Obviously we cannot do controlled experiments here the same way we can in the physical sciences, but it seems that historical evidence is pretty clear by this point on whether freer markets perform better than ones with more government intervention.
This is one of those things, though, where the boring position is that "relatively free markets are good, but markets also require some government intervention to function well". It's not exciting or edgy, and not at all simple, because it's tricky to figure out which regulations and how much are good, and how they should change over time and so on.
"Some government intervention" has dramatically increased over the past century (after having stayed relatively flat for the century before that, since Adam Smith first came into the scene with groundbreaking ideas), so the boring position isn't so boring anymore. The government has their fingers in so many pies these days it's hard to say what even are the remaining relatively free markets.
Agreed. At this point the main question seems to be about to what extent you can add any knobs to a free market via reserve requirements and interest rates and taxes and government spending. I happen to think a lot of that is voodoo that tends to backfire, but I think adding knobs can work better in some places if you do it right and that it’s a legitimate and unresolved (and probably unresolvable without a crazy experiment) empirical question.
Ultimately the more I read the more I recognize my own ignorance about a lot of this stuff and think the more most people are more ignorant than they realize. That’s why I tend to gravitate towards systems that maximize freedom at the national/international level, as I think any restrictions that need to exist tend to be emergent locally if allowed.
