Even if so, we live in the short term (and, define "short term": minutes, months, years, decades?) and among the inefficiencies localized in most of the possible "locations" if not all of them, and I'd rather have regulation protect me than wait an indefinite amount of time until some good-willing entreprise takes initiative, and then another indefinite amount of time until they are successful, and then another indefinite amount of time the big players adapt or die, a process which when listed like this seems to me to be at most as efficient as wishing upon a star.
What "market" is is a big bunch of entities trying to maximise the output and minimise the input (in a large large majority of cases). Everything else is a side effect. In order to impose upon those entities anything, the customer base needs to be diverse enough to include potential opposers to the company's policy, and the number of the opposers who decide to boycott or move away should be large enough that such action significantly affects the company's margins. And that's not so easy to happen, especially if the bad the "big players" are doing does not directly affect the customers (e.g. saying "guns are murderous and destructive" will not affect the gun owners all that much, or "your pesticides kill bees" the pesticide users, no?) and thus the vigilance of the market is triply-restricted: by time it takes to produce effects, by the amount of opposition actors it requires, and by the nature of commerce. Thus, it can not produce timely change, requires and is thus fallible to lots of rhetoric, and is only maybe-efficient in a small set of industries and cases.
A century of tremendous progress afforded by capitalism begs to differ. Anyway, I'm not saying free market capitalism is a panacea, but it's generated wealth and value for consumers in spades.
And I'm not saying it's evil, but that without regulation it will favour itself over the consumer all the time, except when interests happen to align (and it does not, in most cases).
The market doesn't favor "itself", that doesn't mean anything. There may be a paradigm you're missing here.
There's a confirmation bias at work. There are infinite examples of the market working suboptimally for one consumer, a group of consumers, or consumers as a whole. But the entire platform is built upon creating value for consumers. People choose to pay for goods and services they want. In another system, they could be assigned arbitrarily. Or even completely unavailable. Capitalism created things you'd never expect, like broadband internet access and social networking to name a couple.
Market is made up of selfish entities. The good that's done is a side effect. I do not mean that pejoratively.
It certainly is in the interest of enterprises to provide value to consumers. But so too is to do that as cheaply as possible, in order to have the largest margins possible. The one to sell for cheapest will prevail. Even if that means making people work for the bare minimum that'll keep them alive and poisoning them with murderous materials in subhuman working conditions. Even if that means starving an entire ecosystem to death to grow some grains or whatnot. That's where regulation kicks in. It sets the ground for competition without harming the rest of the world.
We do not disagree. But you're believing mistakenly that I am criticising capitalism. While I instead am telling that like every powerful resource, capital too needs to be heavily controlled and supervised. If you live somewhere where the market and capitalism is not doing shady things to cut costs and sell cheaper, tell me which utopian place/planet you are at, so that I can join you lot. But in the real world lots of starving hands touch everything we wear and tap and click. Regulation is necessary so that one's life don't cost many others' lives.
Yeah, I think we actually are pretty close to the same page. I just think, in light of the tremendous amount of progress over the past years, often discounted by a media audience that is fed a healthy diet of panic (this brought to you by capitalism, FTR!), capitalism has been an overall win. And I don't know of any other system that could have produced anything close to what we have.
I guess a lot of it comes down to whether we are satisfied with the state of humanity, and whether we recognize past progress as an overall good.
What "market" is is a big bunch of entities trying to maximise the output and minimise the input (in a large large majority of cases). Everything else is a side effect. In order to impose upon those entities anything, the customer base needs to be diverse enough to include potential opposers to the company's policy, and the number of the opposers who decide to boycott or move away should be large enough that such action significantly affects the company's margins. And that's not so easy to happen, especially if the bad the "big players" are doing does not directly affect the customers (e.g. saying "guns are murderous and destructive" will not affect the gun owners all that much, or "your pesticides kill bees" the pesticide users, no?) and thus the vigilance of the market is triply-restricted: by time it takes to produce effects, by the amount of opposition actors it requires, and by the nature of commerce. Thus, it can not produce timely change, requires and is thus fallible to lots of rhetoric, and is only maybe-efficient in a small set of industries and cases.