> Tangent but David Harvey says "wealth redistribution is the lowest form of socialism". A better way is to do a few things differently so those people are better empowered to make more money for themselves.
This is a pretty interesting take.
From a Capitalist perspective, people know what they want - and the market is "efficient" when you let people do what they want. There's nothing more efficient than giving people money.
From a Socialist perspective - I guess this is obviously wrong? If an economy free of government interventions worked, you wouldn't need Socialism in the first place? So it's better to let the government make investments on your behalf?
Let's not conflate the free market, capitalism, and 'capitalist-ism'.
I'm not sure I follow your terminology.
Unregulated markets are not, in theory or practice, efficient and do not work out to be free markets; they are controlled by the few for their purposes. Government can regulate markets to provide free markets, reducing barriers to entry and requiring competition; they also can provide safety and public good by preventing harm to the public by fraud or injury. Another way to think of it is that power (over the market) is conserved; the question is, who has it, a few participants acting in their interests or the people acting in theirs? A well-regulated market is better and freer for almost all participants than an unregulated one.
Regulation is not socialism; socialism is the collective or government ownership of economic assets. For example, the US government regulates GM, Ford, etc., but does not own them.
Capitalism is ownership of economic assets by private entities, called capitalists.
From an economic perspective: The market is not fully efficient, and it's a horrible assumption to pretend that it is (akin to asserting P = NP). Business/capitalist thought deliberately embraces this when setting out to find/create market inefficiencies (eg "build a moat"), but then feigns the opposite when criticized. At best we can say it's efficient to some epsilon, but this epsilon is nowhere near negligible at human(e) scales.
Legal rights/entitlements are essentially a form of non-fungible wealth that resists the common pattern - being turned into an "asset class", centralized, and packaged up into recurring rent streams collected from wider society. It remains an open question whether the overall trend would be so strongly towards centralization without the continual government handouts powering the financial industry (witness all the whinging about interest rates existing again). But unless that dynamic is actually reformed then non-fungible guarantees seem like a necessary backstop for maintaining distributed power throughout society.
> Business/capitalist thought deliberately embraces this when setting out to find/create market inefficiencies (eg "build a moat"), but then feigns the opposite when criticized.
Agreed, to recycle a comment [0] in the same vein:
> On Monday, capital-C-Capitalism is celebrated as being the most efficient and economist-approved system (i.e. the bestest) when--if--there is somehow perfect price/deal information available to all actors.
> On Tuesday, no-True-Capitalism is lauded as immune to cartels and collusion, because any actor will quickly undercut the others with secret prices and deals and hidden identities and wash-trading.
> On Wednesday, Virtuous Capitalism needs no oversight because nasty behavior will be seen and detected by consumers who will vote with their wallets.
> On Thursday, Property-Respecting Capitalism refuses to infringe on the owners' essential freedom... to construct impenetrable webs of shifting corporate ownership to obfuscate all controlling relationships.
This is a pretty interesting take.
From a Capitalist perspective, people know what they want - and the market is "efficient" when you let people do what they want. There's nothing more efficient than giving people money.
From a Socialist perspective - I guess this is obviously wrong? If an economy free of government interventions worked, you wouldn't need Socialism in the first place? So it's better to let the government make investments on your behalf?