>A smarter approach is to cherry pick the best elements from every model and redesign the parts that don't serve us
There is a reason why Gesell only suggested the three core policies free money, free land and free trade. Once you have that you can cherry pick whatever you want, without any contradictions.
If you want austerity and low unemployment, high wages, low inequality and so on, the system is set up to support that.
How is that possible? Because most important thing realization of Gesell was that the system is not in equilibrium. You have to bring it into equilibrium through equilibrium encouraging policies.
The standard neoclassical framework treats the economy as if it was always in equilibrium and governments are the ones ruining equilibrium, which means you can abuse the economy and hack it and destroy it as much as you want and it will still work anyway. If anything, a neoclassical economist will even think that it will work better when it is in shambles.
So in a way, the policies that bring about equilibrium will appear as if they are a panacea. They do impossible things that people who are living in the old way of mandatory contradictions would never believe, when in reality all they did was reduce the obvious dysfunction staring down on them.
Doing Capitalism better means preventing market failures and accepting more state intervention... which i suppose the trump / republican government is doing.
Free market Capitalism is dead in the USA, winners are getting picked. Coal over solar. Who knows, perhaps it's right, but I suspect not.
In all seriousness, and I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of flak for this, but at this point the Chinese do capitalism better than the US:
- Lots of small and mid-sized firms.
- Lots of cutthroat competition with resulting price pressure.
- Virtually all firms are subsidized by direct government investment to some extent, but the government doesn't pick winners.
- Red tape and barriers to entry are generally low, regulation mostly affects larger firms. (The CCP doesn't want companies getting too big for their britches, but there are too many small firms to harass, and the government doesn't want people unemployed.)
- Civil legal liability is anywhere from 10x to 1000x less of an issue. I'm not exaggerating. The courts are fast, decisions are usually reasonable, and "access to justice" costs very little.
In the US you have this scheme where barriers to entry are insanely high thanks to regulatory capture, and the courts are a weapon that large firms use against small ones, almost exclusively, as smaller companies can't afford the costs associated with litigation. This is without even getting into "winners getting picked," which is obviously a problem.
And it's not some law of reality or the goodness of the CCP or some raced based bullshit that underpins is. The US was like this too, 75yr ago.
But for several generations we've been throwing more power behind both public and private institutions that reduce the tempo of economic activity and it sure fucking shows.