Both parties have pivoted to America First platforms. The selection of Vance is a signal for more protectionism and "Mercantilism" for the Flyovers. If they succeed in their platform, one could call it...Redistributing Wealth. A lot of money to be made by donors regardless who wins...a faux libertarian's dream.
"free market" capitalism always strikes me as a meaningless phrase The reactionaries have always wanted an economic system that protects the status quo distribution of resources at all costs, or to change it so that more of it accrues to the elites the progressives have generally tried to disrupt and unwind this. Neither way is any more "free" than the other, one person's freedom from cancels out another person's freedom to and vice versa. We should just choose policies that are good & have good outcomes.
I agree but I would also say that there never has been true free market capitalism it’s just degrees of regulations Both parties in the last ten years has embraced protectionism and those who like free trade have largely lost. Internally in the US while the Democrats are more for regulation in general we’ve seen a lot of regulation from Republicans often for social issues.
I’m also going to counter the supposed populism of Trump and Vance yes they use a lot of populist rhetoric and are for things like protectionist tariffs. Trump as president and what he is proposing to do again is to cut corporate taxes, restrict unions and cut regulations on worker safety. Those things harm thr working class they claim to be fighting for while benefitting corporate elites.
Unchecked capitalism is as bad as facism - you can't let corporations have the same rights as people, they will create monopolies and screw over people. The Government's job is to keep capitalism on the rails, and keep the 10 year olds out of the mines. Capitalism works, but needs bounderies. DD
Capitalism has neer intentionally made something better .. . it is about making profits It does not care if something is better or worse. . . only if it is profitable Rocket River
you convenient forget NAFTA and then USMCA while Trump is threatening to cut off funding to the WTO, his predessors, for the most part, have been proponent of the WTO it is as meaningless as the false narratie that "the Fed is wrecking its balance sheet"
There have been times in American history where nativism overwhelms everything for a while, but capitalism et al always fills the void when the tide goes back out. View it as the temporary rise of passions around nativism and jingoism displacing everything else, not a structural impediment to continuing the old status quo. Its an War in the Vendee moment in response to all the great shocks endured to the conservative sense of what is possible.
When was it particularly alive? And the redistribution of wealth can happen as readily in a free market, can’t it? Monopolies through economies of scale, and anti competitive measures taken by the private market is a free market isn’t it?
I think we need to be a bit more nuanced than a binary of free or not free. In the '80s and '90s, we had this wave of "deregulation", initially not because competitive firms had too many regulations to comply with but because we had many industries that were straight-up government-regulated monopolies -- airlines, telephone, electricity, etc. "Deregulation" actually meant "restructuring" because we were rebuilding industries to have competition instead of monopolies. That was the "free market" initiative that defined our modern, domestic economic discourse. But, since then, we've lazily applied this vocabulary of "deregulation" to mean stripping off all kinds of rules that govern how competitive firms are allowed to compete without screwing everyone over. Republicans branded themselves the party of deregulation to capitalize on this "free market" association, as if allowing coal plants to pollute was morally akin to breaking up Ma Bell to allow telephonic competition. Democrats saw themselves as protecting the little people from the excesses of competition, and I think they did suffer some trauma in this whole experience because many lost any faith they had in markets being able to create positive outcomes. Still today, I encounter (with work) liberals who want to go back to monopoly industries so that they don't lose control. In foreign trade, shortly thereafter, we had the "free market" stuff that meant taking down trade barriers between countries. It was related to the break-up of monopolies in that the economists' advice about most-economically-efficient practices were actually being made into policy. Both parties got on board with this one. Bush did deals, and Clinton also did deals. And people of both parties also hate it and feel like they are getting screwed. So where are we now? The democratic party still seems to like free international trade, still love regulations on competitive firms, and have a love/hate relationship with monopoly. MAGA oppose free international trade, hate all regulations on competitive firms, and love for-profit de facto monopolies (like big tech) which I would call "state capitalism". Love the War in the Vendee reference!
pretty sure we operated without central capital controls for a few millenia unless you know of some secret cabal that controlled the gold issuance rate and market value
To whatever extent we might have had this pseudo-capitalism with a centrally controlled cost of capital, that's enough capitalism for me. Letting go of that sounds like some anarcho-capitalism that I'm not interested in ever seeing.
