#freemarket — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #freemarket, aggregated by home.social.
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Just a reminder that #capitalism does not equal #freemarket. #China dumped a ton of startup money into a lot of companies, assuming that 95% would fail. Those 5% went on to make billions in a free market with a ton of healthy competition. Norway also holds a majority share in all of its companies. Now the government owns a majority stake, and all profits go directly back to taxpayers. The best rise to the top, and the rest die, like free markets are supposed to work. Meanwhile, in the land of the free, we dump tons of #subsidies into giant #corporations that make enough money to lobby politicians for it, and we get no profits back from our taxes. We give around $1T a year, or 1/4th of our yearly spending on corporate subsidies, and never see a dime back from it as they continue to dodge taxes. Capitalism is about who owns the means of production, and it's never the taxpayers or the workers. -
Why your fare cost so much, and uber drivers get paid so little:
It is the result of a highly calculated corporate strategy known as surveillance pricing (or algorithmic personalized pricing).
In a genuine free market, prices function as transparent signals shaped by open supply and demand. Both buyers and sellers see the market rate, ensuring fairness. If a business overcharges, consumers walk; if it underpays, workers leave for a competitor.
Surveillance pricing completely subverts this dynamic by weaponizing information asymmetry. Using a massive hoard of data, the platform creates an invisible digital partition between the customer and the service provider. Instead of a shared, transparent marketplace, the algorithm isolates both sides into separate, closed-door negotiations where the platform holds all the cards.
For the passenger: The algorithm calculates the exact upper ceiling of what you will tolerate paying at that specific second—factoring in everything from your immediate location, time of day, and urgency, to your historical behavioral trends.
For the driver: The platform acts as an electronic monopsony (a market with many sellers but only one dominant buyer of labor). It isolates the worker and calculates the absolute structural floor of what that specific driver will accept to keep their car moving. By dangling unpredictable, variable incentives, it extracts hours of uncompensated labor (waiting and idling time), leaving the driver to absorb all the capital risk, vehicle depreciation, and fuel costs.
By blinding both sides of the transaction, the platform acts as a centralized command structure rather than a passive matching service. It systematically strips away the "consumer surplus" (the extra value and savings a buyer gets) and the "producer surplus" (the fair profit a worker keeps) and absorbs that wealth entirely for itself.
This mechanism is profoundly anti-free market because it replaces transparent competition with a proprietary information monopoly. True markets thrive on decentralized, shared knowledge; this system relies entirely on keeping everyone else in the dark.
#SurveillanceCapitalism #GigEconomy #PlatformCapitalism #FreeMarket #Economics #monopsony -
Greatest thinker you’ve never heard of
1944, groundbreaking political economist Karl #Polanyi published The Great #Transformation
He accused liberal economists of commodifying human beings in name of #FreeMarket
1800s ideas brought barbarism, poverty with globalisation & unfettered capitalism
Wealthy Germans saw #Nazis as force against unions were persuaded to ignore #Hitler antisemitism. As do Americans who find #Trump distasteful still vote for him
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As night follows day, repression follows Thatcherism
The naïve ones believe that the economic system that is causing the trouble will also miraculously save us all. The cynical ones are just looking at their balance sheets.
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2024/04/16/as-night-follows-day-repression-follows-thatcherism/
#FreeMarket #KeirStarmer #neoliberalism #Thatcher #ToryParty