Quote Originally Posted by CoccoBill View Post
I don't follow your logic here. Governments dish out so much grant money that the unis don't have to compete for the much larger funds available from the private sector? Public funding just means that they don't _have to_ compete, and even if they lose, the private funding still remains a viable option, right?
Capability to do something doesn't mean the incentive is there. It's basically a cost/benefit, opportunity cost situation. With government funding the way it is, university policy is structured in such a way that pursues that funding at the expense of other sources. Additionally, incentives from other sources to provide funding are reduced. We don't know what the situation would be like without government funding, but we do know it would be different because incentives would change and universities would shift strategies



Again, it's not about achieving a monopoly or a commanding market position, nothing wrong with that. It's just abusing that position that's unwanted, simply because at that point the market is ill-equipped to deal with the situation, since that company already controls the market and can bar entry from others, by undercutting prices, hostile takeovers etc. That's exactly why laws regulating that kind of behavior were put into effect, since that was seen to be the only option. The court cases were delayed unnecessarily, there's nothing inherent about them that requires them to take years or decades. Developing technology trends and new usage models took care of Microsoft (in a sense, they still rule the PC/office segment), not the market (MS's competitors or customers).
Two things:

(1) you keep saying the company(s) do bad things but then don't acknowledge consequences they suffer from those bad things. Where you see a company raising prices due to high enough market share as a bad thing, economists like Milton Friedman do not see it as a bad thing (as long as the market is relatively open i.e. the government hasn't regulated against competition). This is because economists view companies that abuse their customers as doing one of the main things that get their customers to choose to spend their money elsewhere

(2) I think you're viewing markets more narrowly than they should be. Saying MS has a monopoly in PC/Office isn't necessarily a meaningful distinction because that's more of a niche in the broader market than control over the market. It's like this: if you live in Chad and the only beverage you can buy at the store is Coke, you're still not suffering under a monopoly because you can choose to not buy Coke and just drink water instead. This is precisely what happens if Coke does abusive things like price-gouge. When consumers are allowed to choose to not consume something and when producers are allowed to provide a product, you're not suffering under a real monopoly. It only becomes truly problematic if there is a law that forces consumers to buy Coke or doesn't allow Pepsi or Tommy's New Jungle Brew from entering the market.




Slavery disappeared worldwide due to legislation, not because it suddenly became less profitable. Putin already seized Crimea, just a little more subtly than by direct military invasion. He knows Russia can't risk an all out war with Ukraine (~20th largest military power in the world) with a possible involvement of the west. The stock market crashing surely also had a big effect on his popularity numbers, that's for sure.
I think history was made. If this was 1960, he wouldn't have stopped until an army got in front of him. This is one of the first major events where markets, instead of guns, stopped a dictator using his guns.

What do you mean by [schools] negotiating prices?
Generally it's any method by which to keep prices down. Some are better than others, but the US pretty much uses the worst. It writes into its laws things like it's illegal for the government to negotiate with private companies (why pharmas are so expensive here), or it doesn't even attempt to address prices while it actively increases costs. Doing things like guaranteeing student loans then doing nothing else may sound more market-oriented than adding price controls, but it's not. It's a whack regulatory environment where intervention creates the need for more intervention in order to keep the integrity of the system


Yes, so we do have examples where the government runs education just fine. In fact in most of the world's top educational countries the system is mostly public,
I wouldn't say that. Beating the US system is easier than stealing candy from a baby. Other countries have better systems mainly for cultural homogeneity reasons, and secondarily because the states don't do a handful of really dumb things that the US state does. But that doesn't mean the systems are great. Even the best state system right now is likely wasting a shitload of money

I think that if the US fully deregulated education i.e. complete elimination of public institutions and funding, in 30 years we'd have a system that blows the socks off Finland. Getting into details why is more complicated, but I say this to counter the idea that some states are running great systems. I don't think they are. I think the bar is so incredibly low and if private enterprise allocated money the way state education systems do, they'd all go bankrupt.

with also the private sector receiving major financing from the state.
Which is a huge problem. This is perhaps one of the biggest problems in the US because it makes private institutions structure policy in whatever way best gets awarded those funds. This is the backbone for why US test scores have gotten so bad.



Markets work great for anything highly innovation- or creativity-driven, things that I'd label other than basic necessities.
Does not everything fall into this category? Innovation and creativity in food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, and education at just as important as in video games.

I believe in equal opportunity, and I think a government is needed to provide that for everybody. Equal outcome no. Transportation isn't a necessity so I wouldn't include it, and nourishment is so abundant and available in the western world that I wouldn't label that as such either. In a 3rd world country, probably.
It was the market that made nourishment so abundant in the first place.

People naturally look to the state for answers. But it is only in areas where the state has not allowed the market to solve the problems. Everything that we today take for granted or do not consider something the state should be involved in is something that came that way because the market made it so abundant.

The idea that the state shouldn't be involved in nourishment is a new one, because in most of history, it has been involved and nourishment has not been abundant. It's only after farming became a market thing that nourishment started skyrocketing