How much is this a semantic argument?
While government intervention does indeed affect the market...by economic definition it is NOT a "market" force.
Someone (Ashton?) recently brought up the concept that professions are just the way to keep non-professionals from playing your game through the use of technical jargon. I'm not an economist, but a layperson ... one who pays attention.
It seems there is some disagreement even from the people with formal training in the field as to whether government intervention should be classified as a "market force." To the extent that anything that affects the market is a market force, it is. To the extent that the "idealized market" only consists of supply, demand and price, it isn't. The "truth" must lie somewhere in between.
My understanding, as I said in my other post, is the simple Supply/Demand graph, and that everything else is just inputs into determining these curves. The simple chart, by itself, is not predictive or useful. But even at this level of understanding, I see government intervention -- in the form of patents, anti-trust regulation, price fixing, nationalized industry, etc. -- as fundamentally different from buyer/seller inputs.
In this sense, supply is the idealized end-point of all inputs involving the seller, and demand is the end-point of all inputs involving the buyer. IMO government input is still orthoganal to these forces. I suspect that Addison's viewpoint is farily close to this. FWIW I believe that's the "proper" way to view government input since "the government" is theoretically a representative of "the people," which should include the buyers and the sellers.
Slightly OT: A gas station franchise owner in Alabama (he only has one station) has sued OPEC under anti-trust legislation for price fixing. At the first hearing, OPEC didn't appear and the judge entered summary judgement on behalf of the plaintiff. Another judge has set aside the verdict, and a second round is under way with OPEC taking the matter somewhat more seriously. The US Attorney isn't weighing in, claiming they don't have a mechanism to pursue the case. OPEC's position is that the plaintiff has no standing to pursue a multinational, due to sovreign immunity. They are explicitly holding themselves up as equivalent to the U.N., as deserving of immunity to local prosecution.
