copec
Solar Enthusiast
- Joined
- Jan 23, 2021
- Messages
- 363
I agree with you except laissez faire.
Laissez faire only fails when you have govt intervention (we never really had laissez faire, and govt always, in the end, distributes special favors which is what makes "capitalism" "fail")
Where/when did Laissez-faire fail?
I suspect we actually share mostly the same opinion, but the difference lies in how each of us respectively defines laissez-faire. I think of pure laissez-faire as zero control of any marketplace by a government entity. The end-game of this is it ends up looking like the feudal system: A certain class owns all the resources and makes the rules of every "marketplace" that they control, everybody else toils to barely scrape by.
I believe in a fair marketplace, not in a anything goes marketplace. There has to be rules and regulations and they have to be actively kept up and enforced to keep it fair.
If it weren't for anti-monopoly laws and various labor laws, I'm 100% convinced almost all of us would be toiling every waking moment all under the umbrella of a single corporation that owned all the land, the resources, manufacturing, etc. and that company would be from various oligarchies. You wouldn't even be able to work your way out of it because they would control every resource you needed as well as dictate the rules of every possible marketplace, so its not like you could ever compete on anything - The only way to get ahead would be to work within the political framework internal to such a system.
We are already seeing a little taste of that now: A large part of inflation was through this exact map of corporations that all dramatically hiked prices and whose executives and ownership all pull from a certain already ultra-rich class. Same with all the major defense contractors, as well as all the investment in land ownership that has had a large part of driving up real-estate prices. Am I making an argument for communism? I'm not intending to - The basic notion of private property and capital, and your own choice what to do with your life and skills is fundamental to what I would call freedom. I lean on the side of no regulation unless it is a clear-cut case of violating that (i.e. anti-monopoly laws, and also I include labor laws because nobody would ever have extra time or money for which to multiply).
Where my more liberal side comes in is what I see as resources.