Is a Free and Well Regulated Market Economy something that this country needs?

[oohhbother]

or does that give too much power to government for people who like things as they are right now?

[justgoodfolk]

The second. The 'free' market is a lie and a fraud. Capitalism is a cruel pyramid scheme

The solution to the spreading economic crisis and the deteriorating social position of the working class lies not in the reform of capitalism, for it is beyond reform. The crisis is of a systemic and historical character. As feudalism gave way to capitalism, capitalism must give way to socialism. The key industrial, financial, technological and natural resources must be taken out of the sphere of the capitalist market and private ownership, transferred to society and placed under the democratic supervision and control of the working class. The organization of economic life on the basis of the capitalist law of value must be replaced with its socialist reorganization on the basis of democratic economic planning, whose purpose is the fulfillment of social needs.
While employing democratic rhetoric to legitimize its rule within the United States and to justify its use of violence all over the world, the contemporary American state retains at its disposal repressive mechanisms of unparalleled scope: a prison system that, with more than two million people behind bars, is the largest in the world; a massive and heavily armed police force; a judicial system that processes over 14 million arrests annually and that has the power to inflict capital punishment; an immensely powerful and lavishly funded military force, imbued with militaristic and anti-democratic sentiments; and a vast “national security” apparatus, which has been given extraordinary latitude in spying on and prying into the private affairs of the people. Over all these institutions the American people exercise virtually no effective supervision or control. Torture has become state policy, habeas corpus has been drastically restricted, and the state operates, in addition to its public prisons within the United States, an international gulag network of secret prisons into which nameless individuals, deemed “enemy combatants,” are made to disappear.
Democratic rights established in an earlier historical period have been drastically eroded. Lincoln’s democratic vision of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” has long since degenerated into rule of, by, and for the rich. The right to vote means little in a political process regimented by an institutionalized bipartisan “two-party” system that guarantees the monopolization of election campaigns by the two corporate-backed political parties. The existing electoral set-up excludes effective participation by parties opposed to the Democrats and Republicans. Ballot access laws have been designed to prevent challenges to the two-party dictatorship. Likewise, freedom of the press means little when the major media outlets are controlled by powerful corporate interests.
The defense of democratic rights is inseparably bound up with the struggle for socialism. As there can be no socialism without democracy, there will be no democracy without socialism. Political equality is impossible without economic equality. Like the struggle against war, the fight to defend and expand democratic rights requires the independent political mobilization of the working class, on the basis of a socialist program, to conquer state power.
The struggle for power requires the unconditional political independence of the working class from the parties, political representatives and agents of the capitalist class. The working class cannot come to power, let alone implement a socialist program, if its hands are tied by politically enfeebling compromises with the political representatives of other class interests. First and foremost, this means unwavering rejection of the timeworn and fraudulent myth that the Democratic Party represents, as compared to the Republican Party, a “lesser evil.” The subordination of the working class to this reactionary capitalist party – which traces its lineage to the slave-owning class in the pre-Civil War era – has been, historically, the Achilles heel of the labor movement in the United States. Despite its tradition of violent class conflict and industrial militancy, the labor movement’s dependence upon the Democratic Party – promoted for decades by the trade union bureaucracy, the Stalinists of the Communist Party, and innumerable middle-class political tendencies – effectively blocked the development of an independent and politically class conscious movement of the working class, fighting for its own class program, under its own banner.

[Don Q]

Your question does not make sense, A free market economy does not give govt. power. Socialism does . Socialism is Government owns everything , Citizens/slaves own nothing , The govt. makes decisions for you. A free market economy is what it states FREE.