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Excellent post. Its a nice summary of the Socialist base of our capitalist system.

Yep, we're free market capitalists alright. Well, except for our housing market. Oh, and the financial system. Oh and agriculture,education,scientific research,transportation,medicine,Social Security and basically anything else that matters.

Yep, we're free market capitalists alright. Well, except for our housing market. Oh, and the financial system. Oh and agriculture,education,scientific research, transportation, medicine, Social Security and basically anything else that matters.

Some weeks ago I posted here trying to make this very point. I was trying to say that in missing things like this and what Locke points out above, that conservatives basically wind up handing an issue to liberals. This give legitimacy to their "corporate America" tirades, which in turn, brings up the danger that people who haven't studied the issue will blame capitalism itself, when in fact the real problem they'll miss is that we just don't have enough capitalism.

For my efforts in this I was called a liberal and a disruptor.

I don't agree with everything I've ever read from Locke, but he is dead on point with this one. If we want to not lose public support for a free-market system, we need to be addressing this problem, and not let others twist this problem into an indictment of capitalism itself.

All things in economics are relative, and again, you know that, don't you? You do realize that there is no such thing as a "pure" free market. So it is always a system of degrees---and we are FAR freer than any nation in the world, Switzerland and Ireland and CERTAINLY China, notwithstanding.

"Yep, we're free market capitalists alright. Well, except for our housing market. Oh, and the financial system. Oh and agriculture,education,scientific research,transportation,medicine,Social Security and basically anything else that matters."

The U.S. has predominantly free markets. Software. Hardware. Firearms. Cell phones. Long distance. Used cars. New cars. Private aircraft. Auctions. Flea markets. Retail sales.

Over in Europe, the government limits stores to only two "Sales" events per year, and retail prices are regulated (discounts are an actual crime). Little complaints are heard from the EUros for such nonsense, of course.

In contrast, over here in the U.S., we've got whiners who use the government-led Internet to make their posts on FR, yet bash any and all government involvement no matter how trivial (and compared to Europe, government involvement over here IS trivial).

Most of which were considerably "free-er" prior to the 1930's when they were hijacked by the federal government. Many claim that federal intervention pulled the US out of the depression in the late '30's, but that is highly debatable. For one thing, that was a time of great buildup prior to our entering WW-II.

As well, there is really no way to compare what happened to what would have happened had FDR not done what he did. Basically, any experiment needs a "control" group; a population in which the action being tested wasn't performed in order to form a comparison. There was no such control group in the '30's. The whole country was essentially dumped into a semi-socialistic position by fiat. So how can one say that we are better off (or were better off at the time) directly as a result of FDR's socialistic actions when there's nothing to compare to?