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Comment by adventured | Hacker News Reader

It's because the US is no longer a Capitalist nation; as such it no longer derives the maximum benefits of Capitalism. It was a mixed economy 30 or 40 years ago. Today it's a welfare state that depends on its central bank to remain solvent, with hyper regulation, high levels of debt, and high levels of taxation. The number of economic regulations and general laws passed each year in the US is truly astounding, and literally impossible to either keep up with or manage (this includes the laughable tax code).

A century ago there were hardly any regulations or taxes. Today every segment of the economy is highly regulated outside of tech and nearly everything you can taste, touch, smell, eat or look at is taxed (often multiple times).

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A century ago we had the Great Depression, followed by a major application of regulation, followed by the biggest and longest boom in middle-class history in the US.

In the 80s we started massive deregulation including killing Glass-Steagall, opening up banks to so destroy the global economy that we're having this discussion today.

Your history of regulation and relative wealth is backwards.

Edit: I'll acquiesce that the tax code is laughable, but mostly in how upper-class income tax levels are half what the middle class pays.

Capitalism still works fine, because it's not a designed system, it's not a central plan.

In fact, countries like the USA should give it a try again. It worked quite well for them last time.

> Capitalism still works fine, because it's not a designed system, it's not a central plan.

What logic is this? "Anything which is not a designed system works fine"?

F.A. Hayek wrote in The Fatal Conceit, “the curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.

We need to be careful that this differs materially from "the curious task of auronautics engineers" circa 1900. One place it surely does differ is that we've quite a few more people on this plane of the economy than on any test flight. We should, indeed, be correspondingly more careful.

That said, "be careful" and "do nothing" are two very different propositions. Being careful may motivate doing nothing, or it may motivate doing quite a lot. While I don't think it was present in Hayek's reasoning, this frequently spills over into something that looks like "We're dealing with people's lives/rights here! How can you be so crass as to talk about numbers and make decisions?" When things are difficult and important, that's precisely the time you need to be most careful in your reasoning.

Abstaining is still an action. Proposals for reduced or constrained intervention are still proposals, and only deserve reduced scrutiny to the degree that they are supported by "we've done that before and it worked out well".

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