[zarro]

I don't get why "Equitable rules to play by" is a concept so hard for everyone to understand.

The free market is about creating a level playing field. Globalization was shit because because it did not create a level playing field, it created a subsidy for "developing" countries, at the expense of "developed" ones.

Its hilarious that people think that somehow free markets and libertarians are responsible

[trophycase]

From Wikipedia: "In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority and from all forms of economic privilege, monopolies and artificial scarcities."

I think most people stop reading at "government" and don't realize that for a free market to exist, it needs to exist in a vacuum. There is no frictionless market, and every market has it's share of cost externalizations (plastics, energy, etc.), or leverage imbalance (healthcare, labor market).

[hn_throwaway_99]

Was about to upvote you until your last sentence.

Reason being, yes, I agree that a huge problem with globalization is that, while developed countries have spent many decades building things like labor rights, environmental protections, IP protections, etc., globalization essentially allows an out for companies to undermine all of these base-level rules.

But there is a very good reason people are blaming "free markets" and "libertarians" - lots of the cheerleading behind globalization was based on people espousing their love for free markets and libertarianism. The fact that you may disagree with their definition of free markets and libertarianism doesn't change the fact that their definition is the one that is most widely acknowledged.

[zarro]

Which is why I deliberately left that sentence in there. Its because there is a profound misunderstanding of the definition "free market". I also disagree with the contention that what the most number of people mistakenly define to be true is justification for miscategorizing and dismissing something.

The "cheerleaders" you are talking about clearly did not understand these concepts, and the result is mis-association, and thereby in effect dismissal of the idea of freedom as absurd.

Even though "ideally", "In a free market, the laws and forces of supply and demand are free from any intervention by a government or other authority", In practice to achieve this end, this means creating a level playing field which take things into account such as "IP protections, environmental costs, etc."

From a libertarian perspective, in order to eliminate a "government or other authority from all forms of economic privilege" in the long term, is to in the short term work to better define property rights and rules to play by to force more accountability with the individuals involved.