| dharh said: Show me a functioning Free Transparent Market in Modern History, anywhere. Go ahead, i'll wait. |
The trouble is that so much of the argument in favor of unrestricted capitalism assumes the existence of transparency, when transparency is one of those things that a government would have to regulate into the system.
For instance, the anti-regulationist argument against Environmental Regulation: "if people are mad that 3M's been dumping pulp waste in the ocean, they'll stop buying 3M!" But do you think 3M is just going to sit back and let people learn about the extent of their polluting habits? Hell no. You buy off the journalists who would report on it, or sue them for slander and keep them tied down for years in the courts. You hire people to go into the street and discredit the people complaining about the pollution as vigorously as the law would allow. That's even being idealistic enough to assume that they would follow the laws that still existed in this hypothetical model.
Proper capitalism would actually need a very vigoruous regulatory government making sure that everyone was playing fair, namely through enforcing constant transparency and the dissemination of information, so that all market players could be empowered to act logically by being as fully informed as possible. Even if we removed regulation from the equation, major corporations' Legal and Marketing Departments would make sure things went their way, even if they had no government officials to bribe.
An issue that PipeDream24 brought up that I would like to address is one of urban sprawl. There are still plenty of jobs in the greater Detroit area, but very few of those are in actual, municipally incorporated Detroit. The other issue is the sheer size of Detroit. Like many governing bodies throughout history, Detroit increased its borders when times were good and they had the money to support and provide services for a lot of people spread out over a large area. The decline in Detroit's population is evenly spread to a degree, so you end up with all of the old neighborhoods still occupied, but at nowhere near capacity, which combines with them having to cover (with police, firefighting, road crews, etc) the same geographic area with less money coming in.
Unfortunately, the best situation, aside from fucking over pension-holders (which is a bad idea because it will savagely demoralize the city's public servants, causing many of them to resign and move elsewhere and make the city's recovery nigh-impossible), would be a large-scale declaration of Eminent Domain, buying up these worthless, but occupied, properties all over the city, and forcing all city residents into a smaller geographic area. It would then be easier to provide services to these people, and the city could then raze all the unoccupied neighborhoods and sell the land for commercial development (tax-incentivized)
Monster Hunter: pissing me off since 2010.
