| ▲ | ben_w 2 days ago | |
> Free market capitalism is the only system proven to work, over and over again. It brought billions out of poverty and it still does to this very day, when allowed to work, of course. Capitalism? Yes. "Free market capitalism"? No. While regulated capitalism is very effective at aligning everyone's interests, a free market operates without the intervention of government or any other external authority, and rapidly decays into a market for lemons[0] — or worse, arbitrarily negative contractual obligations, which is how serfdom functioned. Even when the governments start off by only intervening to prevent those two issues, with minimum quality requirements and prohibitions against unfair contracts, they often find themselves having to also intervene directly in the markets, everything from the US ban on trading onion futures[1] to printing and destroying currency to keep inflation in a particular range designed to encourage the spending of money rather than its hoarding on the one hand without also preventing people from saving on the other, and even to intervene in the employment market because 100% employment drives a spiral of wage inflation that the system as a whole would not be able to cope with etc. etc. Same deal as the Laffer curve: zero regulation is bad, micromanagement is bad, people argue about where the peak in the middle is. | ||