Capitalism is when bad things happen. And the more badder they are the more capitalism it is!
[1] https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/featured/calling-commun...
I've heard people say housing policy has failed because it's too neoliberal meaning too free market, and then other people say it's failed because it's too neoliberal i.e. too much government intervention.
Neoliberalism is basically just markets-by-default and evidence-based alternatives when they fail.
That's not though. I think the name is from the 'New classical school', oppose Keynesian economics. I think the meaning drifted to mean supply-side economics (direct inheritor from the Chicago school and the new classical school).
Neoliberalism can't be 'evidence-based' when it rejects basic observation (like those from MMT. You can reject MMT 'solutions', that's fine, I do too. Don't reject evidence though).
I think your criticism of it as not being 'evidence based' because it 'rejects basic observation' is emotive but fundamentally it's still a technical criticism, not a moral one. Neocon criticisms of neoliberalism (even if they misidentify what that means) revolve around the decay of traditional values, for example. Socdems around inequality (which to them is ipso facto bad).
But that's true that a lot of socdems don't really understand economic theory and so some criticism seems empty, because they repeat a criticism they did not understood. And that's ok, because macroeconomics is the less scientific of all social science field (for good reason), and who would want to bother with it (unless you're an idiot who took that in college because it seemed to pair well with math :/)
That’s a contradiction.
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like so straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said Ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
- Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
It's a contradiction only if you understand democracy as a theoretical ideal. Practical democracies, as implemented in western countries, in recent decades proven themselves to be completely controllable by capital, both the democratic elites and democratic masses.
I think we should rather go with practical outcome not the stated theoretical ideas. It's also a good way of evaluating communism and probably other systems.
Whatever the rules are, people end up adapting to and gaming them to entrench and grow their own position, typically at the expense of everyone else.
Although re your actual point: the current admin only gifts things like this to a chosen few; a small subset of those with extreme capital. So it seems much more appropriate to call it cronyism, or some such thing, rather than capitalism in the sense of merely controlling capital.