At the end of the day, I think that the issue with this sentiment is that in some sense, control over something and ownership of that thing are virtually the same thing. If you have “appropriately controlled capitalism”, then you have someone other than the capitalists ultimately deciding what the implements that drive the economy are used for and who the dividends are given to. If that someone is just some individual or small group controlling it to their own interests, then you just have an authoritarian system (and frankly, its not really different from a capitalist system that has become sufficiently consolidated for the number of rich owners controlling things to be very small anyway, since those guys will also run things to their own interest). If theres some kind of collective/societal-wide control mechanism, and its actually sufficient in its influence to prevent the abuses of capitalism, then it isnt really capitalism at all anymore because those private “owners” just have a legal fiction of ownership. At which point, their position is doubly useless, so there is little benefit to keeping up that illusion.
There are mixed marks that seem to work. The one I’m most familiar with is private health insurance in the Netherlands. The market is very strictly regulated, all health insurers need to offer the same basic package - a cheap package that covers all the basics. And there is intense governmental oversight to check that the health insurers cover what they are supposed to. The capitalist aspect and the market economy enter mostly on the non-basic packages.
You can notice how it’s a very slow moving market, but it still generates profits for the owners and profits the society as a whole.
I hope something like this could be implemented more widely, where a strong tax redistribution system and strong regulations in favor of the less rich can counter the evident downsides of capitalism without killing neither private ownership nor market economy. Like we haven’t killed car traffic, we have very strongly regulated it.
At the end of the day, I think that the issue with this sentiment is that in some sense, control over something and ownership of that thing are virtually the same thing. If you have “appropriately controlled capitalism”, then you have someone other than the capitalists ultimately deciding what the implements that drive the economy are used for and who the dividends are given to. If that someone is just some individual or small group controlling it to their own interests, then you just have an authoritarian system (and frankly, its not really different from a capitalist system that has become sufficiently consolidated for the number of rich owners controlling things to be very small anyway, since those guys will also run things to their own interest). If theres some kind of collective/societal-wide control mechanism, and its actually sufficient in its influence to prevent the abuses of capitalism, then it isnt really capitalism at all anymore because those private “owners” just have a legal fiction of ownership. At which point, their position is doubly useless, so there is little benefit to keeping up that illusion.
There are mixed marks that seem to work. The one I’m most familiar with is private health insurance in the Netherlands. The market is very strictly regulated, all health insurers need to offer the same basic package - a cheap package that covers all the basics. And there is intense governmental oversight to check that the health insurers cover what they are supposed to. The capitalist aspect and the market economy enter mostly on the non-basic packages.
You can notice how it’s a very slow moving market, but it still generates profits for the owners and profits the society as a whole.
I hope something like this could be implemented more widely, where a strong tax redistribution system and strong regulations in favor of the less rich can counter the evident downsides of capitalism without killing neither private ownership nor market economy. Like we haven’t killed car traffic, we have very strongly regulated it.