[Sohcahtoa82]

> The solution is real free markets.

A ludicrous suggestion.

The "free market" optimizes for one single thing: Profit.

Providing housing for homeless people is not profitable, and so a free market would never do it.

> Constant government intervention in the housing market, the stock market, education, healthcare, and everything else under the sun has led us to where we are today.

Health care is in the same boat. If a poor person gets cancer, the free market would gladly let them die. They wouldn't be able to pay for treatment.

Education is similar. If the government didn't provide schools, a considerable portion of children would go uneducated.

[holbrad]

Optimising for profit can lead to both massive positive and negative effects.

So the obvious question is how you balance those negative effects against the positive. This is where regulations and governments have to step in, though that certain has it's own massive issues.

Health care has a lot of unsolved problems, from my perspective no group is actually doing well (Just varying shades of bad, I'm from the UK). There are so many ailments that can't currently be treated well (Despite having spent decades studying them, though that seems to be a systematic failure of academia)

[Sohcahtoa82]

Optimizing for profit greatly incentivizes innovation as corporations compete, I'll definitely give you that.

But it also leads to a poorer customer experience (long hold times as call centers are understaffed, cheap and flimsy materials, I could go on...), exploitative dark patterns, rent-seeking, and more.

And then there's the fact that corporations would happily dump toxic waste into rivers to save a few dollars if the EPA didn't exist to stop them. They will gladly burn the atmosphere in order to show growth on their quarterly report.

> So the obvious question is how you balance those negative effects against the positive. This is where regulations and governments have to step in, though that certain has it's own massive issues.

Agreed. Corporations can't be free to do whatever they want, but finding that happy medium of reining them in without stifling them is hard.

It doesn't help that our politicians are for sale. Corruption runs rampant.