It’s not capitalism when your risks have the government as a backstop. Failure is a healthy market mechanism; socialized losses only hurt investors’ ability to make capital decisions and consumers’ ability to have agency via their individual choices.
socialized losses encourage risk taking as there’s no real cost to the people running companies (see the bank crisis), and a holy expect pg&e to survive bankruptcy without actually paying for the damage or returning any of the stolen tax dollars.
It's pretty meaningless to say that such-and-such implementation of capitalism isn't real capitalism because of a reason that a) is common to just about every implementation of capitalism, certainly every major one and every one celebrated as a success story of capitalism and b) seems basically unavoidable in the real world. This is real capitalism and we should admit that.
Reminds me of some other arguments about economic systems.
