[davidw]

This is one of those things, though, where the boring position is that "relatively free markets are good, but markets also require some government intervention to function well". It's not exciting or edgy, and not at all simple, because it's tricky to figure out which regulations and how much are good, and how they should change over time and so on.

[hpkuarg]

"Some government intervention" has dramatically increased over the past century (after having stayed relatively flat for the century before that, since Adam Smith first came into the scene with groundbreaking ideas), so the boring position isn't so boring anymore. The government has their fingers in so many pies these days it's hard to say what even are the remaining relatively free markets.

[davidw]

And we are dramatically better off than a century ago. Teasing out what's correlation and causation is not easy work.