It's more of a dig on the right and die-hard libertarians who still embrace Trump for the Freedumbs and trash Dems for being Woke and destroying the market. The Free Market in this context would be free trade and business friendly policies that tech libertarians love. Stuff that would make the stock market pump even higher for no reason. So there's payback for Trump not doing what businesses want... Free market capitalism isn't zero-sum. There's a genuine belief that the more people there are under a free market, the higher the potential for wealth creation. It's why we opened everything up to China, and a large part on how they lifted a billion people out of poverty. Here's where it differs from mercantilism via chatbot: Mercantilism was an economic system that dominated European economic thinking and policies from roughly the 16th to the late 18th century. Think of it as the economic "playbook" that guided how countries approached trade and wealth during the age of exploration and colonization. The Basic Idea At its core, mercantilism viewed wealth as a fixed pie. Countries believed that to become richer, they needed to take a bigger slice of this pie than their rivals. The goal was simple: accumulate as much gold and silver as possible. Key Principles: A country should export more than it imports (creating a trade surplus) Government should heavily regulate economic activities National power and wealth were measured by how much gold and silver a nation possessed Colonies existed to benefit the mother country, not themselves How It Worked in Practice Imagine your country as a giant piggy bank. Under mercantilism, success meant getting more coins into your national piggy bank than out of it. To achieve this: Countries placed high taxes (tariffs) on imported goods to discourage citizens from buying foreign products Colonies were forced to send raw materials like cotton, sugar, or timber to the mother country Colonies could only buy finished goods from their mother country, often at inflated prices Trading companies received special monopoly rights (like the British East India Company) Real-World Example: Spain accumulated vast amounts of gold and silver from its American colonies. However, because they focused more on extracting precious metals than developing productive industries, much of this wealth eventually flowed to countries like England and the Netherlands, who sold manufactured goods to the Spanish. Contrast With Today's Economics Unlike today's emphasis on free trade and specialization, mercantilism viewed trade as a competition where one country's gain was another's loss. Modern economists generally believe trade can benefit all parties involved when each specializes in what they do best. Legacy While mercantilism eventually gave way to more modern economic theories (thanks largely to Adam Smith's critique in "The Wealth of Nations" in 1776), aspects of it still surface in modern debates about protectionism, trade deficits, and economic nationalism. Think of mercantilism as an early, flawed attempt to understand how national economies work—before economics even existed as a formal discipline. ------ Tariffs-export controls-Greenland-Panama-SpaceX One can claim China's Capitalism with Chinese characteristics isn't free market capitalism either, but that wasn't how the neoliberals from both parties sold it from the 90s onwards. You're right. Power law distribution with pure and free actors without top-down control/regulation usually leads to a few winners like FAANG. Democracies have been looking for a "sweet spot" that benefits the innovation and self-drive of capitalism while providing the safety net of state planned governments. I guess the Nordic model is close, but is it purely cultural? Asian countries have the appearance of both, but I don't know if a work obsessed culture of running people into the ground is a great model to copy. I believe Governments should be table setters and make sure local small biz run freely and fairly. That's not the case because once a biz cracks a ceiling. Their scale and influence outstrips whatever checks other biz and local govs used to counter with. I don't think corruption is inevitable but incentive structures with how societies and governments work is a big deal...which brings back to what Cons and Republicans, the party Americans view as being better economically, are promoting as their ideological/academic philosophy. It's not about Free Markets anymore. Or maybe it's now all about what has more electrolytes and isn't endorsed by Hitler or pedo-lovin Epstein liberals.
I beleive corruption is definitely inevitable Esp if unchecked Capitalism reaches a point where . .. me improving it less profitable than me stopping you from improving It is more profitable to stop some innovations (esp if they aren't mine) than it is to try to compete. Rocket River
according to your link, metal coin was the first fiat currency used, some 6 or 7 century ago in China and Turkey
