It’s also the case that market-ideals tend to become miserable to experience in practice if you approach them too closely.
Usually the discussion of that kind of thing revolves around the near-elimination of profit via (hypothetical) too-perfect competition among producers and too-perfect information for consumers, but with the rise of automated mass-scale spying and automated finer-grained price discrimination (plus enormous consolidation of markets due to near-abandonment of anti-trust enforcement in the ‘70s), we’re kinda seeing the real deal play out the other direction: approaching-maximum extraction of profit from every transaction.
Which sucks, to put it mildly. You do not want markets that function “too well” in any direction.
Usually the discussion of that kind of thing revolves around the near-elimination of profit via (hypothetical) too-perfect competition among producers and too-perfect information for consumers, but with the rise of automated mass-scale spying and automated finer-grained price discrimination (plus enormous consolidation of markets due to near-abandonment of anti-trust enforcement in the ‘70s), we’re kinda seeing the real deal play out the other direction: approaching-maximum extraction of profit from every transaction.
Which sucks, to put it mildly. You do not want markets that function “too well” in any direction.