You can be an autoparts manufacturer whose line of credit got stopped because of a global credit crisis.
You can be a student with a job lined up who happened to graduate in 2009 and have your offer revoked.
The market isn't a meritocracy.
The banks do a lot of marketing telling you how much they are "friends" of business, "there to help you grow", etc. It is utter nonsense.
Never mistake a banker as a friend. If their incentives so dictate, it'll only take a New York Minute to stab you in the back.
Edit: typos
Banks go out of business if they get a reputation for defaulting on depositors' accounts. After all, would you deposit money in such a bank? I wouldn't, either. Depositors would still have legal recourse against the bank, too.
For a more specific answer to your points, the free market is not a guarantee. It's probabilities. There are no risk-free actions, and you're not doing "everything right" if you fail to take that into account.
It's just the best we got. And I support a generally free market because I think overall even the losers are better under our capitalism than everyone would be under equal socialism. We just have to correct the flaws in capitalism, like fixing market failures and providing a saftey net for people.
What matters is how and when the anger of those being stepped on fully manifests itself. Anyone who wants to protect "Capitalism" really ought to be frantically doing everything they can do to promote UBI or at least Universal Health Care and Education.
No. K-12 doesn't qualify you for a job in the "modern economy."
The sad thing is it's not even about the education: companies only look for the degree.
And not when it means that we aren't actually getting the best candidates for certain fields. To be a doctor, not only do you have to have the intellectual capability, but the financial ability as well. Yes, I know there are loans, but burdening folks with debt deters some folks from even trying... let alone the expenses required to apply and attend college.
Nothing is ever enough. America has the richest poor people in history, and yet it's a crisis that they aren't even richer.
I think if we were using taxpayer money for these education, there would also be more interest in making sure that the education requirements aren't filled with too much fluff that should be part of basic education or an option within basic education (we can, for example, have longer high school for college bound students than those going into a vocation).
Essentially you're arguing for a centrally planned economy, where bureaucrats decide and micromanage everything.
Somehow, it never seems to work out very well, and they have to build walls to keep people from escaping.
Nor are bureaucracies all bad if they actually rely on facts and less on special interests.
That's the theory. But it never works out that way, because bureaucrats are human beings and all human beings have special interests.
I worked in call center many years ago with a dude that worked for Enron. He was just an employee in a cubicle farm. He left work one Friday with a job. Monday, he found a box with his personal effects from his desk where his cubicle had been. That's how he found out he lost his job.
He worked at the call center because the fact that he had Enron on his resume made folks hesitant to hire him, unfortunately.