When you’re having a political conversation like advocating for some election or public policy result and you hear someone say, “Let the market decide,” what they mean is this:
Let’s do nothing.
There’s no law against businesses and individuals donating to charity or offering adequate healthcare to the destitute or being generous to the poor or giving out decent wages for menial labor. The market can already choose to do those things. It mostly hasn’t.
Saying that the market should decide is saying that everything that should be done is being done and there’s no reason to pool resources together through the government to make things better. Except it’s saying it in a sneaky way that sounds more serious than, “Eh, so what?”
What are markets and how do they decide?
Markets are people, you know like corporations, who buy and sell stuff, you know like weed. Do you suppose that weed suppliers offer their employees health care? I digress. The same thing goes for the people in the other markets. “No soup for you!” FREE MARKETS work a little dufferently. The supplier kills off all of his competition in drive-bye shootings and corners the market. That’s because he doesn’t really care about his employees or his customers. What he cares about is becoming very rich. Like, you know, Romney. Or if there’s another supplier with equal fire-power the two of them will call a secret meeting and form a cartel, like you know OPEC. Then they’ll set the price of weed. Enough economics for tonite, tata.