Thank you for a thoughtful response.

The thing is, power is power. Power is the enemy of justice. Justice is always and everywhere concerned with constraining power.

Economic power corrupts people’s morals as surely as political power does. That has been amply demonstrated.

The existence of a central-bank banking system puts huge amounts of power over society (as in influencing macroeconomic outcomes) into the hands of the private banking system. For anyone who favors the rule of law to say that entity shouldn’t be under the control of society because bribery and such can occur is ludicrous.

Your definition of capitalism is a bit lacking. An economy consisting of small farms and proprietorships, which would have “privately owned means of production” and employees (and therefore exploitation in the Marxist sense: wage slavery), selling what they produce locally — the ‘Jeffersonian’ model — would not be ‘capitalism’.

Capitalism includes large-scale production and extended markets. It is the scale of capitalistic enterprise that requires a big, strong government to assert the interests of society as a whole over capitalistic enterprises. Again, the existence of corruption is not a plausible reason for abandoning society to the power of capitalists.

Overall, you seem to conflate overseeing the practices of businesses — regulation — and ‘managing’ the economy. The two are not the same. To talk about the impossibility of ‘managing’ complex systems as a reason for not regulating businesses in their impact on people and society as a whole is to mix your apples and your rutabagas.

You are wrong if you think I am a Marxist/socialist. I am not even a liberal — but then I’m not a conservative or a libertarian, either. I’m a rationalist. No ideology is any more rationalistic than any religion is. All are based on beliefs. Rational justice is my only concern in all this.