Talk:Free market/Archive 6

Part of a series on Conservatism?
If this article is going to talk about how capitalism relates to libertarianism and socialism, and include the 'Part of a series on...' box; wouldn't it also make sense to include a section on it's relation with conservatism? --Stuck Internetting (talk) 15:44, 31 October 2018 (UTC)

Bias and contradictory tag for article.
Before I add a tag at the top of this article I figured I’d discuss here about the neutrality and consistency of this article. It has several problems throughout it. For example, there is an entire section devoted to defining a free market as one in “perfect competition” while later it claims competition is not necessarily required to be a free market. This is only the peak of the iceberg in this article. Admittedly I’m not an expert in economics nor wiki editing, so hence this discussion. livingfract@lk 02:55, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

General principles subsection
This section seems crafted specifically to introduce POV. The general concepts behind free market principles were already discussed earlier in the article with a decent effort at showing that the proper definition for the term has multiple meanings depending on whom you ask. For example, some experts believe that small government is, in and of itself, a necessary condition for a free market (laissez-faire). Others believe that monopolistic actors and imperfect information require government intervention to ensure that a market is free in practice (geoist). These are all discussed pretty well in the Economic Systems section, but the General Principles subsection merely reproduces wholesale the research of a group (Heritage Foundation) that is firmly on one side of this split without providing any other competing discussion.

What's worse is the use of the "Free Market Monument Foundation" as a qualified source, when it really appears to be a couple of small businessmen/local politicians, neither of whom claim to be academic experts in economics, who want to fund a physical monument in support of their particular view of free market principles so that they can "be explicitly enumerated and then carved in stone so that they can never be redefined or forgotten". I tried to remove this portion, but it was reverted (without comment, I might add) and changed slightly to explicitly identify the source in the text. But the issue is that it is not a reliable source, at best - and at worst, it's POV spam meant to drum up financial support for the aforementioned monument. It also does not add to the article, because the concepts are, generally speaking, similar to those embraced by the Heritage Foundation and already delineated earlier.

The entire subsection really needs rewritten, but it seems to me that any such rewrite done properly would not have a place for the "Free Market Monument Foundation" portion. --DachannienTalkContrib 20:57, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Bias for laissez-faire definition
The main section describes the free market as defined by laissez-faire capitalists. The rest of the article notes the different definitions, including the original one by classical economists and it is clear only one is being discussed in the main section. The laissez-faire definition is essentially the definition of capitalism, while classical economists meant an absence of monopolies and a market where the consumers know what is in their products, for example. There seems to be a violation of NPOV. Wiki user wiki (talk) 01:29, 29 March 2019 (UTC)

Restricting or banning monopolies requires government intervention. In a so-called "free market", there is nothing to stop monopolies and oligopolies from forming.

We already imply this in the article: "Critics of the free market have argued that in real world situations it has proven to be susceptible to the development of price fixing monopolies. Such reasoning has led to government intervention, e.g. the United States antitrust law." Dimadick (talk) 12:45, 5 April 2019 (UTC)

"Free enterprise" listed at Redirects for discussion
An editor has asked for a discussion to address the redirect Free enterprise. Please participate in the redirect discussion if you wish to do so. feminist (talk) 14:04, 4 April 2020 (UTC)