> Rent seeking is enabled by government involvement in markets

Twaddle. Bad government can increase it, but government is also the only force with the capacity to oppose it. In other news, medicine can kill you.

Adam Smith noted rent-seeking in the 18th century. We have had plenty of laissez-faire government during that time. It did not eliminate rent-seeking.

It did not eliminate rent-seeking because rent-seeking is not created by the application of this or that economic policy; it's because animals seek easy meat.

Over time, that trumps any system based on codified rule of law. It is, by Gödel, impossible to write law that decides the legality of all behaviour. Sufficiently smart sociopaths will get around any codified system. Ideology founders on biology.

That does not mean we should give them free reign. The solution to am arms race is not to place your head on the block - not when your enemy is a sociopath.

Free market fundamentalism, like all dogma, is espoused by exactly two sets of people: grifters, and cretins. Ideology - be it free market fundamentalism or communism or any other holy book that claims to solve 7 billion humans doing human things - is nothing more than the expression of a hunger for simple solutions to complex problems. There is no fault in _liking_ simple solutions, but _needing_ them is an intellectual disability.

> "...is espoused by exactly two sets of people: grifters, and cretins"

This is when you can tell someone has a really strong argument. Anyone who disagrees with you is, by definition, scum.

A true Scotsman would never support free markets fundamentalism.