namelesstavern.net

A friend of mine today told me that this financial crisis is the end of "laizzez faire" capitalism. I laughed and asked him to tell me how the american system is laizzez faire at all. He didnt have an answer.

My question to you is:

Is this statement correct? why or why not?

/Discuss

The question that our federal government currently faces is not if it is within it's powers to monkey around with the economy via interest rates or bail out packages, but how best to go about it. The prevailing mindset is that it is governments job to manipulate the economy to keep it out of any danger zones.

Depending on your fine tuned definition of laissez-faire beyond the broad concept of minimal government intervention you may or may not include the concept and support of private property ownership as one of the precepts, personally I see this as less of a laissez-faire ideal and more of a capitalist ideal, in no small part due to the fact that I believe very strongly that we are not at all operating under a laissez-faire system, yet still operating under a capitalist system where private property ownership is the area least affected by government regulation.

While you were right to laugh at your friends statement it would have undoubtedly been interesting to have him explain and qualify that statement assuming he is not a completely ignorant individual and had just technically miss-characterized to an extent his prediction of the future, ie if you removed the laissez-faire part of his statement would he still agree with it.

“Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven’t had capitalism.” ~Ron Paul

i wonder how much the bonuses the ceos will give themselves upon getting the bailout

it's a mixed economy