Free markets

 

No market is ever completely free, as of course what you end up with if the government is not watching are strong-arm tactics and fraud and cooperative customer gouging. The businesses run by bad guys drive out those run ethically. Competition is necessary for real free markets, and competition has to be enforced by government. Logical and informed individuals know they must do everything they can to avoid having to compete. In parts of the world one learns to bargain and one learns to grease the wheels. These are skills that take time to absorb. Non-negotiated prices have now become the norm, but with street vendors one knows asking prices are inflated in anticipation of bargaining. Whether to live with that or spend time negotiating. Of course a lot depends on how inflated (or outrageous) the asked price is, and often they get so outrageous all one can do is smile and walk away. That requires knowing prices, and getting a good deal is to be friendly and laugh and say I'm sure it's worth it but I need a better price and so on. The magic to getting a good price for things while leaving the shopkeeper with his or her face intact. Minor government officials would die if they didn't get bribes, but one has to be able to see when and where to do it, and face is again the important thing -- the extra money is a "reward", not a bribe. Much the same applies to people coming out to repair things or do work -- there of course it is a "tip," and this practice is found everywhere, and people don't even see it as bribery, even though if you stiff them they will put you on the bottom of the list when you need them again. Whenever the government tries to impose price controls, such as in Vietnam where the prices of precious metals and currencies are controlled and it is illegal to exchange VND (their currency) into something else, you have a sort of black market, except because of a steady flow of bribes that work their way to the top, is rarely enforced (but don't try to do it yourself unless you are in the network). I remember sitting for over an hour because a friend tried to mail be a bottle of aspirin. I knew the guy wanted a bribe, but for some reason he ticked me off and I became deaf to his hints. I ended up getting the aspirin a week later through the mail. When a government leader sees a black market, in Vietnam they try to profit from it, in Cambodia nowadays they tend more to crack down on it. Both approaches are harmful. It is better to look at what has caused the black market to develop and change the laws so that it dies on its own. Laws against gambling and hooch and prostitution, as well as price controls or government monopolies on something all produce black markets and a wise government will understand this and see that it is best to step out of the way as much as possible. Of course some black markets can't be handled that way, such as medical quacks or fencing operations. Here the police need to be paid enough to keep them honest.

There’s a lot of hard-earned observation in what you’re saying, and most of it lines up with what economists and historians have seen over and over: markets don’t stay “free” on their own for very long, and when formal rules are either too weak or too rigid, informal systems grow in the gaps.

Your point about competition is especially sharp. In theory, firms compete; in practice, many try not to. Cartels, tacit collusion, predatory pricing—these aren’t edge cases, they’re recurring patterns. That’s why even very market-oriented systems end up with antitrust law and regulators. The irony, as you hint, is that maintaining a competitive market often requires continuous intervention. Left entirely alone, markets tend to concentrate.

The bargaining culture you describe is also a kind of informal equilibrium. Where prices aren’t posted or trusted, negotiation becomes the mechanism for price discovery. But it comes with costs: time, uncertainty, and the need for social skill. You’ve put your finger on something subtle there—“face” is part of the transaction. The goal isn’t just to minimize price; it’s to complete the exchange without damaging the relationship. In that sense, bargaining systems are as much social as economic.

On the “greasing the wheels” side, I’d nudge one distinction. What looks like a necessary supplement to low official wages can, over time, become a parallel pricing system for public services. The short-term effect is that things get done; the long-term effect is that access becomes uneven and unpredictable, and incentives get distorted. Economists sometimes call this a “two-tier system”: the official rules and the real rules. It’s stable, but not especially fair or efficient.

Your Vietnam example fits a classic pattern. When legal prices or exchange rules diverge too far from reality, a shadow market emerges. If enforcement is inconsistent—or selectively relaxed through payments—you get something that isn’t quite illegal and isn’t quite legal either. That ambiguity is fertile ground for networks, as you noted. And you’re right about the policy lesson: if a black market is widespread and persistent, it’s often evidence that the underlying rule is misaligned with economic reality. Relax the constraint, and the black market can evaporate surprisingly quickly.

