Liberals love this phrase. Maybe I have a limited vocabulary, but I wasn't really sure what "fettered" meant. So I looked it up:
Any questions?
Unfettered means unrestrained or unlimited. Clearly that is not what capitalism is in this country, did you think otherwise?
I just wanted to provide a visual of what liberals want: fettered capitalism. People in chains.
How odd that progressive liberals do not realize the alternatives to capitalism are far more restrictive. Capitalism is all about choice more than anything else, and any other economic model is more about govt's choice rather than your own. In capitalism you get to decide what you will buy among many options and how much you pay for it. Every other system has much fewer options and directly or indirectly the govt decides how much you pay.
Yeah! Hell Yeah! Just like when those right wing assholes forced the general public to engage in commerce via mandatory health care purchasing.
I thought that was Obama and those left wing assholes that tried to mandate health care insurance.
There seems to be some confusion over what unfettered means. It means unrestrained or unlimited. Capitalism in the 1800s was basically unrestrained, i.e., uncontrolled and as a result we had corruption and enormous abuse of the working people. Towards the end of that century, gov't started to finally institute some controls to preclude the unfair business practices and employee abuses, with some success. Today, capitalism is no longer unfettered, we do have some governance over it; some say not enough or ineffective or inefficient, and the fight goes on.
The "corruption" was all in the government. Any "abuse" of working people was a result of the fact that employers weren't held liable for workplace injuries. The American standard of living grew by leaps and bounds during the period 1865 - 1929. After that, it started swirling down the sewer.
"The "corruption" was all in the government."
Not true bro. There was a heckuva lot of corruption going on until the govt finally passed the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, and other laws that followed.
Really? Like what?
The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 was the first measure passed by the U.S. Congress to prohibit abusive
monopolies, and in some ways it remains the most important.
Trusts and Monopolies
A
trust was an arrangement by which stockholders in several companies transferred their shares to a single set of
trustees. In exchange, the stockholders received a certificate entitling them to a specified share of the consolidated earnings of the jointly managed companies. The trusts came to dominate a number of major industries, and were, in effect,
monopolies.
A monopoly is a situation in which there is a single supplier or seller of a good or service for which there are no close substitutes. Economists and others have long known that unregulated monopolies tend to damage the economy by (1) charging higher prices, (2) providing inferior goods and services and (3) suppressing innovation, as compared with a competitive situation (i.e., the existence of numerous, competing suppliers of the good or service).
The most infamous of the trusts was the
Standard Oil Trust, which was formed in January, 1882. At that time, Standard Oil and its affiliates controlled more than 90 percent of the oil refining capacity and most of the oil marketing facilities in the U.S. Trusts were also established in numerous other industries, some of the largest of which were sugar, tobacco, railroads, steel and meatpacking.
The idea of the trust was conceived by Samuel Dodd, an attorney for Standard Oil. In the case of this company, a board of trustees was set up and it was given control of all of the Standard Oil properties. Every stockholder received 20 trust certificates for each share of Standard Oil stock. All profits from the component companies were sent to the nine trustees, who set the dividends. The nine trustees also selected the directors and officers of all the component companies. This allowed Standard Oil to function as a monopoly.
Trusts used a number of techniques to eliminate competitors, including (1) buying them out, (2) temporarily undercutting their prices, (3) forcing customers to sign long-term contracts (4) forcing customers to buy unwanted products in order to receive the products they wanted and (5) dispatching thugs to use intimidation and violence when all other means of persuasion failed.
This falls under the heading of corruption IMHO.
Further:
The Sherman Antitrust Act was born against a backdrop of increasing monopolies and abuses of power by large corporations and railroad conglomerates. In 1887, in response to increasing public indignation about abuses of power and malpractices by railroad companies, Congress passed the Interstate Commerce Act, which spawned the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC)—whose purpose was to regulate interstate transportation entities. In particular, the ICC had jurisdiction over U.S. railroads and all common carriers, requiring them to submit annual reports and prohibiting unfair practices such as discriminatory rates.
