you say "government", then you're admitting free markets aren't really the best way to allocate resources. If you say "the sellers", you are (a) introducing a new form of utility, while (b) not dealing with the chaos problem. If you say "the buyers", you are giving up on the idea of the free market being the best way to allocate resources, since the only leverage the buyers have is to give up the resource.
@abucci This is pretty interesting... Sadly I don't know enough enough about market dynamics to respond here, so instead I've shared with my economist neighbor for comments/thoughts 😅 -- It would be fun though to try to write a computer program that simulates some of these things? 🤔
@abucci This is pretty interesting... Sadly I don't know enough enough about market dynamics to respond here, so instead I've shared with my economist neighbor for comments/thoughts 😅 -- It would be fun though to try to write a computer program that simulates some of these things? 🤔