markets

Found on australianconservative:

Academic says US media reform should be part of a march towards socialism

A professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Robert W. McChesney has said that “media reform” should be part of the march toward socialism in America and that capitalism has to be dismantled “brick by brick.”

I am convinced that ideologies are always problematic. As soon as a person falls for an ideology (any ideology!) they cease to be able to use their eyes, ears, or brain if the result would be to see, hear, or understand something that would invalidate the ideology. In 1989 communism fell throughout Europe for blindingly obvious reasons: every single communist regime was murderous, the people were in poverty, and the environment was a disgusting mess. These things were not coincidences. It seems Professor McChesney has never read any Hayek, but if he had, and if he could free himself from his ideology, he would know why socialism necessarily produces tyranny, death, and misery. But no matter how much misery socialism produces, the recipe for heaven on Earth in these ideologues' eyes is always - more socialism!

Unfortunately we live in a world where some of the necessities of life are disparaged and sometimes even criminalised. Carbon is perhaps the life-giving "villain" highest in the public eye right now, but the free market, without which most of us would be living in squalor and misery, or even be dead, cannot be far behind.

In a nutshell, the free market is one of the necessities for wealth and happiness, but in the popular perception two things go very badly wrong:

1. The free market is confused with laissez-faire economics, deregulation, untrammelled capitalism, and so on;
2. Admirable ideas about equality, cooperation, friendship, generosity, concern for the weak and powerless, and so on, make the idea of trading—buying and selling, spending one's time making sordid money instead of selflessly giving—seem incompatible with 'being a nice person'.

The former problem means that free markets can be, and perhaps always have been, implemented badly so that a range of corruptions can be indulged in, often perfectly legally but without a shred of morals. The latter problem means that many or most who concern themselves with these issues, and who have the best and finest intentions, turn against the free market and trading in their entirety, and therefore never take part in any discussion to fix the problems with how free markets are actually implemented.