... a fairly stunning rebuke of capitalism as it has been practiced of late.

"Of late" is the operative phrase in Andrew Leonard's statement.

The idea that a market whose freedom is not being actively defended, from itself, will soon fall into economic tyranny and disaster is not a new notion. Adam Smith put it forward more than 2 centuries ago in an explicit warning. Twentieth century political economy understood those principles even better, having grown out of the labor movement and the first era of baronial industrialism.

What Leonard seems to understand, but Martin Wolf does not, is that refuting the last 30 years' of economic fads is neither extreme nor scary (unless, perhaps, one has been making one's living off of pretending that prior to Reagan and Milton Friedman there were never any other theories of capitalist economics).

Far to the contrary — the current discourse is the first time in over a generation that actual sanity appears to be on the verge of breaking out. People are actually talking rationally about economics again. They started to back in 1992 with the novel idea that balancing the federal budget would improve the liquidity of the domestic money supply and thereby bring about massive incentives for entrepreneurial investment — but the haze of so called "free" trade, low-wage labor, and continued dependence on extractive energy resources proved more persistent.

If one were feeling especially bold, one might go so far as to say that the actual, honest-to-goodness free market has a brighter future today than it has at any time since the "confusion" of the 1970s that these wretched Chicago schoolers are so unhappy about.

Now all we have to hope for is that all the old liberal economists who remember all this stuff haven't yet died out. Or maybe this is a chance for the new-fangled econometrics kids to step up and show their stuff?

I think many corporations are run for the short term interests of the management. With fragmented ownership, management has less oversight than it needs.

Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the US did very well with an economy that had a very large union membership, steep tax rates for the wealthy, and a much smaller gap between rich and poor. Productivity gains were shared with workers, so the country as a whole felt prosperous. Children could hope to do better than their parents.

Those people would be surprised and offended if you claimed that they were not practicing capitalism. The Reagan/Thatcher model was a deviation from the approach that had proved so successful in the past. It was an experiment, and the result of the experiment is that 90% of the American people have gotten poorer in real terms (real income for wage-earners peaked in the early 1970s). Only the entry of women into the work force masked this effect, so that a two-earner household with fewer children could feel as properous as a one-earner household with more children did in the past. OK, that and the housing bubble, which allowed people to take on more debt.

A particular form of capitalism has failed. In the 60s, there was enough nervousness about communism for Western rich to feel motivated to treat workers well. Now, maybe they'll do it to save their own skins.

I'm rereading William Greider's "The Soul of Capitalism." Highly recommended for those who take a long view of capitalism.

but there have been times when corporate finance and investment banking, well-regulated, worked pretty well. Generally when Democrats, or more enlightened goopers were in office.

Usually things go off the rails when politicians begin bowing and scraping to corporate shills. As long as politicians remember that corporate sharks care only about their next meal, and nothing else, we might actually be able to have a mixed economy in which capitalism does what it does best--for ALL the people--and regulation does what it does best, which is to reign in capitalism's idiot excesses. This was, supposedly, one of the key foundation blocks of our modern economy until the crazy randian, Chicago-school-boyz destroyed it.

Your final paragraph sums up the main fault in the conservative argument which seems to hold the position that any oversight, any regulation of financial markets leads directly to authoritarian socialism. To them there is no possible middle ground.

That's the same relative position as the gun rights lobby, any regulation, any oversight means all their guns will be confiscated by a fascist state. Same is true of the anti-choice argument, favoring any abortion, even one to save the life of the mother, makes one a mass murderer.

There are well over three hundred million people in this country. World population is approaching seven billion. there are many types of governments and even more cultures. We cannot demand that this nation or the world operate on a black and white, no middle ground standard. That is the way of our enemies, the Taliban and al Queda.

The quintessential advantage of a capitalistic "system" is not efficiency, rather it is flexibility. "Capitalism" is ideal in that it allows the morality of individuals and their associations to be expressed (or exposed) more freely than other systems.

It is laughable when the author and others of like mind trumpet "a well-regulated" market as a panacea for the seemingly inevitable hiccups and headaches of capitalism. This is because it is often these same individuals who bemoan the corrupting influence of business on government regulation.

If the current market is not regulated well enough, this says as much for the virtues of legislation as it does the vices of capitalism i.e. businesses are political actors and they will act in their own self-interest.

If one believes that a well educated and reflective populace is essential to legislating a more perfect union, then it is hardly a stretch to postulate that the same ingredients are necessary for a "better" capitalism.

Capitalism is amoral, legislative bodies less so.

There hasn't been anything resembling capitalism in this country since the first 20 years of it's founding. We've had a mixed economy. What it has really most resembled has been fascism. The means of production were in private hands but the producers were told what to do with it by the government. Capitalism is the only politico/economic system in which individual liberty is the ultimate goal. The rules are so simple. As long as a person does not initiate the use of force, threats of force or fraud they can do whatever the hell the want too. Shoot heroin into your eyeballs until your head explodes, or become a billionaire. It's up to you. I don't care. Just leave me the fuck alone. The whole problem with this world is that there are too many people up in other peoples business. MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS!