This ignores power differences though?

The market isn't particularly free when people need to eat

It'd be much freer with guarantees for basic necessities

Basic food income will lead to an artificial reallocation of food to unproductive humans away from productive and growth oriented industries like advertising and mega yachts for the rich.

Owning land that you rent to others is unproductive too, but somehow it is socially acceptable and brings food on the table??

> The market isn't particularly free when people need to eat

> It'd be much freer with guarantees for basic necessities

You do know that would literally just make the problem worse, right? I mean, it sounds good to someone who can't work for legitimate reasons (small percentage of the population), but it also sounds good to everyone who has the capacity to earn their necessities, but would rather have it handed to them instead. It also sounds really good to politicians who seek (re)election by promising everything for free, knowing perfectly well that nothing is truly free. That kind of reasoning is what got us into this inflation mess.

Also, the "free" in "free market" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does.

> You do know that would literally just make the problem worse, right?

Depends what you think "the problem" is. To my mind the biggest problem is the hours of human life wasted on performative make-work while most citizens in a supposedly rich country barely spend any time on things that are actually fulfilling for them.

> Also, the "free" in "free market" doesn't mean what you seem to think it does.

On the contrary, this looks to be one of the minority of cases where the term is used correctly (which makes it a bad term, but I fear we're stuck with it).

> To my mind the biggest problem is the hours of human life wasted on performative make-work while most citizens in a supposedly rich country barely spend any time on things that are actually fulfilling for them.

The idea that citizens of a rich nation has some natural right to live a fulfilling life just because the country happens to be rich, is hubris on the one hand, and also entitle on the other.

People work to obtain the resources to live off. Some can produce _more_ (due to luck, or skill), and those are the ones who would be able to give up productive work and focus on "what's fulfilling" (aka, climb up the maslow pyramid).

Some people don't get to do that climb - that's just reality of scarcity of resources today. Until the day the world becomes like star-trek, where people's basic needs a completely covered without any labour input from any humans (in which case, they spend time exploring the galaxy!), it cannot be that all people fulfill their higher needs in the maslow pyramid.

> The idea that citizens of a rich nation has some natural right to live a fulfilling life just because the country happens to be rich, is hubris on the one hand, and also entitle on the other.

> People work to obtain the resources to live off. Some can produce _more_ (due to luck, or skill), and those are the ones who would be able to give up productive work and focus on "what's fulfilling" (aka, climb up the maslow pyramid).

But the biggest factor that enables them to produce more is the society around them. So the idea that the surplus should go to the individual rather than the society seems pretty entitled. If we're a rich country, we should be able to allocate those riches in a way that produces the most benefit.

> Some people don't get to do that climb - that's just reality of scarcity of resources today. Until the day the world becomes like star-trek, where people's basic needs a completely covered without any labour input from any humans (in which case, they spend time exploring the galaxy!), it cannot be that all people fulfill their higher needs in the maslow pyramid.

But the patterns for how we'll live when resources are virtually unlimited will be set today. And by most objective metrics, we're already far past the level of having enough for everyone to live on - even the very poorest have food and shelter (and most rich countries manage to provide them with healthcare and education). Conversely an increasing fraction of increasingly many jobs is, as I said, performative make-work rather than something that actually increases societal resource output; those jobs are a dead-weight loss.

We need to start being ok with people working less and retiring earlier. Otherwise our lives won't get better no matter how much more productive we get.

I thought the current inflation is primarily driven by high energy prices and disrupted supply chains and those are primarily driven by war and the pandemic?

You are pretty much spot on, Japan tried to massively increase the money supply and that didn't really do anything, if anything it proves that interest is a vicious cycle, once the interest rate is too high to be serviced, you must borrow more money to service the interest which is a positive feedback loop. If you refuse to pay interest you basically stop the vicious cycle.

> I thought the current inflation is primarily driven by high energy prices and disrupted supply chains and those are primarily driven by war and the pandemic?

Nope. You'd be wrong. It's the trillions of dollars unnecessarily printed by the fed. A large part of that went to business owners who didn't actually need it, but took advantage of all the "free money" (and who could blame them when the gov't practically gave it away). That money was quickly invested into real estate and equities markets, leading the way for inflation in the rest of the market, albeit with some delay.

And we're not even at the worst yet.

Hm, where I live real estate and equities are currently down, but inflation is up. Maybe it's different in the US.

"Basic necessities" doesn't really lead to any kind of fulfilled life. It's but a safety network, a staging area to help people collect themselves and have another attempt at a better life.

