🚀 go-pugleaf

John Navas wrote:
> >There is a single price for carrots (or power) based a balance between
> >supply and demand.  In a free market, each seller does not sell his
> >product for a different price based on costs.  That only exists under a
> >regulated cost-based pricing model (or when buyers have and abuse market
> >power to force each seller down to a subsistence price).  Instead,
> >everyone sells at the same price, and the more efficient producers
> >simply make a higher profit then the less efficient ones.
> 
> In a truly free market, your farmer undercuts other farmers by selling
> at (say) $0.40, in order to gain market share and sell out the crop.

Nope, in a classic "pure competition" marketplace, such a seller sees a
flat, horizontal demand curve.  He (having a capacity which is small
compared to the size of the market) can sell as much as he wants at
$0.50, so there is no valid reason for him to sell at $0.40.

> And the farmer plants more crops to capitalize on the lucrative
> opportunity and to preempt other farmers.

The premise is that there is only a finite amount of *maximally*
productive land.  All other land is less productive, or carries higher
costs in some similar way.  

But even if our hypothetical farmer does plant more crops, as long as he
doesn't have sufficient market share to posses market power, he can't
alter the market price either up *or down*.  (He can of course, sell for
less if he wants, but doing so would gain him nothing.)

In your zeal to argue that electricity is special and unique as a way of
justifying government control (since you realize that an argument that
the government should control every market would fall flat on its face),
you have very simply tied yourself up in knots.  What you are calling a
"truly free market" requires that the farmer be able move the market
with his production decisions.  Does that sound like a "truly free
market" to you, or does it sound like something else?