Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I think that's a key point. When the US has eschewed "socialist" welfare state programs as it has generally done over the last 30 years - in favour of free enterprise and privatisation - the result has been to concentrate wealth at the top of the spectrum with the country club set. I don't see any free enterprise solution to this.

Victorian England had a lot of concentrated wealth at the top, and a huge pool of poor workers and very little regulation. That led to work houses and rampant pollution. It also (thankfully) led to a strong labour uprising that redistributed that wealth with a progressive tax system, creating a large middle-class. Bad for the rich? Absolutely. Vastly better for the whole country? Definitely, yes.

>> ^NetRunner:

>> ^blankfist:
@NetRunner, you offered the following as your utopian idea for new government:
1. regulated market.
2. welfare state
That's exactly what we have now. Exactly. Government regulates every single industry. Every one. We have a massive welfare state. Our economy is also going to shit and entrepreneurs cannot stay afloat with all the regulations in order to create more jobs. It's a recipe for failure.
Why not give free market Capitalism a chance? Your regulated markets and welfare state spending simply is not sustainable.

I'm starting to get curious, do you ever read my comments all the way to the end?
Maybe I need to be less whimsical. My point was that today's flawed reality is a utopia compared to your utopian proposals.
As for "why not give free market capitalism a chance", I may as well say "why not give Marxist Communism a chance"? I mean, obviously real communism has never been tried -- just ask the modern communists.
There's been no radical boost to growth during America's 30-year march to the right, and shrinking the welfare state and dismantling unions hasn't boosted the median income, so why would we ever keep marching on until we get to the ultimate extreme?
The modern progressive movement isn't on a march towards communism, it's trying to optimize society through an iterative scientific process. We look at things that have failed, or things that have worked elsewhere, and try to learn from them, and build a better mousetrap.
I don't really know what the end-state of modern liberalism looks like. I think it will always be looking to change and evolve over time as new problems and new solutions present themselves.