No, reread my post.
A mixed economy works best. A free market economy is an extremist pipe dream.
Investopedia,
A free market economy would quickly turn into chaos without government interventions, to redistribute incomes or to impose externalities or to prevent monopolies or to establish professional standards or to try to prevent financial Ponzi schemes or a thousand other needed interventions.
In short, you are wrong.
Governments can help markets function by defining and enforcing property rights, enforcing contracts, punishing fraud etc.
This is not what Venezuela is doing. It is fixing prices, debauching the currency, destroying the nation's capital stock and incentive to invest, and generally making things miserable for producers. These all have predictable consequences, and the predictable consequences are exactly what they are getting.
I am not defending the socialism that Venezuela has turned to. I am not defending the corruption that the country has because of the socialism. .
I agree with you that they deserve what they are getting, at least the ones who are in the government and the ones who support, that is vote for, the government.
All that I am saying is that the socialism that we see in Venezuela is an example of a severe over reaction to the oligarchy that preceded the socialism.
That both of them are extremes of a way to operate an economy and a society. That you have to avoid extremes (and sudden large changes.) And further, that like socialism, oligarchy tends to end up at authoritarianism.
That an oligarchy is a predictable result of unbridled capitalism. That the fatal flaw of capitalism is that it tends to concentrate income and wealth in progressive fewer and fewer, progressively richer and more powerful people.
That this means that the government has to intervene in the economy to a much greater degree than is implied by the term the "free market." More than is usually included in "defining and enforcing property rights, enforcing contracts, punishing fraud etc." Including the intentional redistribution of income through progressive taxation, for example.
That the idea behind the term "free market" is as an extreme way to try to run a society and an economy as socialism is.
You would have seen all of this that I have repeated for you if anglo had left the post of mine that he was responding to in his post or at least a jump back to my post as I did in my response to him.
I am assuming that this thread and all of the other threads that we have had through the years on the horrors of the socialistic government in Venezuela is to point out the horrors of socialism so that all here would understand why we have to avoid it.
I am saying that socialism is a failure because it is an extreme form compared to what has been proven to work well, a mixed economy between government, the private for profit sector and those activities best handled by professionalism.
That the economic policies that are included in the term "free market" add up to an extreme that has to avoided. That free market economics is as unstable and as prone to corruption as socialism is. That free market economies and those operated on free market capitalistic principles usually devolve into an oligarchy where the rich get every increasing control over the political process and over the politicians and use this power that results to further enrich themselves.
I would even go so far as to say that this is an example of the dangers of an extreme set of economic policies that is much more relevant to the majority of us here than the horrors of socialism because we are living through it.
