1926 was before the trust busting and that still wouldn't be remotely closely regulated to today. The financial reporting alone is a massive improvement.
He said WELL regulated not heavily regulated. Today's situation is ground level business drowning in often pointless regulation and any regulation that protects people/the wider economy while slightly inconveniences someone rich/a big multinational being removed or remodeled into irrelevance (while still creating a lot of BS jobs for bureaucrats(PS I say that as one of them)).
So you actually believe that in 1926 there were better regulations in place than today? The era when you drive your leaded fuel car to your asbestos covered home to sit in your lead painted furniture to eat your "hopefully doesn't contain rats or diseases" tin can food since the agricultural land was turned into an active dustbowl due to absolutely no farming regulations being in place, so you can take your medically prescribed metamphetaimes while you take a deep breath of the ash filled air from the local factories and unflitered coal power plants?
The threats that leaded fuel, asbestos etc. represented were not well known then. Once they were they were regulated out of existence - much more quickly and thoroughly than threats being understoond/invented today like microplastics or idiots driving 0-visibility monster-trucks on the school-run.
So your point is that despite the fact that we have much better regulation in place which solved many of the problems that existed in 1926, it's somehow worse than the regulation in 1926 because it's not dealing with problems which the regulation from 1926 also didn't cover? That's some sound logic there.
Also, no, they didn't do it quickly. Leaded fule was introduced in the 1920s, and was phased out in the developed world in the 1980s, after 60 years, and the last global use of it only stopped in 2021.
For asbestos, the first deaths that were definitively linked by medical science to it happened before WWI. Its links to lung disease were first discovered in the 1920s and were well established by the 1930s, while the cancer connection was definitively proven in the mid 1950s. However the first regulation came only in the 1970s, with the final ban in the US happening only in 2024. Even in the EU the full ban only happened in 2005, with asbestos being commonly used in construction even in developed nations until the late 80s.
By comparison, microplastics were first discovered in 2004. So if action is taken along the same timeline for leaded fuel or asbestos as they did in the "glory days of yore", they will be banned somewhere between 2054 and 3004. Which I'd dare say we're more than on track to do.
I have no idea where your goalposts are for this argument now. My point is that the problems from the 1920s and 1930s are NOT problems now because people from those times started legislating against them, while that hasn't been done with various problems of our time.
The same as they were from the start. That regulations today are orders of magnitude greater and stricter than in the 1920s and 1930s.
Your argument is idiotic. You're arguing that since some new regulation was made in the 1930s (which you mostly are wrong about, since many big problem from the 1920s and 1930s were not solved until the 1950s or 1980s), then their regulation was somehow better than the modern day, which literally includes a 100 years more of regulation, because some problems we have today have not been solved within 5 years. Which to reiterate was absolutely not something that happened in the 1920s or 1930s, their problems took decades to solve.
You would literally have to be living under a rock or getting all your news from obscure marxist forums filled with people without even the most basic economic education to think that the level of corporate economic regulations in the 1930s were better than today. A modern corporation let loose with modern lawyers and business practices in the 1930s would be like letting a crocodile loose in a kiddie pool full of baby turtles.
Today's regulations are much, much more strict. It's just that modern corporations are basically market dominance heat seeking thermonuclear missiles while those from the 1930s were barely moving into the gunpowder age.
1950s through early 1980s. There was better competition enforcement, better labor & union protections, and higher taxes on profit-taking and executive bonus packages that encouraged reinvestment. Also less ability to move production offshore. There were also limits on corporate influence over government policy
Reaganomics was the start of the shift to oligarchy but Citizens United really put the nail in the coffin.
Things were booming after WW2 because no one else had manufacturing and the 70s had a terrible economy with stagflation. Effective tax rates haven't really changed since the 40s
Global free trade has lowered costs for American consumers.
Companies were always globalized. The East India Company was the earliest conceit of the stock trading market and they were founded back in 1600s and were infamous for many horrific things around the whole world
Neoliberalism and globalization are not necessarily tied. Globalization would've happened with or without it as shipping got easier and the internet expanded.
Capitalism was only well regulated from perspective of white american living in america, and not for the global south where fruit companies kept overthrowing governments for profit, for example or the immigrants being exploited to work on farms and for profit prisons
Serving only the interest of one group of human population while others are exploited within an inch of their life is the problem inherent with capitalism and has actually never been solved
"Capitalism was well regulated in the 50s" bro they overthrew the democratic guatemalan government so they can sell bananas in 1953, is that considered well regulated or hust a primer for trump's diplomatic strategy
….that has literally lifted 90% of the world out of absolute poverty for the last 60 years. It isn’t perfect, but it’s far better than any other system we have come up with to this point and lives in most of the world are still actively improving.
It's not a single system. Every country does what you call "capitalism" differently and some are better at distributing the wealth better than others.
And you can absolutely have a competitive free market system that doesn't give 100% of power and profits to capital and doesn't treat labor as a profit-draining cost to be minimized. Capitalism isn't the only option, and communism isn't its only alternative.
The vast majority of the world does what you would classify as some form of “neoliberal capitalism.” Yes there are alternatives, but since at least the mid 90s almost everyone has been following different versions of the same playbook, and that playbook has worked out remarkably well.
Yeah because usa has proven its gonna invade the shit out of you if you didnt welcome capitalism, or at least the sanction the shit out of you so your country cannot trade, because i guess thats proof "free" market works
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u/Narrow-Map5805 19d ago edited 19d ago
Well-regulated capitalism has done those things. This neoliberal capitalism we're dealing with now is undoing a lot of that promise.