Governments sometimes need to intervene in free markets in order to keep them free from the collusion of super-rich playground bullies and basic hogs of domination that would tilt the field toward themselves. Hogs don’t care about social progress nearly as much as personal power and total control of money (the root of all {or much} evil). Networks of colluding rich people may form planetary plutocracies that are as unchanging and repressive as that of pyramid building cultures of the Old kingdom of ancient Egypt. Anti-monopoly defenses need to be upgraded continuously or all of a nation’s wealth becomes concentrated in 1% of the people. The marketplace of ideas perishes as an establishment of evil wealth makes sure that politics is controlled and massaged to reinforce the domination of the establishment.
Ideas are repressed and political opposition is labeled ‘extremist’. Currencies become encrypted in electronic data bits and bytes interpretable just by the richest traders swimming about like dark-web sharks in dark pools that have never seen the light of day.
Corrupt private interests with vast wealth may corrupt public interests and ossify social structures and influence economic evolution globally to reinforce their concentration of wealth and power rather than the public good. Millions of insider lackeys may work as sycophantic ideologues to help repress intelligent thought in return for biscuits of prosperity. Environmental decay may develop and the migration of billions of cheap labor workers may ensue to help undermine national political resistance to global plutocratic power or increases of minimum wages.
Free markets may benefit from rules changes that reflect the real economic failures of the day such as the degrading world ecosphere exploited by inherited business relationships that consider environmental harm as an externality to the pursuit of private capital increase. Capitalism may need modernizing upgrades to keep it competitive rather than concentrated. Limits on the size of corporate employment or number of corporations any individual can invest in might be developed to promote competition rather than inertia temporal control.
Economic infrastructure may be mal-adapted to the environmental and demographic challenges of a given era. Governments with intelligent leadership (yes perhaps improbable) can set parameters within which free enterprise can compete, and remain out of the business themselves. Governments can intervene to bail out the rich with quantitative easing and dump them the capacity to loan out an in effect mint their own e-dollars strictly in conformity to the marginal reserve rate of 10% and thus get 16 trillion times 9 dollars free without work and thus buy a free market. Since 2008 the U.S. government has helped via the Federal Reserve to let the rich own the free market- and that is an example of the wrong way to manage things. Governments can also do things the right way an set parameters that would encourage environmental sustainability in harmony with a low entropy economic model that supports all citizens to have the most opportunity for intellectual productivity they can attain without financial limits subverting their course of higher education. A surfeit of well-educated people is better than a paucity.
Garrison Gibson: books and blog 