Why Capitalism and Socialism Are on One Side and Free(d) Markets Are On the Other

wkmac

Well-Known Member
When a front-running presidential contender tells the country that thanks to Barack Obama, “[w]e are only inches away from ceasing to be a free market economy,” one is left scratching one’s head. How refreshing it is, then, to hear a prominent establishment economist – a Nobel laureate yet — tell it straight:
The managerial state has assumed responsibility for looking after everything from the incomes of the middle class to the profitability of large corporations to industrial advancement. This system . . . is . . . an economic order that harks back to Bismarck in the late nineteenth century and Mussolini in the twentieth: corporatism.
Columbia University Professor Edmund S. Phelps, who won the 2006 Nobel Prize in economics, and his coauthor, Saifedean Ammous, assistant professor of economics at the Lebanese American University, write that the U.S. economy ceased to be a free market some time ago, yet the free market is blamed for the economic crisis. (The real question is whether it was ever really free.)
Phelps and Ammous condemn corporatism unequivocally.
In various ways, corporatism chokes off the dynamism that makes for engaging work, faster economic growth, and greater opportunity and inclusiveness. It maintains lethargic, wasteful, unproductive, and well-connected firms at the expense of dynamic newcomers and outsiders, and favors declared goals such as industrialization, economic development, and national greatness over individuals’ economic freedom and responsibility. Today, airlines, auto manufacturers, agricultural companies, media, investment banks, hedge funds, and much more has [sic] at some point been deemed too important to weather the free market on its own, receiving a helping hand from government in the name of the “public good.”


Capitalism, Corporatism and the Free(d) Market
 

klein

Für Meno :)
wkmac, don't even need to read that, because it's a fact !
Just like my hot dog vending.
If I go to an event, I take sales away from others.
Basically, we all share in the profits ( all us food vendors).

People can only eat so much.

And on a 1 single day event, it's not even the matter who has the best food.
 
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