That certainly wasn’t evident from this comment of yours.
How fortunate, then, that I made other comments as well.
governments just love diddling with prices
I know. And they do diddle with prices. And so all the empirical evidence we have that free markets work well is really evidence that free markets with a whole lot of assorted government intervention work well.
I am deeply suspicious of the claim that diddling with the prices is done in order to maximize total utility
I wasn’t claiming (or at least wasn’t intending to claim) that it generally is. Only that it could be. An argument of the form “we could improve what markets do by doing X” is not invalidated by the fact that governments often do X for bad reasons.
picking appropriate moral criteria you can justify any economic practice whatsoever
No doubt. But if we’re going to argue about what should be done, that’s inevitably partly an argument about values. We can pretend it isn’t, e.g. by settling on some not-explicitly-value-laden thing to maximize—say, total wealth after 100 years—but that really just amounts to choosing values that only care about total wealth after 100 years.
How fortunate, then, that I made other comments as well.
I know. And they do diddle with prices. And so all the empirical evidence we have that free markets work well is really evidence that free markets with a whole lot of assorted government intervention work well.
I wasn’t claiming (or at least wasn’t intending to claim) that it generally is. Only that it could be. An argument of the form “we could improve what markets do by doing X” is not invalidated by the fact that governments often do X for bad reasons.
No doubt. But if we’re going to argue about what should be done, that’s inevitably partly an argument about values. We can pretend it isn’t, e.g. by settling on some not-explicitly-value-laden thing to maximize—say, total wealth after 100 years—but that really just amounts to choosing values that only care about total wealth after 100 years.