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Home » Archives » April 2009 » Unbridled and Unregulated Capitalism?

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04/15/2009: "Unbridled and Unregulated Capitalism?"


I am fed up with people repeating the meme that the current financial problems have been caused by "unbridled" or "unregulated" capitalism. See here, here, here, and here for just a few such articles, which are repeated ad nauseum in comments all over the place.

Oh, please! This is complete and unvarnished baloney.

North America, and the USA in particular, has not seen anything resembling unregulated capitalism in at least 100 years, if ever. Truely unbridled or unregulated capitalism would have no rules imposed on it by the government, but I doubt that has ever been true anywhere in the world.

The USA has minimum wage laws, public services, zoning laws, the Federal Reserve System, the FDA, the EPA, the USDA, the TTB, Fair Housing, the FDIC, the FTC, and many, many more.

Leave aside for a moment the arguments over whether or not these rules are beneficial or not. With all these thousands of pages of regulations prescribing what businesses must and must not do, added to many government sponsored entities adding false competition to the economy, it is far from the truth that North America is experiencing "unregulated" anything.

Please stop this myth!

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