What would be life be like in a true economy?

[lorrnae]

No social programs. No free education. No policies on businesses. No police, Fire department, waste collection/ treatment or ambulances provided by the goverment (we would have to pay someone to provide these).

[brclpp]

a true economy? sigh? they are all true economies, communism, free market, socialism, are all true economies, you just might not like their form of economics.

you need to change your question to what would life be in a true free market society?

and you jump to the conclusion that thier wouldn't be police or fire departments? do you understand how a free market capitalist society would work? they would exist because they would get paid. all the things you mentioned provide a service, they would be selling that service and thus they exist. and guess what they do. we do have some private schools, we do have some private fire departments, ambulances already tend to be privately owned.

no social programs? wow that would be great, imagine a world where people had to work for what they had, companies that lent too much money would fail allowing for better managed companies to move in. people would be expected to provide for their own retirement, failing to do so would mean that the responsibility would fall to the family and not the tax payers. people would be expected to learn new skills in order to receive pay raises and not an arbitrary raise determined by the government
please take economics before you make such vague questions and accusations.

[glosoliii]

I don't think it would be good, as normal people would be far too vurnerable to big business. we need atleast core services no matter if you can afford them or not.

[BoshTalk]

The problem with a text-book free-market society (as described by brclpp and Ayn Rand) is that resources on this planet are not equally distributed.
For instance, there is no free-market incentive to provide electric and water service to some poor guy who can only afford a house 50 miles away from the nearest power company, where providing him service may cost 10X more than it costs people who live within 5 miles of the utilities.

Another example: Let's say Wal*Mart buys up a few private toll-roads to operate. They have an incentive to over-charge Target trucks that are delivering goods to Target stores.

In both cases, social "fairness" is thrown out in favor of capitalist "freedom". A mixture of social & free-market is necessary because they are ran by humans who are (for the most part) both self-interested and rational.