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So all those companies selling at a loss to gain market share aren't part of the free market? Like openai, anthropic, and SpaceX?
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If you can use mountainous capital to sell at a loss in order to distort the market, yes, that's not a "Free Market", as in, the vaguely understood competitive marketplace armchair economists idealize.

True freedom in the market means the freedom to capitulate your wealth to snake oil salesman and schemers who operate on generational timeframes until economic power consolidates and renders your society into de-facto tyranny. Before any sort of regulations existed, we were all trading shiny rocks with ultimate freedom, and that somehow has produced a bunch of economic situations in the modern day that a ton of people don't like.

What's more interesting to me is freedom from the need to have investigative journalists doing deep dives into potentially fraudulent, thieving, or scheming companies behind every purchase, and to know that what I'm granting market success to is exactly what my money or time is going towards - I'm not buying something at a loss that funds some other deliberately obfuscated project that's made opaque from my perspective of the market transaction.

The proverbial "market wisdom" doesn't emerge out of markets with extreme information asymmetry.

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Externally subsidized predatory pricing is the opposite of a free market — precisely because it sells things at below market rates.

Free markets are where players compete on quality, efficiency, and supply. Prices are a result of cost and supply and provide real information on these factors. Competition for customers selects the most effective and efficient producer.

Sustained efforts of selling at a loss to gain market share is the exact opposite. The entire purpose is to corrupt the free market by sending false price signals which SUPPRESS free market competition and push market share to whoever can burn the most capital (whilst providing an actual service/product), not whoever is most efficient or highest quality or lowest actual price provider.

Uber and AirBnB are better examples of your "selling at a loss to gain market share", where they burned capital to undercut prices for close to a decade on falsely low pricing to destroy incumbents.

Spending on R&D while developing expensive technology is different and arguably very much a part of a free market, and is not what I was talking about.

Spending capital to steal your competitors' technology, and then spending more of it to make it available at below-market rates, is absolutely not a free-market activity.

Just because it is not stopped by someone enforcing a free market, does not make it a free market.

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Cough.. cough.. Uber.. cough cough AirBNB
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