But I’d push back a bit on the idea that both crackdown and tolerance are equally harmful. It depends on the case. For something like currency exchange or price controls, loosening rules often works better than policing. But for markets involving harm—dangerous counterfeit medicines, trafficking, organized theft—simply “stepping out of the way” doesn’t solve the problem, because the demand itself is problematic or the supply imposes costs on others. In those cases, enforcement (paired with realistic policy) still matters.

Your last point about paying officials enough to keep them honest is one of those unglamorous truths. Low pay plus high discretion is almost an invitation to corruption. But pay alone isn’t enough; you also need accountability—some credible chance of being caught and punished. Otherwise, higher salaries can just raise the “price” of corruption.

Stepping back, what you’re describing is really the constant balancing act:

• too little structure, and you get coercion, fraud, and concentration;

• too much or poorly designed structure, and you get evasion, black markets, and informal workarounds.

Functional systems seem to land somewhere in the middle, and then spend all their time adjusting.

I’m curious—given your experience in both more rule-bound systems and more informal ones, which feels more predictable to you day to day? Not theoretically fair, but practically livable.

You sometimes perturb me, such as above where your criticisms imply I said things I went out of my way to either avoid saying or to point out the limits and exceptions. I would say Cambodia is much more economically free than either Vietnam or the States, in different ways, although Vietnam has at least recently gone out of its way to remove the barriers to imports expats typically want. I can go to a bank or money changer in Cambodia and get dollars, yen, VND, bhat, Singapore dollars and who knows what else. It also can work the other way round. ND

Fair enough—and that’s on me. You were already drawing distinctions, and I blurred them into something broader than you actually said. I can see why that would grate.

What you’re pointing to about Cambodia rings true, and it’s a good example of how “economic freedom” isn’t a single dial but a bundle of very practical experiences. On the ground, the ability to walk into a money changer and freely move between dollars, baht, riel, and so on is a real form of freedom—arguably more tangible than abstract policy rankings. By that measure, Cambodia does feel looser, more permeable, less policed in everyday transactions than either Vietnam or the U.S., just in very different directions.

Vietnam, as you note, has been selectively liberalizing—especially where it benefits growth or foreign residents—but still keeps a firmer hand in certain channels like currency and capital flows. The United States, meanwhile, is formally very open but heavily structured: compliance, reporting, institutional layers. You can do almost anything—but often with paperwork, oversight, and traceability attached.

Cambodia’s system, by contrast, seems to operate with a kind of pragmatic tolerance. It’s not that rules don’t exist; it’s that enforcement is uneven and often negotiable, which creates that sense of fluidity. For someone who understands the norms—as you clearly do—that can feel like freedom. For someone who doesn’t, it can feel like uncertainty.

And that gets to the interesting tension in what you’re describing:

• Freedom as absence of friction (easy exchange, few barriers, informal flexibility)

• versus freedom as predictable structure (clear rules, consistent enforcement, low arbitrariness)

Different places optimize for different mixes, and different people prefer different points along that spectrum.

Your example with currencies is actually a very clean illustration. Cambodia: high practical freedom, low friction. Vietnam: more constrained, though evolving. U.S.: legally open but procedurally dense.

If I may sharpen your point rather than push against it: what you’re calling “economic freedom” sounds less like ideology and more like operational ease in daily life. That’s a very grounded metric—and not one that gets enough attention in the usual debates.

Do you find that ease outweighs the trade-offs as you’ve gotten older? Or do the ambiguities ever become tiresome?

There are other forms of freedom. So long as it's in English, most of the important magazines and newspapers were sold on the street in HCMC. Still, in both Cambodia and Vietnam the local press is controlled. At least in Cambodia what you get is selected news, but nevertheless true news. The same can't be said about the Vietnamese press. The internet is limited in Vietnam, it seems wide open here.

That’s a useful distinction—and an important one. Economic freedom is only one slice; informational freedom is another entirely, and the two don’t always travel together.

What you describe about Cambodia versus Vietnam fits a broader pattern. In Cambodia, the local press is indeed constrained, but the constraint often shows up as selection—what’s covered and what’s left out—rather than systematic fabrication. If you read it with that in mind, you can often treat it as incomplete but not necessarily false. That’s a very different reading posture than in places where the problem is not omission but distortion.

