[Link] Why don't people like markets?

GLaDOS

An interesting piece with speculation on possible reasons for why people seem to be biased against markets. To summarize:

Market processes are not visible. For instance, when a government taxes its citizens and offers a subsidy to some producers, what is seen is the money taken and the money received. What is unseen is the amount of production that would occur in the absence of such transfers.
Markets are intrinsically probabilistic and therefore marked with uncertainty, like other living organisms, we are loss-averse and try to minimise uncertainty
Humans may be motivated to place their trust in processes that are (or at least seem to be) driven by agents rather than impersonal factors.

The last point reminded me of speculation from the recent LessWrong article Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions:

Do all theories of legitimacy also perhaps rest on the same cognitive failings that conspiracy theories do? The difference between a shadowy cabal we need to get rid of and an institution worthy of respect may be just some bad luck.

Before thinking about these points and debating them I strongly recommend you read the full article.

An interesting piece with speculation on possible reasons for why people seem to be biased against markets. To summarize:

Market processes are not visible. For instance, when a government taxes its citizens and offers a subsidy to some producers, what is seen is the money taken and the money received. What is unseen is the amount of production that would occur in the absence of such transfers.
Markets are intrinsically probabilistic and therefore marked with uncertainty, like other living organisms, we are loss-averse and try to minimise uncertainty
Humans may be motivated to place their trust in processes that are (or at least seem to be) driven by agents rather than impersonal factors.

The last point reminded me of speculation from the recent LessWrong article Conspiracy Theories as Agency Fictions:

Do all theories of legitimacy also perhaps rest on the same cognitive failings that conspiracy theories do? The difference between a shadowy cabal we need to get rid of and an institution worthy of respect may be just some bad luck.

Before thinking about these points and debating them I strongly recommend you read the full article.

How exactly is not having this extremely speculative stock and currency trading running at the timespan of milliseconds became 'having to do everything for themselves'? Or are we speaking of the market where i buy groceries?

This needless back-and-forth trading can be immediately eliminated with 5% tax on those operations (i.e. you sell stock or currency worth $1000, you pay $50). Hell, 1% would cut much of crap out (5% may be too severe). Would it make everyone 'have to do everything for themselves"? Let's look, I pay sales tax whenever I sell anything I make for actual consumption, it's way more than 5% , and it didn't force anyone to do everything by themselves.

What is the problem with high-speed trading in your opinion? I see a lot of people wanting a Financial Transactoons Tax, but I have yet to see étaples of what it would accomplish or prevent?

6Viliam_Bur14y

Both are parts of one continuum. Somewhere in the middle is e.g. a possibility of making billions by creating Google. A proper tax can make a part of this continuum mostly unprofitable. We just better be careful not to remove unnecessarily big part. Good luck finding a rational solution for such politically charged topic!