RE: Hopium and Copium...
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The conflation of the American economy with free markets is irritating. Everything is regulated, taxed, licensed, and subjected to price controls to benefit the politically-connected at the expense of the Everyman. Laissez-faire it ain't, but freedom is always treated as a bogeyman by those demanding more power.
Instead, we are told a parasitic political class can magically make us all prosper if we ignore history and let themanage even more tightly. These corporate monsters are direct consequences of government laws and government fiscal policy, yet they are held up as proof we need more laws and fiscal surveillance.
"The state is the great fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else."—Frederic Bastiat
What I find really ironic is the way "the land of the free" has actually become less free than the Danish "social democracy" in which I was raised. It may have higher taxes, but you (and business) have way more freedom to do your own thing, and pressures for "compliance" with fixed/regulated way doing things (or NOT doing thing) are farm more socially oriented than legislatively oriented.
No system is perfect, of course... but the corporate-political circus in the USA is getting increasingly scary and invasive.
The USA likes to proclaim itself as a free market economy with a representative government serving the people by preserving their liberties, but in reality we have a morass of interventionism and authoritarianism. Scandinavia ranks higher in economic freedom in spite of their welfare state.
Real progress in America would require ending the drug war, ending foreign interventionism, ending the government subsidies to the military-infustrial complex, and replacing the Byzantine taxation and regulatory system hampering the economy. None of this is incentivized by politics.