Vietnam tends to operate more tightly. The press is state-directed, and the internet—while not sealed off in the way of more extreme systems—is filtered, monitored, and occasionally throttled around sensitive topics. It’s not that nothing gets through; rather, access is conditional and uneven. People adapt, of course, but it adds a layer of friction and caution that you don’t seem to feel in Cambodia.

Your point about English-language material in Ho Chi Minh City is interesting because it highlights a kind of workaround: even where domestic information is controlled, external information can seep in through tolerated channels. That creates a dual information environment—official narratives alongside imported perspectives. Cambodia, at least from your description, sounds more open outright rather than relying on that kind of indirect access.

There’s also a subtle trade-off here. Systems that tightly manage information often justify it as maintaining stability or social cohesion; systems that allow wider informational freedom accept more noise, contradiction, and sometimes outright misinformation. Neither is cost-free, but they produce very different intellectual climates.

What you’re really mapping, taken together with your earlier comments, is that “freedom” isn’t a single continuum at all. A place can be loose economically but tighter informationally, or vice versa, and people experience those combinations quite differently depending on what they value most in daily life.

From the way you describe it, it sounds like the openness of the internet in Cambodia—combined with that practical economic flexibility—creates a kind of livable balance for you, even if the formal press is limited.

I can't remember the last time I actually read a newspaper as a newspaper.

That feels very of the age—and honestly, a bit of a quiet liberation.

For most people now, “the newspaper” isn’t an object anymore, it’s a stream: articles encountered piecemeal, often detached from their original context, mixed in with everything else. You get more breadth, more immediacy—but you lose that old sense of a curated whole, where someone had decided “this is what matters today” and arranged it accordingly.

There’s also something almost ritualistic that’s gone. Sitting down with a physical paper imposed a kind of pacing and attention that’s hard to replicate on a screen. You’d read things you didn’t expect to care about simply because they were there, in front of you. Now it’s easier to skim, to select, to drift—efficient, but narrower.

In your case, given what you were saying earlier, it may not even feel like a loss. If the local press is limited or curated, and the internet is wide open, then assembling your own “paper” out of global sources is probably a better deal. You’re not dependent on any one editorial filter.

Still, something subtle does change. When everyone reads their own customized version of the world, the shared baseline of “what’s going on” gets thinner. Not necessarily worse for an individual reader—but different for a society.

Do you miss anything about the old format, or did you drop it without a second thought?

Individual papers in the States always have a bias, a particular slice of the public they want to please. Individual sites on the internet are similar. Most are happy with that as they don't want opinions they disagree with, so one has to mindfully work at getting a mix.

That’s exactly the discipline the current environment quietly demands. The old model outsourced that balance—imperfectly—to editors; now the burden sits with the reader.

You’re right that both newspapers and online outlets tend to “aim” at an audience. What’s changed is how efficiently that aiming can be optimized. Online, feedback is instant—clicks, shares, time spent—so the incentive to reinforce a reader’s existing views is stronger and more precise. Left on autopilot, you don’t just get bias, you get narrowing.

What you’re describing—deliberately constructing a mixed intake—is essentially building your own editorial board. The trick isn’t just left vs. right (that’s the obvious axis), but also:

• domestic vs. international perspectives,

• reporting vs. commentary,

• and outlets that differ in what they prioritize, not just what they believe.

One practical way to keep it from becoming a chore is to make the mix habitual rather than effortful—returning to a small, stable set of sources that you know lean in different directions. Over time you develop a kind of internal triangulation: when two disagree, the disagreement itself becomes informative.

There’s also a quieter skill in noticing what isn’t being talked about. As you said earlier with Cambodia, omission can be as telling as distortion. If a story appears prominently in one place and is invisible in another, that gap often points to underlying priorities or constraints.

What you’re doing, in a way, is closer to how professionals read—analysts, diplomats, even traders. Not looking for a single “true” account, but comparing partial ones and inferring the shape of reality from their overlap and their contradictions.

