Quote Originally Posted by Fisherking View Post
Great questions Seamus.

Supply side economics is simply Neoliberalism. It is corporatism where government pick the winners and losers. Just exactly what we have had for decades, to one degree or another. It is Mercantilism with a new name.

Free market is something that has been in short supply for well over a century. Its chief criticism is over production. This cry comes mainly from large producers being out competed by startups and upstarts. The key opposition to the concept is its lack of government control and regulation. Most people have been convinced that they are too incompetent to decide for themselves what is a good product or service. People today have never had economic liberty to be participants and producers in the economy. They can see no further than consumerism. The modern mind set is of employment by a producer rather than being a fully productive contributor in the economy. Government and Corporate propaganda have taking all confidence from them and they fear what that freedom would bring.

Directed economies all fail eventually. What emerges out of the chaos is always a free market until government moves in to set limits, pick the winners and losers and start the process over again.

None are perfect. There are always winners and losers. But of them all the free market is the most natural way of establishing trade and custom. It should be the one where people are most able to make a living but it does depend on one’s wits.
Neoliberalism is definitely distinct from mercantilism. Mercantilism serves the wealth of the state, but neoliberalism serves the wealth of the market - state and consumer both for the market: "dictatorship of the shareholder". From national economic and political oligarchies to a transnational economic (so by extension political) oligarchy. One has affinity to central control, the other to soup.

Why do you think individual consumers are more competent to evaluate products than the producers who create them or the purveyors who market them?

What's the difference in "freedom" if winners and losers emerge without state backing, as opposed to with state backing? It's all government. That's exactly what a "free market" looks like if you prioritize government (e.g. republican) function from maintaining the public good to effervescing private commerce on the largest possible scale. Large organizations and wealthy individuals (self-aggrandizingly "job creators" and "innovators")will certainly seek to dominate at the expense of the common weal - why is it acceptable for these not even to be nominally accountable to something? Why does Property need a despot?

All economies fail - because societies collapse. Be careful about how you use "directed" economy, as all economies beyond happenstance itinerant exchange rely on some organization.