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Comment by skellington | Hacker News Reader

Incomplete and biased analysis. What you describe as 'privatization' is nothing like a free market which is what most people think you're describing.

Privatization in your case is crony capitalism combined with state power to manipulate markets in favor of certain actors. The key enabler in this scheme is government power corrupted by money.

The commonality in all the different areas that are failing -- power, healthcare, homelessness, etc.. --- are the regulatory systems that are grossly distorted by corrupted government interventions.

The main problem with governments and their services today is that there is no real feedback loop and systems without feedback are doomed to fail. You can vote liberal or conservative and nothing changes because they are two wings of the same bird.

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Maybe there's no "good" capitalism? What we used to think of as "good" capitalism was really heavy government investment leading to a "virtuous feedback loop", for which the Government got no credit?

I think that's more accurate then the "not TRUE capitalism"/no true Scotsman interpretation.

Capitalism is a terrible economic system, except for all the others.

Democratic socialism seems to be working out pretty well in Scandinavia.

Let me be clear: I mean setting prices with market mechanisms, which all the "mixed economies" do. There's really no alternative to it for the economy as a whole (although government adjustments due to externalities, for example, are needed.)

How would you explain the recent gas cap for Russian oil as the hand of the market?

> the recent gas cap for Russian oil as the hand of the market?

As not market pricing? Markets work to find the most efficient economic solution, or at least local maxima. But everything isn’t economics. National security, for instance. So we take economic pain in exchange for national security outcomes. Domestic energy markets are different from international ones.

The hand of the market is a myth - we make the market. It isn't a divine force - that's the Neoliberism God talking.

In this case, we have decided to limit the value of oil a pariah state which attacked a neighbor can sell at. Pretty simple, imo.

Markets are essential. A modern industrial economy cannot function without markets to provide prices for the millions of different things being produced. This is why the Soviet Union failed and why China moved to allow a market to operate.

Right, but price setting via market mechanisms is orthogonal to capital ownership.

I'm increasingly convinced that we should strive towards an impure market socialist system because control of large corporations that are more powerful than some countries really doesn't belong in private hands.

And I say impure because some amount of private ownership to capture entrepreneurial spirits is a good idea. But Fortune 500 companies aren't about entrepreneurial spirits.

It doesn't and it is not used here.

Not one country in Scandinavia has anything like democratic socialism as its social economic system.

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