Almost no one opposes markets per se.
People like markets, but like to regulate them.
Then,the real question is: why people oppose free markets and prefer regulated market.

regards,
Manoel

This kind of impersonal market is a bit of a legal fiction. It was probably practical when Adam Smith wrote “the invisible hand”, when centers of capital were various, when great power depended on great landholdings, and Samuel Johnson wrote “a man is seldom so innocently employed as when he is making money.”

That’s not what we have today. What we have today is a tsunami of investment capital sloshing around the world, directed by a few thousand people who can’t seem to think of uses for it that are at once beneficial and profitable.

Consider Bolivian water. We know who loaned the money, we know who borrowed the money. We know who lobbied the government, we know who took control. They wanted us to know so they could sell stock.

The farmers market might be a good project for tomorrow morning: “Buy the whole market and raise prices 2000%? Any other ideas? No? Let’s go.”

She writes “I don’t think many people feel oppressed or exploited every time they buy a tube of Colgate Total.” True, I don’t feel exploited, but I know that it is only by way of the oppression/exploitation of people (somewhere) that so many types of inexpensive foods and products are available.

She asks, “if you are someone who hears ‘water privatization’ and immediately has concerns that you do not have when you hear ‘government-run utility,’ why is that?”
Again, it’s not about me. Think Bolivia, not America. It is the difference between access to government-run water and a privatized system that prices the poor out of a basic need (and lobbies for laws that makes collecting rain water illegal).