People are terrible at figuring out what the world will look like. The problem is just that the other side has the exact same problem of figuring out the future as you.
If something is successful for 5-10 years then maybe it was not a stupid policy.
Mistakes are a given in any human system, you might as well have cases where a company gives significant discounts to capture the hole market but then the end up losing money.
One cases has a price lower then equilibrium for a while, the other a higher. Both parts of the contract have a huge intensives to get it right and both gain by finding a good level.
I have never claimed the markets are perfect. They are not, the best you can do is an adaptive process that has good feedback.
Also when discussing anti-trust we need to actually show that it is likely that it would actually improve on the situation. You are no longer taking about simply regulation, you are basically talking about the need for a super intelligent third party that could recognize local maximas and fix them, that is quite frankly impossible. Anti-Trust bureaucracies were drowning in complexity of even proving that a clear cut monopoly was actually doing anything bad.
There are local maxima situation everywhere all the time. The market process constantly tries to move towards equilibrium and this is the only mechanism we know that is able to solve the coordination problem. In theory micro optimizations are possible but in practice there is absolutely no evidence that such micro optimizations from outside parties improve long term success, and there is lots of evidence that in many cases attempts at such regulation massively harmed people.
Look at the Post-WW2 India when Indish Economist trained in Britain came over with the new socialist ideas where you would have a market but regulated it so that you had the optimal amount of competition and to prevent monopoly. This was probably the most extreme attempted at doing this sort of thing on systematic bases. The result were slow growth and 100s of millions of people not moving out of poverty. The bureaucracy followed its own interest and instead of fixing local maxima they fixed their pocketbooks.
If something is successful for 5-10 years then maybe it was not a stupid policy.
Mistakes are a given in any human system, you might as well have cases where a company gives significant discounts to capture the hole market but then the end up losing money.
One cases has a price lower then equilibrium for a while, the other a higher. Both parts of the contract have a huge intensives to get it right and both gain by finding a good level.
I have never claimed the markets are perfect. They are not, the best you can do is an adaptive process that has good feedback.
Also when discussing anti-trust we need to actually show that it is likely that it would actually improve on the situation. You are no longer taking about simply regulation, you are basically talking about the need for a super intelligent third party that could recognize local maximas and fix them, that is quite frankly impossible. Anti-Trust bureaucracies were drowning in complexity of even proving that a clear cut monopoly was actually doing anything bad.
There are local maxima situation everywhere all the time. The market process constantly tries to move towards equilibrium and this is the only mechanism we know that is able to solve the coordination problem. In theory micro optimizations are possible but in practice there is absolutely no evidence that such micro optimizations from outside parties improve long term success, and there is lots of evidence that in many cases attempts at such regulation massively harmed people.
Look at the Post-WW2 India when Indish Economist trained in Britain came over with the new socialist ideas where you would have a market but regulated it so that you had the optimal amount of competition and to prevent monopoly. This was probably the most extreme attempted at doing this sort of thing on systematic bases. The result were slow growth and 100s of millions of people not moving out of poverty. The bureaucracy followed its own interest and instead of fixing local maxima they fixed their pocketbooks.