I suppose it depends on what you call "open", eh, Phill?
If by "open", you mean financial markets where, as Milton Freedman says, each new regulation raises the cost of entry and protects the surviving firms by killing their smaller competion with red tape, then we have "open" markets.
Well, Milton Friedman's method for saving the whale is to leave it to the free market, if people want whales in the oceans they won't buy whale meat. The point that even if no US person eats whale, a few thousand "gourmets" in Japan can eat their way through the remaining stocks of many species in a few years escapes him. So forgive me if if find you authority somewhat less than compelling. Adam Smith makes the point rather better in his analysis of monopolies and how they affect the market. But remember that although regulations may be instituted as protectionist mechanisms that is not the only purpose that regulations are introduced.
If by "open", you mean that people can't purchase the attention of their favorite politician fair and square, without having to play zero-sum games with barnyard animals, then we have "open" markets. ;-).
There are so many negatives in that sentence I can't figure out which way you are arguing. Certainly there are many senators, congressman etc who can be bought for a contribution to their election fund or a huge advance on their memoirs.
Nothing personal, Phill, but it does seem like it's more a question of what you're afraid of, than what *is*, right?
No, it is a case of whether you are applying ideological judgements or prepared to analyse the system itself. I do not believe in the idol of the free market. I do not consider ecconomists to have justified the level of inane self-satisfied certainty about their field that they exude. I was talking to a professor at the Sloane school yesterday who made precisely this point. Deciding what is right implies an ethical judgement. Are you basing your argument on Kantian or consequentialist assumptions? I can argue either but since most of my thesis is based on a logical positivist approach I'm far more sympathetic to the utilitarian point of view. The free market is not in itself an ethical basis - that would be creating an ought from an is. The problem which libertarian idelogues are affraid to face up to is that markets have required regulation to keep them open and free. Its all very well for people to jump up and down, stampt their feet and claim the opposite but this is what every government in the free world believes. The effects of deregulation in the savings and loans area make it unlikely any further experiments in that area will be tried for a while. Phill