This premise is highly questionable. Certainly for competitive markets it's entirely false. Uncompetitive markets suffer largely the same failure mode as government bureaucracies, but it's not even clear that this is actually worse, because government bureaucracies are susceptible to not only charging bloated service fees for mediocre service, they can also be captured into diverting tax dollars to private cronies. Just because the government owns the real estate doesn't mean it's manufacturing its own trucks and networking equipment and copy machines, but as soon as it isn't, it's buying that stuff from the market and you need a competitive market or you're still screwed.
So what it comes down to is, you need a competitive market.
Apologists love to complain that <insert problematic market outcome> isn't the product of a true market but that dog doesn't hunt. We have the economic system we have. We call it capitalism. It produces the above mentioned (and countless other) excerable outcomes. No excuses.
Cost disease induced by regulatory capture and a massive housing shortage induced by zoning regulations.
> Once you've cleared that hurdle your next task is justifying the current massively skewed (and worsening) income distribution in the US.
Poverty traps created by social assistance programs that put overlapping benefits phase outs on the lower middle class, causing them to incur oppressively high de facto marginal tax rates that in some cases exceed 100% of marginal income.
> Clear that bar and all that's left is justifying private equity eating everything from fast food franchises to the healthcare system.
This is regulatory capture again. Captured markets consolidate and then corporate raiders notice that the incumbents have a monopoly but aren't screwing their customers quite as hard as a monopolist can do. The underlying cause is government regulations insulating the incumbents from competition; private equity are the maggots that come to eat the corpse once the market is already dead.
Notice how there was "capitalism" in the 1950s but lower levels of corporate raiders or income inequality etc. So then you might wonder what has changed between then and now, and an interesting proxy is the number of pages in the US Code and Code of Federal Regulations.
> We have the economic system we have. We call it capitalism.
If you judge an economic system by what people call it, we called the thing that happened in 20th century Russia "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics" and the thing that happened in WWII Germany "National Socialism" and by this logic we shouldn't attempt anything called "Socialism" ever again.
But if socialism is the thing where you put the government in charge of the economy and capitalism is the thing where you limit the government from interfering with the market then socialism is the thing we've actually tried. How are you going to put e.g. the US healthcare system on "free markets" when it's the most regulated market in the US?
