> The socialist instinct ("anybody getting rich must be cheating") unfortunately obscures the real problem ("monopolists and cartels controlling supply and setting prices are the true enemies of the people") which hinders solving it; by putting capitalism in your gunsights, you make enemies out of natural allies.
I think this gets a little muddied in The Discourse, because tons of pro-market anti-monopolist and anti-cartel[1] policies (like, you know, any preference for more trust-busting than the post-late-'70s neutered version) get painted as socialism in, especially, the US, simply because it's regulation and since the rise of Chicago-school jurisprudence and legislative influence, the fall of anti-capture and money-influence-mitigating regulation of media over several decades, and generally the ascendance of the Reagan-associated neoliberal outlook across all of mainstream American economic politics until very recently, regulation is the enemy of capitalism in many folks' minds, even when it's (god this is frustrating) laser-focused on making markets freer in the sense of their function, not the sense of "less-regulated".
The result is that people who simply think "barely-regulated markets" aren't fix-everything magic fairy dust that can't possibly be improved by a couple more laws and enforcement mechanisms, or even in a some cases by flat out replacement by a government program, find themselves rhetorically connected to nationalize-much-of-the-means-of-production Marxism-curious socialists (besides not being so removed from Nordic-style democratic-socialists to begin with)
[1] frankly, I find it convenient in certain company to shorthand "shitty tending-toward-captured markets, sacrificing efficiency and human decency for the comfort of a few" as "capitalism" given the actual outcomes and evident tendencies of systems the leaders of which emphasize and tout how capitalist they are, and the frequent expressed and revealed preferences of folks who like to promote themselves as particularly capitalistic, for the same reason it's kinda fair to regard communism as authoritarian and anti-democratic in practice, but I'll gladly entertain other usage for the sake of conversation.
These days anti-trust measures tend to be framed in terms of increasing competition rather than market freeness. Which does make some sense. Hard to argue with increasing competition unless you're Peter Thiel.
Increasing competition is increasing freedom to participate in a market, which is the kind of market freedom that matters when it comes to "free markets".
The identification of "freedom of market participants to do whatever they want" as being the "free" in "free markets" is exactly the problem here, in my view—and I'd go further and claim that confusing the two things has been a deliberate sophistic practice (among others, chief among them being "please don't notice I snuck in a couple sketchy axioms and 'as we all know's at the beginning, so that you accept the hundred pages of 'reasoning' based on them that follow") promoted by figures in some allegedly-intellectual circles, to make themselves useful to those who find that kind of thing beneficial, and so to personally gain from being professional BS peddlers.
(I'm not correcting you, here, just adding on—I'd guess we basically agree on at least the first, and most directly relevant to your post, sentence of the above)
> I'd go further and claim that confusing the two things has been a deliberate sophistic practice
I'm only learning about the history of economics myself. It seems a lot of people interpret Adam Smith as advocating against any government intervention, even in the case of price-fixing. For example: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/regulation-industry/misreadin...
I'm not convinced that it's deliberate. You can draw a parallel with free speech: is it about letting anyone say whatever they want, however loudly, as much as they want? Or is it about ensuring that everyone has a voice, i.e. preventing the loud people from drowning out or otherwise intimidating the quiet ones. You could well argue for the latter, but many people in the West assume it means the former.
> Increasing competition is increasing freedom to participate in a market, which is the kind of market freedom that matters when it comes to "free markets".
Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's about making sure you can be competitive, and you as a particular business don't have an inherent right to be competitive. Instead it's a collective right to have access to competition.
A right to participate in a reasonable way does not go far enough in many markets.
I think this gets a little muddied in The Discourse, because tons of pro-market anti-monopolist and anti-cartel[1] policies (like, you know, any preference for more trust-busting than the post-late-'70s neutered version) get painted as socialism in, especially, the US, simply because it's regulation and since the rise of Chicago-school jurisprudence and legislative influence, the fall of anti-capture and money-influence-mitigating regulation of media over several decades, and generally the ascendance of the Reagan-associated neoliberal outlook across all of mainstream American economic politics until very recently, regulation is the enemy of capitalism in many folks' minds, even when it's (god this is frustrating) laser-focused on making markets freer in the sense of their function, not the sense of "less-regulated".
The result is that people who simply think "barely-regulated markets" aren't fix-everything magic fairy dust that can't possibly be improved by a couple more laws and enforcement mechanisms, or even in a some cases by flat out replacement by a government program, find themselves rhetorically connected to nationalize-much-of-the-means-of-production Marxism-curious socialists (besides not being so removed from Nordic-style democratic-socialists to begin with)
[1] frankly, I find it convenient in certain company to shorthand "shitty tending-toward-captured markets, sacrificing efficiency and human decency for the comfort of a few" as "capitalism" given the actual outcomes and evident tendencies of systems the leaders of which emphasize and tout how capitalist they are, and the frequent expressed and revealed preferences of folks who like to promote themselves as particularly capitalistic, for the same reason it's kinda fair to regard communism as authoritarian and anti-democratic in practice, but I'll gladly entertain other usage for the sake of conversation.