As stated in my previous post, I'm not against free market. Quite contrary, there is no personal freedom without personal property and ability to freely trade fruits of our labor. However, I also think that free market without externally imposed countermeasures can exist only if all players understand and follow non-aggression principle, i.e., their pursuit of profit does not cause harm to other people, animals, environment... and we're not there yet. Not even close. And also level of freedom in the market is not a given, is not constant - it is inversely proportional to awareness level of its participants - even if we start with clean and level field, when some players don't mind playing unfair, free market will become less and less free, and more and more like warzone, not market, making all fair players forced to play dirty or give up (or starve).
And then another thing. Scarcity. Big part of the so called "free market" that we have now operates on artificial scarcity. Artificial, because it doesn't need to be there anymore. Not for shelters, not for water, not for food. Not for energy as well. There isn't infinite amount of energy, but for what our basic needs are now, there would be more than enough. Scarcity benefits corporations, whose business model depends on not enough food, not enough water, not enough energy, so more money can be extracted from population. Innovations are actively suppressed, innovations are disruptive, and everything endangering business model and profits that cannot be easily taken advantage of is hidden under carpet, buried under so called "intellectual property rights", etc. When you are big corporation you might just be able to do it, manipulate innovations like the gardener's dog, protecting shareholder value at the expense of everyone else.
And then... having said what I said about freedom and property, there is yet one more thing. As we progress towards better and brighter future, when basic needs are fulfilled by robots and cost nothing... "wait, what do you mean, nothing? How can something be wort nothing? That's commie thinking! If there is no cost attached, there can be no competition, it's not marketable!" - precisely this is what the problem is. Competition is useful to some degree. It might be healthy force helping to get greed in check and quality up. It's a mechanism ensuring that the client (you) get the best value for your money. Like for example if there is no company Y selling the same stuff as company X for more realistic price, then there is potential for the price set by company X to be.. "unrealisticly" high, simply because someone wants to get more money for it. That's why monopolies are generally frown upon and market needs external regulations to ensure no part of the market is dominated by just one company which has no pressure to keep prices... Whatever "sane" means really, according to free market principles the price is determined by demand on one hand and competition on the other. Which is often not enough, if competing companies have silent deals to pretend they compete, but keep prices artificially high (this is the dark side of cooperation). And there is no such thing as intrinsic value of a thing or service, it's all negotiated between interested parties - the client, the provider and competition. And then everything, according to free market, needs to be in private hands, so competition can be assured, the invisible hand can rule happily and without a hitch. Hence the endless war between public good and private resources, capitalism versus socialism. Isn't the below the ultimate free market experience?
Because nothing has intrinsic value by itself all aspects of acquiring/producing it are negotiable. Like workers salaries. Like impact to the environment. Like quality of the product. Like customer satisfaction. If everything is negotiable, even negative aspects, and the nature of competition is to drive profits high and costs low, there is no limit to what evil can be possibly done. Evil is subjective and negotiable as well of course in the world of capital. Part of the equation. It can be judged only from without the system. NAP does not exist within economic theories, because "aggression" does not exist as an idea on flat scale of good for profit/bad for profit. Private prisons in US are another example of free market being able to be evil - they are good on the flat profit scale, they are bad on our multidimensional coordinate system.
So then again, it all depends on the human factor involved - corporation as a creature is morally indifferent ("morality" does not figure in its dictionary), and the only incentive for good behavior is negative PR, and even then only if it reduces profits. Long time ago I worked for a company that at some point decided to spam hundreds of thousands of addresses. Spamming is wrong. Back then it wasn't, strictly speaking, illegal, although everyone knew it was completely immoral. The effect was that the company got quite bad feedback and negative PR, and yet the CEO was actually pleased with total outcome, having new prospect customers calling in, who heard about the company but simply ignored the bad context. As the proverb goes, "there's no such thing as bad publicity." If publicly shooting kittens would be good for profit, there would be many very unhappy kittens (not for long though) in the world. And again, this isn't against free market principles. If the human factor involved is in itself moral and pro-world, the company is good. If the human factor is purely profit-driven, there is no limit to the evil it can do, and competition when the only criterion is profit tends to amplify evil. In other words, free market provides a free for all backyard with no intrinsic evil-deterrents. Unfortunately, and I'd much prefer it wasn't so, it is up to the people and external forces to keep the players in check, so they compete in civilized way without destroying the field. Important note: when I say "external forces" I don't advocate government, I simply mean "something more than the people", as the people may have different views on what evil is. Some people care only about price for example - even if they are told that the price is lower, because producer dumps chemical waste into the nearest like they will say 'oh well, but the price is $0.09 lower! gimme more!". People have equal rights, they are equals in this respect. People have different views, level of knowledge, awareness of general/local situation, willingness to check facts and learn what they buy and from whom, etc. And the same mechanism of flattening worldview that works on companies (capital sees world as good/bad for profit) also works on people. Profit and competition, two pillars of modern world, connected and spinning in vicious circle. Free people create free market. Free market tends to erode freedom of people by casting multidimensional humanness onto two-dimensional profit scale. It is not that easily done of course, and what we observe are trends, tendencies, struggle. I'd like to think that more and more people "wake up", more and more people start to be aware of their multidimensionality, and then they start to protect it actively instead of just feeling vaguely uncomfortably when Profit and Competition knock on their doors.
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[1] http://www.myfrugalbusiness.com/2015/10/kevin-oleary-business-quotes-mike-schiemer.html
[2] https://www.pinterest.com/pin/554787247822105054/
