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Originally Posted by rathi  Laissez today is simply an oversimplification of the requirements needed for a healthy market. |
I can't agree with your choice of vocab. Laissez-faire is an ideology where efficiency is not the primary goal. It has become a warped version of conservatism and the protection of profit, even it is to the detriment of the overall good. Liberalism is perhaps the more suited word for right wing economic analysis of the “healthy market”?
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Today, his message about promoting an open market has been lost, and been replaced with a negative assumption of any government involvement in the economy
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The abuse of Smith by the current free market extremists does get my goat. Consider, for example, the following quote from The Wealth of Nations:
”No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, cloath and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, cloathed and lodged.”
That is effectively a call for government interventionism. Today it would be attacked as socialism. A tad shameful.
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The argument should be which factors are hurting the economy for that specific market, not a blanket statement that incorrectly treats all markets the same.
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You'd go for a comparison of market failure and government failure?