The health insurance system in the US is about as far away as you can get from capitalism. It's heavily regulated, a cartel, the prices are not transparent, and there is no competition (existing hospitals have to approve new hospitals, etc).
You can't disown capitalism from its problems that easily. It's not hard to see that it is in short-term self interest to form cartels, lobby for regulation, crush competition and treat their (now captive) customers with contempt.
This is a pattern we have seen time and again. Describing this as "about as far away as you can get from capitalism" is the no true Scotsman fallacy. Perhaps it doesn't match how you believe capitalism should work or you have a very different definition of capitalism to the more regular meaning of the term.
really-existing capitalism involves co-opting local power structures (parliaments, legislatures, dictatorships, puppets, etc.) to protect your cartel.
If capitalism is only capitalism when there is no conglomerated power structure then capitalism is impossible.
Often enough today its the left who are defenders of capitalism (ie., of disentangling power structures from coporate control) whereas the right seems possessed by the idea that whatever a company does is by definition captailism.
Capitalism was all about recognizing that business interests are anti-capitalist.
> really-existing capitalism involves co-opting local power structures (parliaments, legislatures, dictatorships, puppets, etc.) to protect your cartel.
I grew up in a communist country and guess what: politicians co-opted local power structures for their personal benefit. They drove the good cars, had the nice houses at the lakes and hard (= Western) currency. This is the case for (AFAIK) every single "socialist" state.
The only difference was that in socialism, corruption was not done for the benefit of a company but for an individual.
Do you really think that once the economic system changes, they (= we) are all suddenly better people?
It's the power itself that is corrupted and it doesn't matter how or by whom or in what system, the end result is the same.
Really-existing communism is bad too. I think worse than really-existing capitalism as it had to pass through a dictatorship stage to be realised, and dictatorships are extremely hard to renounce when formed.
What I was saying was a defence of the fundamental economic model of capitalism, not a criticism of it.
> we are all suddenly better people?
Yes. People are largely ethical products of situations they find themselves in. Reduce the number of opportunities for bad behaviour and you get Good People.
unaccountable systems of power are the recurring situations causing bad-behaviour here.
A healthy democratic capitalism aligns the interests of those power with the people. So that capital owners do not seize control.
"Capital" is not capitalist. It is anti-capitalist, wanting to monopolize and dictate.
To me, this is like saying social engineering isn't a security problem.
It seems pretty obvious that, if your aim is to accumulate capital, regulatory capture is a pretty damn efficient strategy as compared to marketing or product development. It's also efficient for the government official, who gets to sell access to regulation processes (an otherwise difficult-to-sell service!) at market rates.
(Not that libertarian-style "OK, let's get rid of governments!" approaches are a good solution here. In that case, the optimal strategy becomes force, which in effect establishes a government of sorts.)
I believe the distinction should be made between laissez-faire and crony capitalism. The sytsem is as far as you can get from laissez-faire and completely crony
US has a market for regulation: lobbying is legal and elections are funded by donors. So I'd say problems caused by the regulation are pure capitalism: it's just a new, more cost-efficient way of beating the competition.
It's not really new. Lobbying the government, or whatever group has the monopoly on 'enforcement', to benefit private interests goes back to the beginning of civilization. The interesting thing is that this is one of the most ideologically divisive issues when framed as it typically is, yet really I think it's something most people could really agree on. People pursuing a "small government" certainly have little love for corporations, but the idea is that when the power and breadth of government is strictly limited then their role as a corrupting force, which is certainly by far the most efficient way of beating the competition, is minimized.
Going the other direction you can have a big government with extensive powers that tries to force fair play through extensive regulation, as ours does. But this has been tried over and over again, and it invariably trends towards corruption. I think that particularly in a democracy, this outcome is going to be quite difficult to avoid. It seems that these basic facts should be the starting point of discussion, as opposed to the point where people have long since splintered off and polarized themselves towards opposite extremes.
It might be capitalism in that trade and industry are controlled by private entities (that's still debatable because in the US nearly 30% of GDP is controlled by government entities, and most of rest is tightly regulated).
But it ain't "free enterprise" whenever regulation limits consumer choice and market entry by competitive participants.
