Unfettered capitalism isn’t about freedom, it’s about the concentration of wealth and deregulation plays right into its hands. Capitalism doesn’t care about individuals, it cares about efficiency and will ruthlessly grind over mountains to make them flat.

Let’s look at the coal industry in the US where a combination of (severely) undervalued natural resources (i.e. “sold too cheap”) and the shifting of private responsibility onto the backs of the public as you referenced above. A few people win, an ecosystem is destroyed and the general public foots the bill in terms of higher health costs and cleanup.

If those assets could be valued properly with all the long-term effects baked in, it becomes much less of an appealing business proposition — which I would argue is probably a good thing. It would probably be cheaper (once all the costs were factored in) to pay people NOT to mine coal and invest in training for growing (instead of dying) industries.

My argument would be that when regulation is perceived as “bad” for profit, it’s more about the individual and less about society. With apologies to Bobby Kennedy for paraphrasing so badly — We need to move beyond simple numbers (GDP, DOW Jones) to judge the success of our country. I’d love to hear Andrew Yang bring all the pieces together with a little (lot) statistical analysis to back this up…