My guess is that people who think pure capitalism is bad, also think that if the government does not help those who can not help themselves, that there is no other mechanism for such action to take place.

100 years ago the US government did not care if you starved to death, and yet, people still got fed.

Relying on the government to mandate morality is never a good idea.

Actually there was government aid 100 years ago. The people receiving it were called paupers.

It's hard to find any documentation on social programs in the US before the 1930's. Whatever there was, it was nothing compared to what we have today.

I think the best is a mix of extreme capitalism and mandated coverages for certain areas of life, such as school vouchers.

BTW Montana - could you give an example of extreme capitalism failing?

Other (the only other so far).

Resource based economy.

Well, I voted for the system that I liked best at least, and I'm more of a socialist than anything else.

In extreme capitalism there is no minimum wage, no regulation and no employee rights. Those are all socialist ideals. Basically the rich get to ride roughshod over the poor, for examples of this think industrial revolution, or how western companies act about factories in third world in modern times.

The best system in my opinion is a mixed market, allowing effort to translate into wealth while at the same time maintaining a high quality of life for the entire population.

Also in my opinion some things are best with the state having either a large stake or even a monopoly. These include education, healthcare, infrastructure, judiciary and government itself.

I'd say mixed.

Both extremes tend to trample human rights at the expense of their other goals, and focus huge amounts of power into very few hands when left unchecked.

Otherwise what Rath said.

Capitalism.

The only thing the Government should focus on, imo, is the inflation rate, in the long-run via supply-side policies, in the short run through increased taxation.

Employment, GDP, etc, will come in time if inflation is kept under control.

The sad thing is that people who look to the government to “fix” things rarely look at the long term performance of the government on the things they tried to fix. One of the primary examples is how the government’s intervention into the housing market to make homes more affordable and increase home ownership has consistently resulted in massive housing inflation that makes homes far less affordable; and this has/is occurring in many countries (Canada for example) which don’t have the same kind of banking de-regulations as the US had. From what I have seen in my lifetime, I would say that the fundamental rule of government intervention in the economy is that the force of the government’s action in the economy is always less than the force of the market’s reaction to bring the economy back to balance.

Another example of the unintended consequences of government action is welfare. Because a person on welfare can not meaningfully improve their education or experience their employability steadily drops while they’re on welfare until they become entirely dependent on the system. If you compare this against a person who struggles to get by on the wages of entry level positions you will notice that after a relatively short period of time (2 to 4 years) the opportunities available to the working individual are dramatically better than the person on welfare. In other words, in the long run welfare makes people worse off ...