Unlike heroin, you'll survive with just this once hit ;)

"WITH YOUR FABULOUS CHILDREN" - Dragon energy is oozing from GEOTUS onto his staff :D

Two weeks down the line, she'll be saying it even better: "with your fabulous children, and they're great, really great, best children, you know it"!

I work remotely. It's great but ONLY IF both the company and the workers have proper remote protocols in place. It's certainly not an easy thing to hit right.

PUTUS striking hard live with the troll hammer :D

The lady has a nice style handling stupidly loaded questions.

There's like 50 vaccines and 8472983742 medicines. Why doesn't a medicine work for your liking in this specific case? Prefer hordes of dead people for months and months until a vaccine comes out (at which point most would be infected anyway)? While you have a cheap and effective medicine rotting away unused?

You're right, it's probably not the most conductive venue for this kind of discussion. As a parting post, let me note that "monopoly" has a different meaning depending on the school of thought we use. On the neo-Classical sense it has to do with market share, on the Marxist sense it has to do with the circulation of social capital and in the Austrian sense it's mostly about the (non-market) barriers-of-entry.

In each school of thought, their respective "monopoly" is "a bad thing". But a company that could be described as a monopoly in one, may well not be so in the other. So again, we come back to the "which model should I use to reason about?" question.

Edit: You're also spot-on about the entrenching note. If we look at the picture with a broad historical brush, we see that depending on the prevailing political paradigm of the era and place, the respective school of thought gets entrenched in the institutions.

That's silly.

The guy is a scientist, not your mother nor your doctor. He doesn't need to do anything for you. He did his work. It's your call what to "listen" to and you pay the consequences and enjoy the benefits of your actions.

The principles don't apply universally, that's why I commented - to clarify this really critical distinction. Because a lot of times we tend to use things assuming universality, while in reality we have instead invoked implicitly a specific framework, without perhaps realizing it.

Let's take for example "utility", which is at the core of pretty much every complex notion. Utility, aside of its common use, is a technical term in neo-Classical economics and is used in "utility functions" - for example U=a * ln(quantity of avocado) - b * ln(quantity of soy milk). In neo-Classical thought, the individual selects the quantities so as to maximize the value of U.

This kind of thing does not exist in the Austrian thought (which I will use as a counter-point because I understand it better than, for example, the Marxist school). Instead, in that school, you have "value scales". In the value scale, the individual would have something like { 1st avocado, 2nd avocado,1st bottle of soy milk, 3rd avocado, 2nd bottle of soy milk, ...).

The difference here seems minute but is one of essence and huge consequences in the divergence of these theories. Why is that? Because in the "value scales" case, they are purely ordinal for each individual and so there is no way to measuring the distances between the items in those rankings. Moreover, the very concept of such "distance" doesn't exist.

And so, to wrap up this example, utilities for the Austrians are ranks while for the neo-Classicals are quantities.

It works similarly for Pareto-optimality and a long list of other notions. Depending on the school of thought you're using, principles and approaches are greatly divergent. Therefore the question is - which school of thought should one pick to reason with? But that's another big topic of discussion, so I'll stop here :)

Well, first of all there's not a single "economics sense". We have Classical economics, Marxist economics, Keynsian economics, Monetarist economics, Austrian economics and the list goes on and on and on. It's not like physics where you a A physics science.

So, when you examine free markets from the perspective of a central planner, yes - markets won't end up on the spot the central planner considers optimal. That's a given, otherwise what would the "need" for the planner be? :)

Yet from the free market perspective, markets don't "end up" anywhere because there is no central goal to be achieved, therefore there exists no concept of success or failure.

"market failures" - this is a term that only makes sense in centrally managed economies. A free market has no "optimal" results, therefore it can neither succeed nor fail. A free market is simply the eternal process and result of sovereign actors (people, companies) trading with each other.

So, if for example you want defense, in a free market you buy it*. Or you don't, and you don't get it. There's no "omg, I didn't buy X but I wanted it, therefore the market failed".

'* either directly, or indirectly, via your other choices. For example, people can flee from insecure places and move their productivity to different places that want to use them.