The so-called free market doesn't self regulate enough to be hands off, and would fail without centrally planned lever pulling on interest rates, the banning ce

The so-called free market doesn't self regulate enough to be hands off, and would fail without centrally planned lever pulling on interest rates, the banning certain practices, and tight regulation of others. Why? The big shortcoming is it doesn't solve tragedy of the commons problems like global warming, destructive pollution, etc. It also breaks down if you don't have proper limits on consolidation and collusion in order to maintain competition. It's not perfect. The free market is an ideal that we base our real pragmatic system on, one that has only mostly worked for us, and only so far. China, on the other hand, as compared to the west, likes centrally planning things, but they can only lean on that opposing ideal so hard before they'd fail too, for reasons you have pointed out. Both approaches have yielded different mixes of central planning and bottom-up self-organization, and they're both necessarily mixes.