this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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Regulated capitalism is still capitalism. There's no such thing as "pure" or "impure" capitalism, the social relationships to capital are the same. Lassiez-faire capitalism is just a flavour of it.
It's like ice-cream: you may prefer chocolate ice-cream over vanilla ice-cream, but they are both flavours of ice-cream and you wouldn't say "yea, that's not pure ice-cream". Some people may even dislike ice-cream altogether and prefer cheesecake.
Imagine a scale, on one end is a market economy where the government does not regulate it in any way, and does not own any part of it in any way. This is pure capitalism/laissez fair capitalism, whatever you want to call it. And you are correct, it does not exist today in any country (and that's a good thing in my opinion).
On the other end of that scale would be an economy that is completely controlled/owned/regulated by the government (for example, communism).
In economic terms, every country falls on that scale with some balance between a completely free market economy and how much regulation they impose as well as what kind of industries they control/own.
If someone is going to blame capitalism for "ruining everything" they are basically asking for a market system where everything is controlled/owned by the government. Where monopolies are rampant, and the citizens have no choice except for what the government or dictatorship has decided. In my opinion, this is also a bad choice.
If I am wrong about what they are asking for, feel free to point out the economy of a country that they are saying we should follow. In other words, if not capitalism, what are you asking for?
I'm a commie, so I'm all for social ownership of the means of production, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, there isn't a scale of how pure capitalism is: a Keynesian model is as capitalistic as laissez-faire is because the underlying relationships to capital are the same. Communism isn't at the other end of any scale because it's an entirely different model, not just more or less regulation.
Some may argue that no country is socialist because they are still transitioning, and that they are still capitalist, but that's not a scale: they are not socialist (yet, hopefully) because their mode of production is still capitalistic.