So what makes that market free? Or is that just BS marketing?

Monopolies are not the result of laissez-faire

Monopolies are the natural product of capitalism with inadequate regulation. Laissez faire (hands off) is a lack of regulation.

If government does nothing to prevent a negative outcome that it has a duty to stop, it is complicit.

I have that same problem now, because my healthcare costs so much and I’m young and healthy! If only there was a cheaper way to pay for that like every other developed nation in the world does.

Those countries, to a one, have significantly restructured their governments or have been dissolved and reformed to a system that at least gives lip service to being controllable by the masses. They didnt do it out of benevolence, but because there would have been riots and revolution otherwise. The US is a good modern example of capitalism because it was born after capitalism had already been developed and was privledged enough to gain an upper hand, through investment of existing powers and colonial extractivism (also a key feature of capitalism).

As an example, 1838-The People’s Charter was drawn up for the London Working Men’s Association (LWMA) by William Lovett and Francis Place. The Charter had six demands: • All men to have the vote (universal manhood suffrage) • Voting should take place by secret ballot • Parliamentary elections every year, not once every five years • Constituencies should be of equal size • Members of Parliament should be paid • The property qualification for becoming a Member of Parliament should be abolished

Second example, The French Revolution

That is the enevitable end state of capitalism. It concentrates wealth upward and consolidates power in the hands of the few. You can tack on an external system of regulation, but eventually that power becomes so concentrated that those with power reshape those regulations to allow them to gain even more (and the ones at the top are greedy to a fault, its how they got there).

High taxes are fine if it means that I don’t need a savings account to live. No need to save for retirement if my basic needs are met. Need being the operative word, it is important to still have the option at least until we can move to a post-scarcity gift economy, but I doubt we’d be ready for that in the next 250 years.

I may be naive, but a life a idle leisure is not satisfying long term to many. Even the wealthiest people today are not content to idle their days away on private islands. They work and take on projects and set themselves goals. I think it is intrinsic in our nature (not all, but a vast majority) to want to build, create, and improve our lives and that of those around us. The pursuit of happiness is tied closely to the ability to enrich the lives we hold dear.

I think that part of the reason idle languish seems appealing is that we are worked too hard and our attention stretched too thin. Every choice under capitalism about how to spend our time has to weigh a vague life and death decision about how to feed and house ourselves in perpetuity. There is no expectation that the welfare safety net will catch us (in the US).

There is plenty of good work that needs to be done, and with free education (including vocational training) there is no shortage of skilled labor. With a surplus of labor we can shorten working hours. So why not have a jobs guarantee? If you are aimless but want to contribute to society, society can put the pathway to build what it needs in front of you and give the tools to achieve it. If in a couple years you decide thats not what you want to do, you can retrain or simply go do something else.

Capitalism’s fundamental flaw is that it exploits and feeds people’s greed. It requires an external system of regulation to ensure that the vast majority of people aren’t left with so little that murdering the people responsible for their suffering doesn’t seem like a better option than continuing in the system.

One could envision a system that uses mutually aligned incentives to ensure that when you succeed, we all do better, and when I succeed, we all do better. What does that system look like? It looks like a flattened hierarchy, where it is practically impossible for one person to accumulate enough wealth to influence national politics. I think it likely looks like state that guarantees healthcare, education, food, privacy, housing, and a job if you want it. Why does it look like that, because all of those things are neccesary to a happy, fulfilled, and productive life. If you have more people optimally outputting, your economy has strength and resiliency. With a modicome of smart public investment, you can fiscally guarentee that in perpetuity. In order to achieve it you need a government worth trusting, we don’t have one, but we can build one.

If nothing else, the modern era of capital accumulation demonstrates that there are so many more resources in the world than people to use them. What if we just let them? Since the war on Iran started the US has spent more than 1/3 of what the UN estimates it would cost to end world hunger (37B/97B).