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by throwaway132448 46 days ago
Privatize the gains, socialize the losses. I miss actual capitalism with actual competition and anti-trust enforcement, not the oligopolies, regulatory capture and government-picked survivors we have now.
4 comments

Actual capitalism is the free and unfettered ability to handpick cabinet members, bribe government to deregulate an industry in your favour, hand out no-bid contracts, offer tax credits and subsidies, and shelter you from foreign competition.

What you've described is a heavily regulated market economy.

This is "actual capitalism" which is why every economic thinker not part of Reagan's cabinet and network insists you need to enforce competition with regulation to get the benefits of capitalism.

A market without regulation is not a free market after the first few transactions.

You don't get to point to all the ways you can manipulate a market and cry foul, that's reality. If you want to play with fake markets that can't be manipulated or controlled and don't "need" regulation because competition is perfect, stick to econ 101 and go no further. Real world markets are not efficient.

What you want is well regulated markets, that purposely make it harder to be a big company. "Efficiency of scale" is vastly overrated, and not meaningful to all our IP based economy.

What year was that, out of curiosity?
Too bad the reaction isn’t to correct capitalism rather than to eagerly embrace communist progressivism.