Comment Re:Actually, it's not like that at all (Score 1) 835
But the free market theory postulates a few more effects of it, though. That's why it's still being argued. Not because it would just continue to work better or worse, but because it's supposed to lead to an optimum point.
I've never heard an argument that free markets always produce some idealized, perfect outcome. What is argued is that markets tend to allocate scarce resources very efficiently. NOT perfectly efficiently, nor with perfect consistency. You are simply putting up a straw man.
Which really have only been argued on that ideal model. The whole behaviour of the free market as a perfectly self-correcting mechanism, and which does this or that so well without government intervention, is only argued to any satisfactory degree for that ideal market model and not at all on even the most laissez faire RL model. Much less on one which diverges as massively as what Monsanto wants.
Again, you are the only one calling the free market a "perfectly self-correcting mechanism".
The more you deviate from it, the more, well, you may not get the same results. Most of that theory was never proven at all on a case which differs from the ideal at all. E.g., go ahead and try to prove the first welfare theorem _without_ assuming perfectly competitive markets or perfect information and a few more such perfect assumptions. And then try the same for the second theorem, which requires even more such assumptions.
Of course you can only prove theorems about an idealized form of the market. But the welfare theorems are a much stronger form of the argument that markets tend to allocate scarce resources efficiently, and as such need not be assumed to apply perfectly in the real world.
And when you get to the extremes that Monsanto wants, where not just you don't know it all, but basically you know _nothing_ at all about the product you just bought, or at least not know if you got product A or B because they don't want them labeled... well, if you have some market theory which can sort the good from the bad without even knowing which is which, I'm all ears.
If you want non-GM products, then buy ones that are labeled as such. Nothing forces you to buy a product that is not labeled in the way you require. And if not many products are so labeled, it means not that many people actually care about having that information (e.g. Kosher foods). Besides, even without such labels, you can visit sites like this to get the information you require. Seems like the market is functioning pretty well to me.
At any rate, which to read? Well, you can start with say Milton Friedman. Should be palatable enough to the right wing, right?
Are you serious? Friedman was a monetarist. Monetarists advocate monetary intervention in the form of a central bank, which is directly contradictory to a laissez-faire approach. Try Rothbard, Mises, or Hayek instead.