Wait, was my second paragraph actually originally an accurate assessment to some extent of where you were coming from ie it is stupidity inherently to try theorizing and discussing with respect to unregulated capitalism, then? Legit question, I may be being uncharitable, and I don’t want to roll back out a paragraph I thought was probably misapplied and ask for your response to it if it would be a misrepresentation of your position or an attack piece.
I think unregulated markets are something politicians sometimes do promote as a possible solution
You're really internalized this unregulated capitalism nonsense, haven't you?
No politician who has held any real position of power anywhere has ever promoted unregulated markets.
The difference is typically between massively increasing the increasing the amount of a regulation in an massively regulated market, and between slightly less massively increasing the amount of regulation in a massively regulated market. Once a generation or so, there might be a minor trimming of some regulations in a very narrow part of the market, but that's incredibly rare.
So why all this talk about unregulated markets? It's a smokescreen and an attack vector, designed to conceal the real alternatives by strawmanning any possible objections to massive regulation growth on top of massive regulation growth as a ridiculous extreme. It's a way of completely derailing any serious discussion of the issue, and supporting the endless growth of the state.
I disagree that it’s inherently bad to talk about or theorize about, especially within limited market contexts. Though I’ll admit that maybe my views on its current prevalence were distorted, and that this is what authoritarians to skme degree want. If nothing else as noted in my second paragraph of my last post I still feel like it has been advocated in specific areas like trade, healthcare, and the like. And is not always wrong within said specific contexts, though not from my perspective in say trade. Likewise, I’m not an authoritarian, do support deregulation within most, I think all, of the contexts you had mentioned, and use my belief that we should intervene mostly just with market failures as a way to ground my understanding of what should be done within the markets. I likewise use economic theoreticals like no regulation within an industry or wherever, including the market more broadly, as a comparison point that helps ground my understanding of what should probably be done, which is sometimes a return to lack of regulation within context (unregulated capitalism, at least contextually). I don’t think that’s morally wrong or unreasonable, and even if it were somewhat stupid I still could understand people doing it and wouldn’t want to demonize that too much. I feel like a lot of what I’ve said went right past you or isn’t being referenced in your posts, including the thread topic related stuff about Schwab, (not that you have an obligation to reply to it, but I was genuinely interested in what you and other people thought on those comments) though you may perhaps feel the same to some degree if I've been misinterpreting your positions or misunderstanding your basic arguments. If they didn't land and get interpreted properly in my brain space, I assure you that was not my intent. I may have stuck a nerve on this particular topic, too, and done a bad job presenting my beliefs and position more broadly. That’s on me. Still, I don’t think we’re as far apart as one might think from a practical reform perspective, if at all. I think I’ve done a poor job explaining my thoughts on that, but I also think it’s true.
Breaking up your blocks into concise paragraphs would make then far easier to read.
To go a little further, KindaMeh, you seem to respond with walls of words. Which is fine and sometimes necessary if you're sharing a complex and coherent thought that requires significant development. But your walls of words aren't delving deep into a particular topic. They're hitting many topics, often very superficially. To address each of those points requires a separate lengthy essay, and when I gave you one, you didn't really address what I said. Instead, you drew a dozen different conclusions from what I said, none of which I actually believe, and responded to those instead. And when I tried to refocus the conversation on what I said, because there's clearly a fundamental disconnect in basic communication, you complained that I didn't respond to all your scattered points.
I'm not particularly blaming you. This happens all the time, and it's one of reasons I loathe partisanship and sound-bite thinking. Because partisans almost universally seem to create an image in their mind of the Enemy. This is invariably a highly distorted caricature, and assumes the Enemy is monolithic. Even worse, whenever the partisan hears even the shade of a conflicting opinion, the person expressing it is immediately classified as the Enemy, and assumed to possess all the traits and beliefs that have been ascribed to that mental construct. For those who are victims of this type of partisanship, the results can be very surreal, because they're suddenly being attacked for things they never said, and then they're told they're lying when they say they don't believe any of that.
Sound-bite thinking is the habit of jamming a horde of unrelated, short statements of position into a single breathless post or other communication. The statements of position are typically only loosely related, and each is underpinned by a complex web of debatable and often very dubious assumptions, but the whole is always presented as a clear and coherent position based on an unimpeachable bedrock of logic. It's really hard to address posts of that nature, because each separate claim needs to be deconstructed and then addressed separately. And it's usually pointless to do so, because the sound-biter will typically respond with either a vacant and insulting dismissal or another parcel of random soundbites.
You seem to be trying to engage in an honest discussion, and I don't think you're a diehard partisan. But you clearly have some established assumptions about what other people believe, which you're imposing on me. That makes it hard to talk, because it means my only response to all your posts is "I didn't say that". You do have some tendencies toward sound-bite thinking (though you're nowhere as bad as Battlemaster), and you're packing a lot of only loosely related things into each post. That makes it very hard to respond, because I have fundamental differences not just with the long list of things you're saying, but with the underlying assumptions on which they're built. Which takes a long time to unpack, and as I noted, seems fruitless when there's an underlying miscommunication.
I'm not sure what the solution is. I keep trying to engage in discussions that are more than just virtue signaling via aphorisms, but the result has been misery and endless vicious attacks, and I suspect it's a futile quest. The format of the internet rewards brief replies and repetition, and punishes anything longer than a Tweet; and the increased animosity in the internecine squabbles incentivizes skimming vast volumes of content for markers or signals that indicate Friend or Foe, and defending or attacking based on that classification, even if the methods used are dishonest or completely irrational.