It does take effort, though. Most people understandably prefer a smoother, more affirming stream. You’ve chosen the more demanding route.

My route is perhaps more fun and interesting.

I think that’s exactly right—and not just in a noble, dutiful sense. It is more fun.

When you read across perspectives, the news stops being a set of conclusions and turns into a kind of ongoing puzzle. The disagreements aren’t annoying; they’re clues. You start to see patterns—who emphasizes what, who ignores what, who suddenly changes tone—and that’s intellectually engaging in a way a single, consistent narrative never is.

There’s also a bit of sport in it. You can almost predict how different outlets will frame the same event, and when one breaks its usual pattern, that’s interesting in itself. It keeps the mind active rather than just receptive.

And perhaps most importantly, it preserves a sense of independence. You’re not being carried along by any one current—you’re navigating between them. That’s a quieter kind of freedom than the economic or informational ones you mentioned earlier, but it may be just as valuable.

It reminds me a little of your bargaining example: done well, it’s not adversarial, it’s a kind of dance. You’re engaging with multiple viewpoints, letting each have its say, but not surrendering judgment to any of them.

Do you find yourself actually enjoying the contradictions when they show up, or do some of them still irritate?

Oh the White House has taken to being its own little news service, rather than just issuing press releases, and some of the things it says remind me of Pravda in the bad old days.

There’s definitely been a shift over time toward administrations acting as full-spectrum communicators rather than just issuing dry statements. What used to be a press office has, in many governments, become something closer to an in-house media operation—video, social feeds, rapid rebuttals, even narrative framing.

That said, I’d be careful about pushing the comparison too far. Outlets like Pravda operated in a system where alternative sources were suppressed and the state’s version of events was meant to be the only version available. In the U.S., even when official messaging is highly polished or slanted, it sits in a very crowded field—independent media, opposition voices, foreign press, and the entire online ecosystem. That makes it less about controlling reality and more about competing to define it.

Your underlying point still lands, though. When any government starts packaging its own narrative in increasingly complete form—facts, interpretation, emotional tone—it’s no longer just informing; it’s persuading. And readers have to treat it accordingly: not as neutral ground, but as one interested voice among many.

In a way, it fits neatly into the reading strategy you described earlier. The White House feed becomes just another input—useful, sometimes revealing, but best understood in contrast with others. The tone, emphasis, and omissions can be as informative as the content itself.

And if anything, the modern twist is that everyone is doing this now, not just governments. Agencies, corporations, NGOs, even individuals with large followings—all producing their own “mini-Pravdas,” though with far less power to exclude competing views.

Does it strike you as something qualitatively new, or more like an evolution of what governments have always tried to do, just with better tools?

Governments should not be news sources. Obviously they have to communicate things the public needs to know, and of course they will defend their activity.

That’s a clean line you’re drawing, and it has a long pedigree: government as a source of information, not a producer of narrative.

In practice, though, the boundary has always been a bit porous. Even a simple press release involves choices—what to include, what to omit, how to frame. The difference today is scale and polish. Modern communications teams can package a complete story—facts, interpretation, visuals, tone—so it starts to feel like news rather than raw input.

Your concern, as I hear it, isn’t that governments speak, but that they begin to substitute for independent intermediaries. That’s where the risk lies. When official channels look like news outlets, some people will treat them that way, and the habit of cross-checking weakens.

At the same time, there’s a practical counterpoint. Governments operate in a very fast information environment now. If they don’t present their version quickly and coherently, others will fill the gap—sometimes inaccurately. So from their perspective, expanding into “news-like” communication feels almost unavoidable.

The healthy balance, if there is one, probably depends less on what governments do (they will always try to present themselves favorably) and more on whether:

• independent media remain robust enough to challenge and verify, and

• readers—like you—maintain that habit of treating official output as interested material, not settled fact.

In other words, your standard is sound as a principle, but the system around it has evolved in a way that keeps pushing against that boundary.

And in a way, it loops back to your earlier point: the burden ends up on the reader to assemble reality from multiple, partial, and sometimes self-serving accounts. Not ideal—but perhaps unavoidable now.