Alternatives to the Free Market

Humanity dreams about alternatives centuries. There is no one.

belgium has a sort of free market but is controlled by the goverment at some degree(I should really pay more attention in economic class). I forgot what it was called. 

Alternatives...

Well, there is 1984. Everything that matters is under state control. A controller estimates the needs of the society and bureaucracy is charged to realize the aims as planned by the politicians. See for instance, USSR, China etc.
You have mid-terms mixing such a system with market. The US from 1941 to 1945 are a good example.

Nowadays in Cuba the Army is the most important producer of sugar and 80% of the stuff exported come from their factories.

Actually free market is a fairly modern invention. The Ancien Regime in Europe was more about "fair market" as economy was also a moral. Indeed the prices weren't supposed to be fixed by the enconter of supply and demand but by some good and christian value. Consequently usually the price of bread was fixed by the government.

As gcle has mentionned, there is also the monopolistic economy. Nowadays this is the case of oil for instance (oligopolistic to be exact).

The market economy implies a complete freedom or to be more pricise a complete dependence on the balance between supply and demand. Yet many lesser phenomenon can interfear with it. Apartheid for instance, when not all the potential workers could have any kind of job.

In India I suppect, there was some kind of social economy where your position within the frame of the division of labour was primary due to you belonging to a cast.

Tribes and anarchists have also developped different types of economies. In some utopian factories the workers realize different kinds of jobs every day and are paid according to their needs and not according to the value of their work. The various tribes have also extremely varied ways of sharing their "production" but anyway in this case the word "market" loses it sense.

Then one must not turn a blind eye on auto-production and self-consumption.

Within the companies (themselves cought in the market) the market doesn't really work and the hierarchy does the job of sharing the tasks.

Finally some activities are kept by the states as monopolies as for instance judging criminal, enforcing laws or protecting the borders.

For the Jap economy you are forgetting a few details. It was non-regulated because the workers were properly exploited by the big companies tied up with the government and the mafia. Beside they had the blessing of a foreign market at home: the US troops and from 1950 to 1953 the Korean War. They also enjoyed a few once-in-a-lifetime advantages: no international patent to be respected and the LA market more open to them than to the rest of the US for some weird laws. All that to say, in my opinion it was not a system, it was a one-shot phenotype. Conserning the services you should pay attention to the Japanese banks the most powerful in the world since the 60's.

Maybe the alternative to market economy as we know it is an absolute market economy where every workers doesn't own his tool but manage it at will. For example if nowadays you own (or manage) a movie theater with two rooms you need somebody at the caisse,  one person to open each room and one person to handle each projector. In the alternative market economy, you would stay at the caisse and you would rent each room to a diferent person who could decide of the program. This person would also hire a projectionist who would come with his own material (you would pick a specialist according to  your needs, HD digital or old silent black and wight. There would be no boss no more only a pure seller-buyer relationship as everybody would own its personnal company.

Originally posted by Tobodai Those factors are irrelevent ot the overall principles, service economy is a death trap of stagnation and eventual decline into deficiet and uselessness.  Government (or mafia, whatever same thing in practice) should intentionally stymie the encroach of the service economy.

Edited by gcle2003 - 18-Aug-2006 at 06:28

[QUOTE=Tobodai]

A service dominated economy as understood in the US is one where the occurance of buying and selling far outstrip the ability to produce.  This works as long as international trade works, but once a major manufacturer is cut off, even temporarily, the service economy will have to re-leanr how to be industrial again, if it can.  For example, the US now has to import bullets from Israel to be used in Iraq because the army cannot make them fast enough.

The notion of a "free market" is a fantasy. All markets are regulated, the question is whether they are regulated for the benifit of the elite or for the benifit of society as a whole. When you have a Lassez-Faire economy the economy becomes de facto regulated by powerful corporate intrests that want to turn the populance into thier serfs.

Originally posted by gcle2003 The west doesn't have a free market.

Edited by malizai_ - 23-Aug-2006 at 11:30

Isn't the real issue the increasing weight of capital toward work and the gapping difference of wage between high salaries and low salaries. Both are creating a new proletaria...

Bad