Many comments here say the key to maintaining a fair free market economy is regulation. I’m curious how that works for other countries. From a US perspective, r

Many comments here say the key to maintaining a fair free market economy is regulation. I’m curious how that works for other countries. From a US perspective, regulation is next to useless. The FDA and USDA are captured by Monsanto et. al. The FDA is captured by pharmaceutical companies. The FCC is run by telecom companies. The FTC is a toothless shell of itself which cannot stop any but the most blatant of anticompetitive measures (and often not even those). What is the public to do? They can exercise choice in the market, but not when an oligopoly exists, which often only offers the illusion of choice under different brand names. The regulatory bodies have no elected positions and thus no accountability to the public. The public can elect new officials who hopefully appoint new officials to the regulatory entities, but the politicians put forth are only two flavors of the same pro-corporate regime. The media, which is deeply entangled with politicians and their will, degrades every third-party or outsider candidate at every chance they get to ensure the public never sees anything else. So even if the party at the top changes, it is still the party setting the tone, mostly, and they are funded to huge extents by all the largest corporations; and thus we have the inmates running the regulatory asylum. Direct election of heads of regulatory bodies seems like a decent solution, but it could fall victim to the same issues as the major political parties. We could fight to get money out of politics, but with both sides benefiting from the current state of affairs, it seems impossible. As far as I can tell, our hands are tied. I’d love for someone to tell me I’m wrong, and that it isn’t the world of multinational companies, which we just happen to live in.