Thanks for your feedback Scott! You will probably not be surprised that I disagree with you. I wrote the article with the assumption that there are multiple interactions. I even gave examples of how outcomes varies in different cultures such as relation between employers and employees in Japan and the US. Inertia builds up over multiple experiences. Americans have learned over several interactions that defection is the smart strategy because they know most "players" of the game cannot be trusted. You don't fire and hire the same person several times over so you cannot really learn to adjust your behavior.
I think you misunderstand the prisoner's dilemma and how it applies. You use the example of how consumers and businesses interact several times, but that is not an application of the prisoner's dilemma to free market capitalism that I ever used. I had an example of a seller and buyer who don't trust each other as an example of how you can explain the prisoners dilemma. I was not using that as an example of problem which is prevalent in market economies. The first part of the article was just about different ways of explaining the principle. The second part was my application of the principle to a free market economy.
I wasn't actually focused on fairness. My underlying point was actually that fairness is a very subjective topic. It is hard to assess whether capitalism is fair or not. Hence I showed an example where it was very obviously fair. The point of that though experiment was simply to show how markets in an ideal situation are good at allocating resources. Judging how good markets are in more realistic situations is a much more complex assesment with less obvious conclusion.
Not sure why you give the bread example. I made exactly the same point myself. There is a tendency for many who are very deeply committed to free market capitalism to see cricism as being from people who only favor government and think markets are all bad. But that is exactly what I went to great pains to argue against. I argued in favor of a mixed approach rather than chasing some silver bullet.
Again that you bring up the USSR and the elites is strange given that I myself specifically used the USSR as a warning about how an economy without market prices will end up working very badly. You are kind of kicking in an open door. It seems you are arguing against an imaginery anti-capitalist person. That isn't me. I was very clear offering the USSR as a word of warning not as something to embrace.
You miss the point agains in your advertisement counter argument. I never argued there should be no advertisement. I simply pointed out its overuse. It is not hard to demonstrate that it can be overdone. The US has significantly more advertisement than in most European countries. Yet in my experience US media is generally of lower quality. In fact because it is so viewer driven it tends to be sensationalist. Focus too much on "popular opinion." Whatever drives high readership or gets lots of viewers. Social media in hunt for clicks have promoted the most conspiratorial and divisive videos and opinions. If anything advertisement has done a staggering job at undermining democracy all over the West.
Advertisement isn't free. Somebody has to pay for it. Me and you as consumers are paying for it indirectly. Advertisement represent a tax on all consumer goods. Companies need to raise prices of the products they sell to finance their advertisement. Instead of paying the advertisement tax you could have paid more for a newspaper subscription. It is not like a society without ads would not have had newspapers. People would still be interested in news and willing to pay for it. It is all about the culture you build up. You can compare iOS and Android. On Apple's platform users got used to paying from the start and associated apps with value. On Android a culture which expected everything to be free developed because Google unlike Apple is ad oriented and generally give their stuff away for "free".
No offense but the "ownership" approach to polution is such rubbish. Libertarians love to throw that around but can never actually point to a place which has implemented it successfully or actually come with a concrete solution. You cannot sell ownership to the air. How is ownership going to reduce CO2 emissions, acid rain etc? If it was as trivial as you claim we would have solved global warming long time ago.
Any detailed analysis will show that the "ownership" model crash into a brick wall of reality very quickly. Things like water rights cannot easily be privatized to one person for instance. Rivers flow through several properties. You cannot section off the rivers as a seprate property. Nor can the water table be sectioned off. Also there are plenty of examples of private ownership not protecting resources. For instance in Norwegian history we were on many occassions about to faced sever deforrestation. You would think forest owners would think ahead but they didn't. It was the government every time who saved the forest. And deforestation happened all over Europe through history despite the forest being owned by someone. In most cases it was governments hindering it from getting worse than it did.
What you talk about is theory, not reality. You think that a rational human would protect their forest, but actual history shows a different reality. If the map doesn't match the landscape, you cannot keep insisting the landscape is wrong. It is what people actually do which is reality not what you think they ought to do according to some idealized economic theory.
