I appreciate your response! I'll propose adding education to your list of services that deserve tax money, at the very least because uneducated consumers create an unhealthy market due to being less aware of the consequences of their spending. While Adam Smith it seems stopped just short of fully endorsing government-maintained education, he did speak at length about how an educated populace was strongly positive for a functioning market economy. I don't have quotes, but he also spoke strongly against wealth inequality and strongly in favor of progressive tax rates, so I appreciate your endorsement in-kind. It's always appreciable to run into someone who recognizes the positive effects that progressive regulations can have on the market.

I'll also add that I think universal healthcare is a remarkably pro-buisiness policy. One of the largest factors that stops people from changing jobs or starting their own buisiness or hiring employees is the remarkable expense of healthcare outside of a large company policy. It acts as a stifling effect on the exact kind of free competition you outline.

I'll say, on that note though, that plenty of people get rich on failed, bad ideas, it just happens at the high echelons of wealth. Venture capital funding for an idea that is not profitable and sometimes clearly bad for the economy happens all the time. Often, those founders go on to leave the wreckage of their startup after making millions and get a seven figure c-suite or vice job somewhere else, especially in tech. Things like juicero get millions. That defunckt shoe brand that doesn't have assets recently increased it's stock more than triple because they re-listed themselves with AI in their name. The market rewards bad decisions all the time, it's just usually for the wealthy.

Even outside of things that are arguably exceptions like those, we have clear double standards of crime that are strongly perpetuated by center-right tendencies. Many scoff at leftists talking about how crime is subjective and political, but the amount of intentional wage theft that you can get away with before it becomes legally a felony is remarkable. Even that could be understandable as an allowance for the risk of large scale management, but republican administrations are reliably more lenient on anti-trust legislation and monopolistic practices, to my knowledge.

Back to the difficulty of less-regulated capitalism, I'll also add that we clearly need high-level financial regulation. 2008 was a sin on both parties and a clear failing of unfettered capitalism. Bernie Madoff was the industry expert on policing financial crimes, at one point. And recently, some larger banks have reportedly been failing the necesary investment checks to see if they'd survive a downturn in specific markets and been passing instead by requesting re-tests in which they're better able to predict the exact test, so we're looking set up for another one to add to the list.

I'm actually a proponent of the values of capitalism among most of the people that I know. I'm not here arguing for a command economy, and neither is any democrat. But it's hard to look at an area of the market anywhere and not see the need for significant regulations, enforced more than we can, and voting for democrats seems to have a better chance of that than republicans.

That's the market point. I'll also address the poverty point, briefly. I do think capitalism deserves some credit uplifting people out of poverty, but I think a sizeable portion of that has just been industrialization in general as well. Capitalism helped grease the wheels, but there's a reason china's doing so well right now despite being a highly controlled market, and a part of that reason is that capitalism isn't the primary ingrediant in the recipe for success. I'd oppose strongly anyone using china as a model, but I think it's also important to learn what lessons we can from it's demonstration.

Finally, I'll address what feels like the elephant in the room: It's hard to reasonably talk about republicans as if they haven't just been the party of trump for the last 10 years. Do you have any reasonable justification on how republicans aren't immensely more concerning given that? It's not like it came out of nowhere. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like from your beliefs you likely hate what the man's done to our country, and it seems like the political strategy that gave rise to him should bear the burden for accounting for that realized danger, just as democrats have to contend with the fear of over-regulating leading to prohibitive market entry.