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Progressives should embrace 'well regulated capitalism' [1]
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Date: 2025-09-10
Unregulated fire can be hurtful and destructive. Well regulated fire can be harnessed for the benefit of people. Capitalism is the economic equivalent of fire. It can destroy the environment, it can hurt people, it can distribute too much wealth to the top and too little wealth to the bottom. Well regulated capitalism will harness the power of inventive individuals allowed to create useful new products that benefit end users and to devise useful new modes of production or organizational arrangements that make better or more efficient use of human labor.
We need capitalism regulated so it improves the quality of life of all people, and not so that it greatly benefits some at the expense of everyone else.
Progressive capitalism is pretty much part of the direction Teddy Roosevelt was going — antitrust, reining in the oligarchs and robber barons of the day. The great mistake of orthodox Stalinist communism was to abolish private ownership of all the means of production. The current great mistake in Republican economic policy is the thrust to privatize everything in the mistaken belief that profit seeking is always good.
“Socialism” is a very vague term. It embraces a huge gamut of economic arrangements.
At one extreme, Soviet Russia — the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under Stalin — and another example the Castro regime in Cuba — stamped out private ownership of all productive enterprises including manufacturing and agriculture and sales and services such as restaurants and shops. A huge mistake of gigantic proportions.
At the other extreme, we have mixed economies where the ideal structure is an efficient government that directly provides a large part of the economy wherever this makes sense, and where well regulated private business provides the rest. This is what Republicans call European socialism, such as in Denmark, where the public sector includes health, utilities such as water and electricity and garbage collection and prisons, but where more or less well regulated private businesses thrive, such as the enormously successful Maersk shipping business.
Progressive Democrats and progressive Republicans -— yes, there are such animals — have tended very much in the direction of providing good government that improves quality of life for the entire population through intelligent regulation of private businesses and efficient provision of public utilities and public services.
David Cay Johnston’s book “Free Lunch: How the wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves At Government Expense (and stick you with the bill)” comes from a progressive Republican totally disgusted at the way that the greedy wing of the Republican party is privatizing all kinds of public property and activities, providing a long list of major piratization of public resources.
I myself have encountered creeping privatization that has raised costs to the average citizen. In my home town, police are required to station a police officer and police cruiser in front of buildings where construction that invades the road is taking place. Until a few years ago, citizens and businesses hired police on private duty through booking through the police station. Then, privatizing crept in, with a private business hired by numerous pol;ice departments in the Northeast, to schedule private duty police. Prices skyrocketed.
Also in my home town, when I needed transcripts of police reports on a traffic accident, I had to pay a private provider. I found this totally disgusting. Piratization of public services.
Also in America, there are now private prisons, operated for profit, with strong indications of bad behavior on the part of a number of operators.
Our privately owned electric grid is a mess, that needs much stronger government regulation.
Our health care system desperately needs to be governed by the principle that every person residing in the United States is entitled to full health care benefits.
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Of course, “well regulated capitalism” requires sensible rules. A widespread complaint from private businesses is that some rules don’t make sense, and that sometimes rules are contradictory, or ambiguous. Some of this may simply be noise. But close attention needs to be paid to making rules sensible and consistent between rule making bodies.
Progressives should certainly be very out front in very publicly pursuing sensible rules.
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Our entire economic system is increasingly relying on machines and artificial intelligence, requiring less and less human labor. The danger here is of insisting that income must depend on employers, that at present often provide miserably low wages to many employees, both in the case of small businesses such as restaurants, and in the case of larger businesses such as Walmart.
Our economic system requires a transformation where everyone receives income sufficient to live decently. To some extent this already exists in a rather diluted way. Low wage employees who can show they are working can obtain Section 8 subsidies for housing. Someone I know working at a low wage job was renting an apartment for about $1500 a month and was receiving $1200 in subsidy, This made an enormous difference, allowing them to rent a decent apartment. Subsidy of food is another category, made more efficient now with debit cards rather than embarrassing food stamp coupons. Public housing is another solution, though increasingly supplanted by subsidies of privately owned apartment complexes. that avoid many of the bad features of traditional public housing.
These kinds of subsidies allow the existence of low paying private businesses.
Section 8 housing subsidies allow landlords to charge quite high rents to provide well managed good quality housing, supervised by housing inspectors paid by Section 8.
in the long run I can see an economy requiring much shorter working hours, and much more government subsidy, Where is the subsidy to come from if people are working short hours? The only solution is printing money.
“Printing money” has a bad reputation. It can easily get out of hand if too much money is chasing too many items in short supply. Printing money is, notoriously, widely abused by Republican politicians to allow lowering taxes while borrowing money to pay for government expenses, providing a short term political advantage (everyone loves lower taxes) while damaging the economy in the long run.
The solution is an independent government body immunized from short run political pressures --operating under stringent rules that prevent excessive purchasing power leading to excessive inflation -— which supplements the income of low income employees by depositing credits (money) in bank accounts without borrowing from private sources.
This can be done electronically and very quickly. It will not be inflationary if done prudently at a pace that does not create excessive demand. The main principle is to avoid having too much purchasing power chasing too few goods. Gradual and predictable increases of credits to the bank accounts of low income persons should cause businesses to respond with increases in production, so that more goods are produced in response to expectations of more income to low income people. If done properly this should not cause inflation.
You can call this “printing money” because it conjures spendable income out of thin air, without governmental borrowing. I think this can be done without creating significant inflation, if done prudently, beyond the control of irresponsible populists such as recent Republican presidents who have lowered taxes by borrowing money and creating a situation where taxes are increasingly used to pay interest and principal on the borrowed money. A solution that Democratic presidents have, nobly and in the best interests of our country, have refrained from using.
In summary, we need an agency that, without borrowing money, supplements the income of low paid people by depositing credits in their bank accounts in a prudent manner that does not cause significant inflation. Low paid people include many people who think of themselves as middle class but are having trouble staying afloat. This is a huge chunk of the electorate, who should be voting for progressives.
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Lastly, here is a hypothetical situation where money and a market economy are no longer needed
Consider the Isaac Asimov environment, described in his novels, where robots do absolutely everything necessary to provide a high standard of living.
If you are allowed to tell robots to provide anything you want, you might build a huge palace with an Olympic size swimming pool and an indoor basketball court. If everyone else did this there would be immense damage to the environment.
In this situation, an obvious solution is [a] to adopt limits on each kind of product or service you can ask the robots to produce. The limits would range from zero limit to high limit to forbidden. You could not ask a robot to hurt someone else. [b] to automatically provide certain things like as much health care as you wanted, a decent apartment or house, or nonharmful foods [c] to limit providing things that if consumed in excess could harm the environment or other people or yourself. There is no market economy. But there is no restriction on designing and receiving new products so long as they do not produce damage. You can order robots to furnish your home with custom built furniture. Or produce banquets for yourself and friends. Consumer choice is preserved, limited by the need to protect the environment and the interests of other people. Consumer choice does not have to rely on a market economy.
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