This is a reply to " Regulation, Free Market, and Socialism - Framing the issues".
Meanwhile back on planet Earth...
...people are starving under Zimbabwe's socialism. It failed in the rest of Africa too: Betrayal: Why Socialism Failed in Africa. They suffered under it in the USSR & China, & continue to suffer under it in Cuba & North Korea. Socialism in Guyana was no picnic either. Socialism doesn't work, get it? Free market capitalism created the richest societies in history. You live the remnants of its legacy today. For all its problems the US remains one of the most affluent countries in the world. In the 19th century it was the countries that adapted laissez faire that became the industrial leaders of the world. When countries such as India & Guyana adopted the socialist model on independence they starved. At least we agree on one thing. "Regulation" that favors the elites is wrong. What you don't get is that that is the only kind of regulation there is. That is what produces the law of the jungle. That's how the elites trample the rest. It was the free market that so reduced poverty & created the middle class. You ignorantly state, "I do not understand why right wingnuts are so opposed to living in a world where everyone's basic needs are met." Sure, Daveys, I get off on watching people suffer. (sarcasm) Get off your high horse. I would ask you why you advocate this system that has caused nothing but suffering & death everywhere its been tried? It's the advocates of capitalism who want people to have their needs met & more, we want them to prosper. "Socialism is about making certain that no human goes without basic needs to sustain life and to ensure individual freedom." This is a total fantasy. Giving the government that much control is by definition tyranny. History bears this out. As Patrick Henry warned arguing against adopting the Constitution: Such a government is incompatible with the genius of republicanism. There will be no checks, no real balances, in this government. What can avail your specious, imaginary balances, your rope-dancing, chain-rattling, ridiculous ideal checks and contrivances?...It is on a supposition that your American governors shall be honest that all the good qualities of this government are founded; but its defective and imperfect construction puts it in their power to perpetrate the worst of mischiefs should they be bad men; and, sir, would not all the world blame our distracted folly in resting our rights upon the contingency of our rulers being good or bad? Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men without a consequent loss of liberty! I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed, with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt. Let me quote from Government Failure: Laissez faire in Washington? On what planet? Governments at all levels have regulated the financial industry from the time of the founding. The Clinton-era repeal of the 1930s law -- Glass-Steagall -- prohibiting the same company from engaging in commercial and investment banking did not constitute root-level deregulation, since the new full-service banks are still subject to myriad rules set by politicians and bureaucrats. (The end of the New Deal’s arbitrary separation of investment and commercial banking was forced on the government because new global competition in financial services was harming American companies.) At the Division of Labour blog, economist Lawrence H. White asks: “What deregulation have we had in the last decade? Please tell me. On the contrary, we’ve had a strengthening of the Community Reinvestment Act, which has encouraged banks to make mortgage loans to borrowers who previously would have been rejected as non-creditworthy. And we’ve had the imposition of Basel II capital requirements, which have encouraged banks to game the accounting system through quasi-off-balance-sheet vehicles, unhelpfully reducing balance sheet transparency.” Most fundamental of all, the government -- after promoting easy loans to borrowers with dubious creditworthiness -- stood ready to save big companies -- most especially the government-created and government-favored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- from their own dangerous policies. (The “F” in those acronyms stands for federal. For details see my “Bailing Out Statism.”) This is "the reality of what is *really* going on". Next time try presenting some documantation for what you claim, if you can.
