Should American society be a combination of free market regulated enterprise, and?

[Monsieur Recital Vinyliste]

a social safety ,consumer protected structure for banking, transportation, communcation, and health care? Explain why or why not in a paragraph please....

I happen to believe that affordable health care, honest banks, and an insurance industry that is regulated is good for society...since they can't seem to self-police, shouldn't there be govt. oversight?

[Niklaus Pfirsig]

The "free market" concept is a theoretical economic concept that is seldom found in the real world. In purely economic terms, a free market exists when every seller and every buyer have equal access to a market and are trading identical products. This mythical market situation is used to demonstrate the concept of "supply and demand".

In the first economics class I took several years ago, the teacher used shoes as the example product.

The classic example is where you go to the flea market to buy a pair of shoes. You get there and find a bunch of people selling shoes, and the shoes are the same quality, and the dealers have invested the same amount of money per pair, and ever customer at the market wears size 9. There is absolutely no reason for the buyer to pick one seller over the other,
The theory says that in this incredibly unlikely situation, the price of the shoes will be determined by a ratio of the number of shoes available to the buyers and how important buying a pair of shoes is to the buyer.

in real world terms, this is the purest of BS. Free market fundamentalism defines the free market as a marketplace free of government imposed restrictions instead of a market that provides fere access to all sellers and buyers.

In an unregulated marketplaces, some dealers will gain market share over others. They can hen leverage the market share to a competitive advantage. ( e.g. a convenience store chain may sell gas as a loss at a few stores to attract customers away from competitors stores across the street. They compensate by rasiing prices slightly at stores with no nearby competition, and effectively subsidize their own stores.).
Eventually an unregulated market results in the eventual rise of monopolies and oligopolies (a.k.a. cartels).

The real problems arise when monopolies and cartels can control access to basic necessities of life, like food, water, housing and clothing. When this happens business practices cross the line into extortion.

In 1999, the Bechtel corporation in California, contracted to manage the public water supply in a Bolivian city. At one point, Bechtel even laid claim to rain water that fell on the city in an effort to completely control all water sources for its profit. Read about it <a /href="http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=6670">here</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bechtel#Bolivia" >here</a>.

The role of government is to regulate businesses in a way that supresses or prohibits cartels and monopolies while promoting fair competition.

[Bored Goblin]

There is oversight already. Look up FDIC, Medicaid, and plenty of insurance laws. And we have an example of France, where generous social safety has lead to record unemployment.

Also, by saying that government can do a better job than market, you are assuming that government has complete information on everything and everybody, and government employees are all highly intelligent, moral, and and selfless beings.

[miniatureBeggar946]

"a social safety ,consumer protected structure for banking, transportation, communication, and health care" - yeah we need that stuff otherwise what's it all for? We bring kids into this world, haven't we got a duty to look after them? Shouldn't we look after them and each other? That's what government is for. They're supposed to look after us, but if they're co-opted by banks and big corporations, then do they? The bank bailout was for the banks. That's the government's constituency, that's who they care for.

Why is everyone being categorized as an asset or a liability? You're born into this world and everyone loves you. Then you got to school and maybe you fail some exams. Then people begin to have their doubts about you. Then you end up being unemployed and people despise you because you are now a liability on the balance sheet. Look at the extermination of the Jews. All their goods were taken away and detailed lists were compiled. That's accounting! That's profit and loss. That's dividing people into assets and liabilities. Look at the extermination of the Red Indians. They were obviously regarded as a liability.

We're all running around on a big hamster wheel trying to pay off an astronomical debt. Einstein said that compound interest was the most powerful force in the universe. Yet our politicians are asking us to take on and defeat the most powerful force in the world! The fractional reserve banking system creates money out of thin air. Every time they make a loan the banks create THEIR OWN money. We give up our homes as collateral and what did the banks give up? NOTHING, because the money never existed until they created the loan. The western economies are being imploded deliberately by the Federal Reserve which is not federal and doesn't have any reserves.

Free markets do not always deliver the best for the consumer. Imagine you have a long beach with 2 ice cream vans. The best place for both vans is right in the middle. So if the 2 vans are in competition then they end up right in the middle. Which means the people at the extreme ends of the beach have to walk 1/2 the distance of the beach and then back again. If the 2 vans were placed at 1/4 and 3/4, then the maximum distance to walk would be 1/4. This could only really happen if both vans were owned by the same company, but then they could put the prices up because they'd have a monopoly.

Regulated Enterprise? Apart form little Bernie Madoff, there isn't any!

Internet is cr@p at the moment so can't really post any links!

[Excessivesuit386]

yup!