To which I reply, American markets aren't free and never have been. Your "free market capitalism" is actually a series of interconnected oligopolies where a few

To which I reply, American markets aren't free and never have been. Your "free market capitalism" is actually a series of interconnected oligopolies where a few powerful players control the market and use lobbying to errect barriers to free enterprise. Economic sectors can fall in three general categories: 1) free market ( low or no regulation, freedom of contract, no legal barriers to entry, people voluntarily choose to buy their product, freedom to make profits, freedom to take losses) - Examples include: most manufacturing, retail, entertainment, electronics, furniture, cars, clothes, lasic surgery, trucking, shipping, tourism, software 2) guild & cartel - businesses or associations recieve numerous special privileges and legal barriers to entry. One example is the banking sector and the special access to the lender of last resort and to bailouts. Another is the doctors associations and their monopoly right to dispense life saving pills. 3) socialized - a sector that is under operational management by the government. For instance, the public education system or the park system. The basic test for a free market is this: If I wanted to start a business to compete with player X in this industry, would I be thwarted or hindered by the government in doing so? America as whole has never been a perfect & absolute pure free market. But certain sectors tend to pretty come close the ideal. And its those sectors that tend to produce products of increasing quality and lower prices. The sectors that seem to have endemic problems that end up being the subject of national debates, are all in categories 2 and 3 (finance, healthcare, and education). Of course there is no easy way to go from 3) to 1) or 2) to 1). A socialized system is a system of both price controls and restricted entry. If you remove just the price controls, you have given the industry a license to rake the consumers over the coals. Thus your path from 3) to 1) actually makes things worse. This is the fatal law of many of the Cato libertarians. At the end of the day, competency of the government is still important no matter what path is chosen.