For me, I care mainly about increased GDP, increased quality of life for everyone, and decreased environmental impacts. I require all three in order to consider the method to be a success.
There's a couple things. First off, which is more important? If you had to choose an increased quality of life for everyone, or a decreased environmental impact, which would it be? If you could have all the governments in the world shove most of it's production into one, which would it be?
How many rules do you think are appropriate? And why do you think this will make a free market more successful?
Pretend there are 3 regulations introduced over some years. 1 costs a business 40 thousand dollars. A company already established says “ok, I will do this, I will take a hit, but it will be alright”. Then, 3 years later, another comes out, which costs 60 thousand dollars. The company already established says “ok, I will do this. I will take a hit, but it will be alright”. Now, another 3 years later, another 50k regulation is introduced. The company will again be forced to abide by the regulation. They’re able to do this because they’ve been making a profit for a while, and have an established customer base. Even if one of these regulation makes them go in a red, they are likely to get back into the black anyways.
But let’s say you wanted to go into the same industry as this business. Guess what my friend, you don’t have the leisure of paying the cost of those regulations over a decade, you must pay them all at once. That is 150 thousand dollars, plus the cost of actually setting up whatever your business is. 150 thousand is just a number, because there is most likely hundreds or thousands of regulations depending on the industry. Some won’t cost so much, and some will cost more, but the point is that it’s an increased cost to starting a business which puts off a lot of people of even trying. And even if you did get everything covered and were starting to go, one regulation to your industry could put you out of business. Large companies can absorb regulations fairly easily, the same can’t be said for smaller companies."
It is a basic fact that competition between companies to undercut each other reduces prices of goods, but increasing the cost to make a business and maintain it reduces the amount of profit they have to tap into if they want to undercut their enemies. It gets to a point where companies can't sell it for any lower or else they'd be losing money (which some will do for short amounts of time to lure customers over). Regulations raise that drastically, meaning there is a higher minimum price for goods. A minimum price is almost impossible in a free-market society, since even the producers of capital goods will be competing, and even then a new technology could raise the prices again. Sure, Intel could mass produce Core II Duos and sell them for 10 dollars, but the thing is nobody wants them because there are bigger and better things. New designs are created every day for thousands of products, but people can't enter the market.
Another issue I have is copyright. They only really benefit larger businesses, contrary to the belief that larger companies would just steal them. Yes, companies would definitely take them and produce them on theirown, but it would be much harder for them to immediately produce them. You on the other hand, could start a business and produce them before the other companies even catch wind. And even then, you'll be selling them and hopefully making some money. Eventually companies will sell your design, but you'll have a window of time where you establish yourself as the creator of the product, and people will recognize your brand. Then you must compete with the larger company, which is fantastic for the consumer. Both companies (Not just a company vs an inventor at this point) would try and undercut one another. This is great for the consumer.
But with copyrights, when you try and make a business and you have to deal with rules upon rules and a huge capital investment, people are more likely to just sell their designs to big companies and get their money immediately. Then those companies will have free reign over that design, even if it's revolutionary and everyone could use. Drugs are a good example. If a pill was created to cure cancer, one company would have free reign over the production and price of it, meaning no competition for that drug, meaning they can set the price to whatever the fuck they want. That's not good. Hell, even games in a loading screen was under copyright by Namco
for the longest time.
Even if you could produce a product that a big company made cheaper, you can't. Sorry pal, they legally own a fucking IDEA.