If living in such conditions is better than working some of the jobs that sustain large parts of society, I'd say it's about time to reevaluate some things. Are we ok with a society designed to sacrifice some percentage of its people's lives?

Actually, if you think about it. If people have enough food and water to survive and reproduce everything beyond that is optional and at best an opportunity cost. Not growing as fast as possible isn't what causes poverty, not having enough food or housing causes poverty.

What do you mean that reasoning got us into this inflation mess? Down below you say it's due to the fed giving free money to the 1%.

Whose responsibility is to provide free money or the difference they need? Market is not to provide food to people in need.

To be fair, you are correct, someone has to work for that food, which makes a UBI funded from work very unfair to the working class.

Instead, we should tax incomes that have very little to do with human work like CO2 taxes or land value taxes to fund UBI. In essence, the UBI grants people a basic CO2 exemption and a small share in the land of the planet. I would argue that is fair.

The availability of desirable jobs and wealth isn't distributed very effectively. It mostly just clumps together and benefits a tiny elite at the expense of our societies and species. The free market never works for very long before hoarders take most of it.

I don't think these are mutually exclusive. There can be a local deficit within an industry, and we might not be able to meet that demand with our labor pipeline.

At the same time, there can be an overall deficit of meaningful work for decent enough wages at the societal level.

The hoarders can selectively employ people who will make them richer, all while the rest of society continues to crumble around them. That's what's been happening in America for decades. Either you're in the upper class or things or actively getting worse.

> The hoarders can selectively employ people who will make them richer, all while the rest of society continues to crumble around them.

The magical device on which you're reading this comment would not have been possible without companies employing people they thought would help make the company richer. It's not a zero-sum game; we all benefit as a consequence of capitalism – from the richest of the rich to the poorest of the poor.

Have you ever owned a business or hired someone? If so, did you deliberately select employees who would not help the company be successful, and if so, did that somehow help prevent societal collapse?

I hear so many lies about the "evils" of capitalism (from all sources, not just here); I fear people are starting to believe them, as we're slowly being brainwashed into joining the next reboot of "let's see – again – how badly we can screw up the world with communism".

Capitalism fails the moment there is prosperity. Have you ever wondered why people starved during depressions even though there was an abundance of food?

People complain about central banks and low interest rates or about the decline of the west not because of a lack of prosperity, no the problem is that there is too much prosperity in the hands of the wrong people.

During times of actual scarcity, people are busily and happily working to get rid of the scarcity which is why we constantly try to create more jobs and why we constantly induce artificial demand increases, to maintain the scarcity that capitalism demands.

> fear people are starting to believe them, as we're slowly being brainwashed into joining the next reboot of "let's see – again – how badly we can screw up the world with communism".

You can abolish capitalism by introducing an actual free market, not one in name.

> we all benefit as a consequence of capitalism – from the richest of the rich to the poorest of the poor.

This is one of those "myths" of capitalism -- "everyone" benefits. While I'm a recipient of the benefits, I also realize that it's a system with flaws that drives inequity and preys on the poor.

I'm not sure that the impoverished really benefit from the constant stress of working 3 precarious part-time jobs to pay for rent and food, with little to no time for family or leisure. But, hey, latest tech gadget is cheap, so that's a universal benefit, right?

I always thought the American Dream was to own a house through hard work. Now working at multiple places barely covers your monthly expenses, forget buying something. Decent housing shouldn't be an intractable problem, but looking through the capitalistic lens it sure seems to be. But pretending that places where it fails are "lies" and that we have to become the Soviet Union is just fearmongering. Perhaps there are social interventions that could help?

I don't think it's anywhere near that black and white. My specific complaint is with the free market being hindered by overconcentration and monopolists. There is a vast chasm between that and whatever you perceive communism to be. Technological progress doesn't depend on the world being controlled by Google and Apple. And even if it did, I'm not convinced the smartphone is a net positive for society. Shrug. Many shades of gray in our world, and economy too.

I'm not sure the mechanism works as simply as you describe. Money is still cheap, so employers can hold out while waiting for conditions to return to normal, whereas employees generally don't have that option. It's not at all clear that the game simply resolves to employers paying more, locally or on average.

Prices can be sticky in more than one way it seems, and that might make for some interesting economics.

The free markets are not efficient. That’s the core reason why there are mismatches between price and value.

i'd say the free market is more efficient than a command economy. Even if it's not perfectly efficient, it's quite close.

Well, in some cases. There are actually industries where command models outperform market models and industries where they are competitive.

A mix of market and command is necessary. But this whole thing isn't really relevant because both markets and command systems have very wide variety in implementation.