[p2p-research] what to think of the market

[Kevin Carson]

On 7/20/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dean Baker: the market is not the problem!!  			
> Michel Bauwens 			
> 27th July 2009

> Below is Dean Baker’s contribution to the Re-Imagining Society debate at ZNet.

> Specifically, much of the anger of progressives is wrongly focused on the market, as though the market is the source of the troubles in the world. Progressive publications have featured endless diatribes against “market fundamentalism,” implying that the strict devotion to market principles is the core problem that we must counter.
>

> Progressives fall into the right’s trap when we imply that these outcomes are simply the result of the natural workings of the market, and that our opponents have a rigid adherence to market principles. Poverty and inequality are not inevitable outcomes of a market economy; they result from the fact that the market was rigged to produce these outcomes. Furthermore, our opponents absolutely do not have a rigid adherence to market principles. They have a rigid adherence to policies that redistribute income upward.
>

I've been a fan of Baker for a long time.  He grossly overestimates
the positive effect of patents and copyright in stimulating
innovation, IMO.  Most product and process innovations would have been
developed without patents, according to a study by F.M. Scherer, and
the "freemium" model (i.e. Redhat and Phish) is pretty broadly
applicable as a way of making money despite free content.  If
anything, patents suppress innovation.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html