To be clear, I am by no means a market-maximalist. I'm claiming that markets are an extremely effective way to govern the production of goods and the allocation

To be clear, I am by no means a market-maximalist. I'm claiming that markets are an extremely effective way to govern the production of goods and the allocation of labor, compared to their alternatives. Further, I'm claiming that any sweeping claim that "markets" as a concept are bad is uninformed and patently wrong. With that said, we have different tools for different scenarios. In 2020, we used the "national funding, mobilization, and redistribution" tool to combat COVID and I think that was probably smart. Doing so necessarily wasted a lot of money (through graft, incompetent capital allocation, ec.). But optimal capital allocation was not the most important thing last year. We wanted safety! State intervention wins here! With respect to other market instabilities, well, it gets complex. 2008 was a mess of government, quasi-government, and private market behaviors all in a toxic dance. In any case, most markets most of the time absolutely do not require the government to step in. The economy is breathtakingly large. I mean, just really, truly stupendously massive. I hear "capitalism is bad" and "markets are toxic" claims a lot, but I've never heard a viable proposal that could realistically function as effectively as a predominantly market system. Also, I'm not claiming that our current markets are perfect. Certainly they are not. It's clear that there are huge issues in a significant number of industries (hospitals, housing, and education are all suffering from cost disease). We can (should!) take a crack at fixing the issues we have. Most of those fixes will come bottoms-up through creative-disruption, and some will come tops-down through policy and regulation. It's important to look at these things as tools in a toolbox, not totalitarian dogma in an ideology.