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by dragonwriter 2000 days ago
> Regulation is an important part of a capitalist system.

If by “capitalist system” you mean “bourgeois socialist mixed economy that replaced capitalism throughout the developed West generally around the mid-20th Century through the efforts of a broad coalition of people fed up with the horrors of actual capitalism”, that's true.

But that system isn't actually capitalism, and the central role of government regulation aimed at channeling the effort of “private” industry by rearranging incentives to different places than they would be set by the free market is one of the central ways in which it differs from capitalism.

The only reason people pretend otherwise is to maintain the fiction that they are on the opposite side of the global capitalist/socialist struggle that predated general disillusionment with capitalism in the West, because even though actual ideology shifted, ideological tribal identity didn't.