At 6:38 PM -0500 11/6/98, Jim Choate wrote:
Forwarded message:
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 12:34:34 -0500 From: Petro <petro@playboy.com> Subject: RE: dbts: Privacy Fetishes, Perfect Competition, and the Foregone (fwd)
Assuming your definition of "free market" is "a market without regulation", you can't have a black market in a free market since a black market is trade in violation of regulations.
Actualy a black market is usualy goods gotten through theft or other illegal means, not necessarily anything related to how or what is sold. If you don't corrupt free-market to include legitimizing theft as a viable market strategy then yes, you can in fact have a black market in a free-market.
Usualy != Correctly. Take tomatoes. Perfectly legal (AFAIK) everywhere, here in this country a 5 year old child can buy a tomato from a farmer with a stand on the side of the road. If you go back 10 years, and if "this country" was the soviet union, a tomato purchased from the wrong person could get you in trouble. Entirely HOW the item was sold. This is true in this coutry. Licquor is legal if purchased thru the approved store. Try selling the same thing out of the back of your truck. It is the product, or how the product is sold.
Let's consider auto-theft. The issue isn't that you can't buy the car through legitimate means, it just means you have to have more resources than
So take ampthetimines (well, don't take them, but take the case of them), if I get them from Joe Random Drug Dealer, it's black Market, if I get them from Paul the Doctor, it's "white" market. In fact, if I get them from Paul the Doctor, and then sell them to someone else, I am selling them on the black market, even if I recieved them legally, so in this case, it isn't how the item was aquired, it's whether the _sale_, the *exchange* is legal.
you have. So what do you do? You find somebody whose stolen a vehicle and is willing to sell it to you at a discount.
In other words, a Black market is when you trade either illegal goods illegally, or legal goods illegally. Too strict and unrealistic a definition of black market.
Not at all. It's quite wide open. It covers every non-legal transaction.
If there are no illegal goods, and there is no regulations limiting trading, then the black market cannot exist. Of course not since we've now legitimized theft and murder with your definition.
I didn't think of theft when I wrote the above, and I don't usually consider murder for hire markets as part of the black market, altho you have a point. I still maintain that as one moves closer to a completely free market, there is less and less of a black market, and to be the extrememe case of a free market, there would be the potential to trade in both human lives, and in stolen property. In a free market, the selling of stolen goods might not be a crime in and of itself, but the posession of those things could be, and the aquireing would be, as well, the _hiring_ of an assassin might be legal, as long as no killing took place. When it does, you hang the assassin on murder, and the hirer on conspiracy, aiding and abetting or whatever, and stick them in the same cell. -- "To sum up: The entire structure of antitrust statutes in this country is a jumble of economic irrationality and ignorance. It is a product: (a) of a gross misinterpretation of history, and (b) of rather naïve, and certainly unrealistic, economic theories." Alan Greenspan, "Anti-trust" http://www.ecosystems.net/mgering/antitrust.html Petro::E-Commerce Adminstrator::Playboy Ent. Inc.::petro@playboy.com