Quote:
Originally Posted by Speedy1975
I'm all for free market, however most things are regulated for this very reason. This type of oil trading was deregulated and look what happened to the avg Joe. We got screwed. As part of that deregulation, you no longer have to hold the commodity you've purchased, making it even more of a volatile situation. Not a good thing when we're talking about a natural resource people rely on.
It would be like a company finding the cure for cancer. Then saying you can only have it for $1M US per dose and you need 4 doses to be cured. I guarantee regulation would prevent something like that. Well, in this case people were choosing gasoline to get to work, or food to eat. Same same as far as I'm concerned.
OH, and I fully understand commodity trading as well as hedge bet trading. I actually looked into it when oil dropped down to $35 a barrel a couple weeks ago. Yeah, you can loose your butt, however the companies involved had SO MUCH buying power they could literally affect the price guaranteeing a significant profit. THAT is what should be regulated to insure things remain "free market" as you say, as that no longer was at that point.
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I don't want to come off as someone who wants a completely free market either. I like your perspective.
In my opinion, the free market is like a polygon, and the center of the polygon is full of great parts of the market—the essence of business, professionalism, and quality products and services. In the corners, you have the sketchy evils of the free market. What public policy, and thus politicians, must do is eliminate the evils of the free market to protect both consumers and business professionals. As a result, products that are societal dependencies are necessary evils that must be regulated while products that are not necessary or contributions to the democratic good should be removed from the market with strong public involvement and support. The ultimate goal of this perspective is to make a round community with less rigid edges and, therefore, less of the evils that make a capitalist or mixed economy as problematic as Marx envisioned it. Any capitalist, as a side goal, wants to prove Marx wrong, and this approach very well eliminates the evils that Marx claimed are so central to capitalism.