Adam Smith said that to have an efficient free market, there needs to be perfect competition. Perfect competition is when all parties are free to transact or not transact as they please and information on prices is clear to everyone. Perfect competition is the best possible scenario for consumers (you and I, our families, and our friends) because it means we always get the best value for services and goods we buy.
America once had a free market with close to perfect competition. The last eighty years has seen special interests erode this away though.
Bankruptcy is a vital part of efficient markets. Bankruptcy is when a company is unable to compete and funds get allocated to companies that can. In 2007 and again in 2020 massive government bailouts prevented many bad companies from going bankrupt. Government officials had “good reasons” for these bailouts… You may remember hearing about companies that were supposedly too big to fail or companies that were unfairly affected by the pandemic. There will always be “good reasons” to bail out companies, but the truth is that bankruptcy clears out bad companies and makes room in the marketplace for entrepreneurs who are starting amazing new companies.
Intellectual property has become one of the biggest scams that no one really understands. People have been told that intellectual property protects inventors and make sure inventors keep doing their thing. The truth is almost all intellectual property benefits people who are not really inventors; attorneys, patent trolls, big corporations. The idea of intellectual property itself is ridiculous, someone who adds a tiny pebble onto the Mount Everest of human knowledge does not deserve to own that piece of property from then on and prevent others from building up on it. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. It is common knowledge in the startup world is ideas are worthless and execution is everything. We need to get rid of patents and allow free competition to enter markets.
Price information should be public for everyone. This includes prices hospitals charge, special deals manufacturers give distributors, salaries, tax returns and every other price related bit of knowledge. This will result in fairer and higher salaries for workers, and much better prices for consumers.
America has lost its freedoms. What can we do to get them back?