"That's how the free market works; it encourages people to improve their lives by satisfying the needs of others." I'm sure you've heard this blatant lie thousands of times in one form or another. It's the age old story about the baker who, in order to make a living for himself, feeds the community, and how through competition the consumers will get the best bread for the best price.
source: YouTube
It's not true though. It's already a lie to bring this story about the free market as a key feature of capitalism; it's not. Capitalism in itself is a system of production in which the means of production are privately owned. That's it, there's nothing more to it. Markets, free or otherwise, can exist alongside any other system of production, as they have throughout history; markets existed in feudalism, during slavery and further back in the empires of yesteryear. Trading is not connected to any specific type of economy, it exists in all of them or can exist in all of them, including socialism.
The quote in the introduction of this post could have been true if our economy as a whole had the goal of satisfying the needs of everyone. But it doesn't. There's only one motivating aspect in our economy, and that's making a profit. This goes for every single actor, every single individual in the economy, as well as the economy as a whole; the capitalist market economy only works as long as it grows. This is not possible on a finite planet with finite resources, so it needs to crash periodically, usually every 7 to 10 years, and sometimes has to crash so hard that large parts of the population lose their homes, their jobs, their livelihoods. This is not rocket-science.
If the opening statement of this post were true, the free markets would long ago have satisfied the need for affordable healthcare in America, the only "civilized" country in the developed world that leaves people's access to healthcare to the whims of markets. What people are willing to pay for any given product is dependent for a great part on how badly they want or need it. So, how badly do you want to stay alive? If you need some specific medicine to stay alive, like, let's say insulin, you'd be willing to pay a lot of money for it, wouldn't you? Or you'd be willing to travel many miles and cross the border into another country where prices are somewhat more reasonable, wouldn't you? When the customer has no real choice, suddenly the laws of supply and demand are working against the customer. You can choose to pay more for that new iPhone, or you can choose the much cheaper Android phone. But when it comes to healthcare, where's the choice?
That goes for food, water, electricity, education and many more things as well in our modern society in which surviving with dignity is impossible without either one of them. I'd go even further and say that if you want to live in a functioning democracy, education is of prime importance for that democracy to survive; there's no choice. And where there's no choice, logic and reason dictate that there's no room for a market. Not everything is an iPhone or Nike sneakers. Anyhow, this is just one aspect discussed in the below linked video, which is yet another brilliant debunking of yet another nonsensical PragerU video called "Socialism vs. Capitalism"; I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did!
PragerU Brain Rot (Responding to "Socialism vs. Capitalism)
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