Why Free Markets are Superior to Capitalism

(Another unsolicited essay to counter the diatribe of lies
in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025)

First, capitalists would have you believe that capitalism is synonymous with free markets. That is not true . They are vastly different. Here is an incomplete but accurate list of their similarities and differences.

• Free Markets consist of many individual business owners and small businesses. 70 percent of GDP comes from individual and small businesses. They are the lifeblood of innovation, jobs, and GDP; while they provide most of the government’s tax revenues for many products and services that capitalists love to use, but are last to pay their fair share to build, repair, or improve them. Capitalists also divert huge amounts of revenue to raise top executives pay, give huge bonuses, and stock options (often making CEO pay 500 times or more that of those who conceptualize, innovate and build their products), and for stock buy-backs—not on merit, nor incredible skills, nor much of anything but to bask in the good life—for them.

• Free Markets feature competition, the lifeblood of good products and useful services. It forces improved products, better features, and makes them safer, and with lower prices. Competition forces bad- and over-priced products to shape up or go out business. The Invisible Hand” of supply and demand keeps things that way.

• Many buyers and sellers are the great deciders of who selects the good products and services over the bad ones. Capitalism first uses the blunt force of exaggerated advertising to maintain its flow of funds from consumer to the top brass.

• Companies like Amazon would have you believe they provide only good products at low prices. But they also collect lots and lots of data on you and me, then they inundate us with endless advertising to make or keep us as buying automatons to be manipulated endlessly as long as we pay a fee of $175 annually for overnight delivery. Capitalists also love mergers and acquisitions (M&A) that create less competition; and with vertical integration of all aspects extracting raw materials from the ground to finished products (with higher prices); and paying for political candidates who will do as they are told. They also love patents, and copyrights, and very high entry costs to anyone with the temerity to think they can succeed in business against them. Hello, Elon Musk.

• Conglomerates often eliminate good and safe products via price wars (acting like Tariffs). Without their political connections and alliances, but without legislative assistance they would--themselves-- wither and die against thousands of more consumer friendly products offered by small company competitors.

• Capitalists moan about “too many regulations” that are costly and that make them inefficient. But as we enter the new pro-capitalist era, even safety regulations are being torn apart by inept managers installed by the new administration, often for the express purpose of neutering or eliminating the very organization they were named to head.

I can only speak for myself when I say I stop often at a roadside stand that sells tomatoes (I used to plant, grow, pick and eat them for survival); or when a group of high school kids with the energy and compassion to wave at me so they can wash my car for $5 to help their schools. I gas up at Costco and make a few purchases because of their clean, orderly stores and lower prices; round-up-my-bill for my occasional purchases at Goodwill; and sing the praises of any young man or woman willing to do a hitch in the Armed Forces to learn the art and necessity of how and why to defend their country while earning almost enough government assistance for a 4-year college education. These are just a few ways of how to help take the “un” out of unfairness, without the need for preachers of any denomination to tell me what a sinner I am; or let any Trump suckup try to lecture me on what freedom, free markets, or capitalism are all about.