Anyone ever try a pure free-market capitalist game for fun?

[Tarvok]

Private roads already exist. There are neighborhood roads in various places that are maintained not by municipal governments, but by homeowner’s associations. There are toll freeways in our larger cities that you have to pay to drive. This is often done using a transponder that detects when you get on and automatically bills you for it. The old fashioned way, of course, is gates and toll-booths (kind of like at the Golden Gate Bridge), but new technology is making it so that kind of delay is unnecessary.

As to Democracy’s ability to model an absolute free-market system, it is quite unable to do so. The model makes the assumption that, if the government is not providing certain services, those services are simply not provided, which certainly is not true in real life. Everything that needs doing will be done, since anything that needs doing can turn a profit for the one doing it…

Education existed long before public education, both in the forms of well-paid tutors for the rich, and apprentiships, church schools, and such for the poor. There is a large and very effective system of private education in the US today, not to mention home-schooling, which is in many respects superior to public schooling.

As I mentioned earlier, there is such a thing as privately maintained roads, as well as communally maintained roads (not by taxation, but by voluntary contribution). In addition, I suspect that, were the US government to stop subsidizing road building, we’d see a lot more privately built “mass transit,” since it’s probably easier to charge admission to a train than a road.

In a society with relative political and economic equality, basic military protection can be provided via voluntary, unpaid militia service–and such a model is actually safer than the model which concentrates military potential into the hands of few in peacetime.

A society in which access to land has yet to be locked out finds immigration to be a blessing, and has no need for anti-immigration defenses.

One of these days, I might create a mod which, if proper conditions of economic equality and absence of government funding are reached, it produces an event called “The market takes over!” which results in services being provided without government spending.

[Ztrobe]

@johnnyboy

Did anyone else try to play the free-market approach? I think it’s impossible to do well in this game by doing so but I am curious to know if anyone had better luck than myself. lol. I think its realistic and supposed to happen like this though. The government I think plays a very important role in a government’s economy. Laissez-faire economics doesn’t work. If the United States, one of the most free-market nations in the first-world decided to cut taxes significantly, cut welfare, cut pensions, cut healthcare, etc. and devote most of their budget to military there would be chaos. The whole country would be like New Orleans.

I failed miserably as well. Unlike you I think this game’s economic model is incredibly unrealistic though. You get absolutely zero economic advantage from lowering taxes that should stimulate economic growth. The economy simply does not expand noticably which leaves you with only one option if you want to solve problems and that is to raise taxes to buy results in various areas.

The free market approach would be low taxes->economic growth->more money to spend on improvements even with the same, low taxrates. The two last steps never happen though. The game also doesn’t accept the idea that private initiative might provider services. Effectively, the game considers lowering taxes a way of throwing resources out the window.

After playing around with the game a bit I concluded that there is no underlying economic model at all. There is just a variety of factors that you can adjust to directly impact the happiness sliders. To see that this is so try playing a game where you first make drinkers extinct(0% of the population) by criminalizing drinking for a few periods. Then remove the bans and watch lifespan drop sharply, even though you still have zero drinkers in your population.

I had fun with the game for a little while, but it’s so far removed from reality that it’s just a popularity contest really. And one easily won by just maxing out the policies that help more than they destroy.

[cliffski]

GDP is strongly affected by pretty much every tax in the game, There is a strong relationship between lowering corporation tax and seeing a rise in GDP. It may take a few turns to have an effect, as it would in real life, but these effects are most certainly modelled.

[johnnyboy]

I attempted cutting corporate taxes (to the lowest amount) in the game to see if cutting taxes works and it actually increased income initially but then later on, income actually went down. So cutting taxes doesn’t seem to lead to profit, unless it only works if you cut a certain amount.

[cliffski]

I think (as i recall) that its more complex than that. Corp tax will raise money based both on its level, and the amount of GDP (you can only tax income that corporations make, which rises with a strong economy). So it is possible to cut corp tax, and have the amount raised from it go up, if the rise in GDP as a result of the economic boom generated by the rate cut (more companies invest in that country) offsets the lower rate.
In practice, it can be tricky to work out what happened, with all the different factors intertwining over time.