> As soon as you let individuals and businesses decide how they go about it, it's a race to the bottom...
Or, you get free markets and laissez-faire capitalism, the greatest wealth-producing system known to mankind.
Or, you get free markets and laissez-faire capitalism, the greatest wealth-producing system known to mankind.
Or the suppressor operating at the greatest scale known to mankind (from colonialism and imperialism, to 2 World Wars, post colonialism and still counting).
For, if you want to measure the wealth created by capitalism by the last two (or three) centuries, you cannot just add what you like (e.g the internal US market) and hide the rest under the carpet. Add the ecological impact to the whole thing, and the numbers do not look that good.
Not to mention that such a thing as pure "free market" never existed. It's a slogan, like "Don't be evil". What does exist is a huge market system that's "laissez-faire" only for those in power (countries and individuals) and "take it or be crushed" for others.
And in which the huge wealth comes along with grabbing resources with military might (not very "free"), imposing tariffs and embargoes to who it pleases you as a big western power, operations covert and open to have friendly people (including brutal dictators) in "allied" countries, and the like. Nothing very "free market" about them.
(Actually, from the moment there is even a "patent system", which controls industries and markets of trillions of dollars worth, there's not a "free market" system anymore -- and that's just the tip of the iceberg).
The US isn't where it is today wealth-wise JUST because of cold hard capitalism. It also helps that we have a large market with everyone speaking the same language, having similar laws, one currency, copyright and patent acknowledgement to protect inventors (back before corporations ballooned to their current size), a decent amount of civility, fair business law, a respect for the rule of law (something my home country of Bulgaria does not), strong property and land ownership, and a desire to innovate that have allowed people to build wealth.
A country isn't built on everyone doing whatever the hell they want. There's an actual formula for it.
The US has that - look at the telecom companies. I'm sure there's many more prime examples, but Companies do indeed use the government, at least to help them make money, by stopping competition, getting bailouts and grants for things like infrastructure and just pocketing the money and sticking us with higher costs and no improvements on our service.
BTW, the only country I can think of that actually practices laissez-faire capitalism is Somalia: they really have no regulation. Not so much wealth being produced there.
Even if you had left off "laissez-faire", the statement wouldn't have been wrong it would have been rather weak: what other systems have we actually conceived and/or tried?