You call it unregulated, but that is the natural trend for when the only acceptable goal is the greater accumulation of wealth.

Yes…obviously.

And that IS dysfunctional capitalism.

Until there are inherent mechanisms within capitalism to prevent special interest money from pushing policy and direct regulatory capture

That’s exactly what I’m saying, dude.

This is NOT capitalism working as intended. This is broken capitalism. Runaway capitalism. Corrupt capitalism.

You call it unregulated, but that is the natural trend for when the only acceptable goal is the greater accumulation of wealth.

Nah unregulated is the exact right word and that isn’t the kind of neolib you’re out for. Those would use “free” instead of unregulated, deliberately confusing unregulated markets with the theoretical model of the free market which allocates resources perfectly – if everyone is perfectly rational and acts on perfect information. Which obviously is not the case in the real world because real-world.

There’s a strain of liberalism which is pretty much the cornerstone of Europe’s economical model, also, generally compatible with socdem approaches, and it says precisely that regulation should be used to bring the real-world market closer to that theoretical ideal – they’re of course not going all-out, you’d need to do stuff like outlaw trade secrets to actually do that, have all advertisement done by an equitable and accountable committee and shit. But by and large regulation does take the edge off capitalism. If you want to see actually unregulated capitalism, have a look at Mexican cartels. Rule of thumb: If you see some market failure, regulate it away. Like make producers of cereal pay for the disposal costs of the packaging they use and suddenly they have an interest in making that packaging more sensible, can’t externalise the cost any more.

Defeating capitalism ultimately is another fight altogether, it’s nothing less than defeating greed – as in not the acquisition of things, but getting addicted to the process of acquisition: The trouble isn’t that people want shit the problem is that they aren’t satisfied once they’ve got what they wanted. Humanity is going to take some more time to learn to not do that, culturally, (and before tankies come along nah look at how corrupt all those ML states were and are same problem different coat of paint), in the meantime regulation, rule of law, democracy, even representative democracy, checks and balances, all that stuff, is indeed a good idea.

would you like an introduction to the almighty red rose?

If you start regulating capitalism, thats called something else. That would be saying that the markets can not regulate by themselves, and proving as a myth one of the basics of capitalism.

So I, as well, think capitalism is working as intended. and sure is based on greed.