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Originally Posted by loquitur
Rekna, your premises leave all sorts of things out. For example, cooking oil is created by means that use energy, and has less dense energy content than petroleum. It is created by using land, fertilizer, water, and other inputs. The issue isn't whether you can run a car on cooking oil - clearly you can - but rather you can run a car more efficiently and cheaply on cooking oil than on gasoline. That's the type of answer the market supplies, and the answer is no. Because if it could be done, we'd all be driving cars running on cooking oil, since someone could make a bloody fortune commercializing it.
As for the AIDS example, the same thing could be said of any non-chronic condition. Yet we now have vaccines for all sorts of diseases, which under your theory shouldn't have happened: rubella, measles, mumps, diphtheria, etc etc etc. We have cures for certain kinds of cancers. The list goes on and on - and many of these were created by private drug companies for profit (or else created by universities and then licensed out for profit).
The market isn't perfect, but it usually produces good stuff at reasonable cost. Nonmarket economies aren't known for creating great science or improving their people's standard of living. Under your theory the Soviet Union should have been a cornucopia of scientific advances - when in reality their primary scientific contributions stemmed from military projects (think Sputnik).
See, the one thing I wish we could come up with is a feasible substitute for petroleum as an energy source. If there's one thing I'd like to do it's tell the misogynistic dictatorships sitting on the underground pools of oil that they can go drink it for all we care. Whoever comes up with a way to do that will make a bloody fortune, the same way that Google gave Yahoo a run for the money when they came up with a better search engine. Unfortunately, the densest energy content at the cheapest price right now is in petroleum. We have to find an alternative, and as petroleum gets more expensive it becomes more likely that we'll find economically feasible alternatives - that's what the market does.
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The point of the cooking oil is that it is USED cooking oil and is thus recycling it. While fueling all cars on it is not necessarily feasible fueling some machines on it is. Also most of the medical advances were not done for profit and were done for science. This is why so much of our taxes go to universities to perform research because the free market won't further those fields and the government has to step in. In some cases there are decent people working within the free market who choose to do what is best for society instead of what is best for profits. Also I made no statement about what research under the soviet union should have been like and only stated that a pure free market has no motive to further many technologies.
Why do you think the drug companies lobby against marijuana? Because it would kill their profits. A drug that people could produce themselves!!! We can't have that. Not that I want to side track this thread with marijuana discussion (note: I have never smoked marijuana and am not advocating the use of it for personal reasons)
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Originally Posted by dksuddeth
as far as running a vehicle on anything, if it comes to a consumer cheaper than the current product, you can bet that people (the consumer market) will buy and use it.
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Thats only true if the corporations choose to sell it cheaper or sell it at all. They are the ones who can afford and have the knowledge to further such technology but refuse to do it because it could hurt their profits.
It is my view that the pure free market does not work and neither does pure communism. Both fail for the same reason, people cannot be trusted to act for the benefit of society when it is contradictory the benefit of themselves. I think the market needs
independent regulatory agencies whose sole purpose is to make sure the market is acting toward the benefit of society as a whole and not to any one person.