Squeers
Do you notice how, if we take away your personal remarks and assuming what is in issue, there’s nothing left?

All
No-one has given any reason to think that governmental interventions
a) can, or
b) do
make society more rather than less fair and affluent, as against the many reasons showing that it can't and doesn't.

Peter,
I responded to "your" personal remarks. You addressed nothing of substance to me, did you?
But yes, I agree and shall endeavour to be civil.

I've been dipping into Eric Hobsbawm's "Age of Extremes" today. He argues that "the Great Slump destroyed economic liberalism (lovely euphemism) for half a century".
Indeed the Great Depression is what sparked both the Left and Right wing radicalism of the 1930's, the left premised on socialism and the right on fascism. In economic terms fascism was predicated on protectionism, in social terms on nationalism. That is why I defend laissez faire (on OLO) "on principle", because its obverse degenerates into xenophobic extremism. The working classes are wont to dip into either camp, thus in Australia today there is a resurgent right-unionism cum nationalism fuelled by hatred of anything foreign.
But back to the free market; it was the driving force behind both fascism and Keynesianism, and it is doubtful that a free market is politically sustainable. But apart from the political upheaval it drives, have you considered that laissez faire also failed because the consumer base, being constantly pared away, was antithetical to growth, which is fundamental to capitalism? Full employment (and concomitant demand for goods), guaranteed by social welfare is what drove the postwar economic boom, by creating "consumerism". I do not use the term merely as an epithet, as you imply.
Laissez faire is politically and economically unsustainable without force [to say nothing of the ethics of economic survivalism], people resent starving to death. In any case, force is itself inefficient and a drain on profits (bear in mind too that evolution as dynamic, whatever the form, is a shockingly crude, inefficient and indifferent mechanism). On the other hand, social welfare is also no longer viable. And the new addition to the mix is resource-depletion/environmentalism.
Capitalism is facing the perfect storm.
Economic liberalism might work in the lab, but not in the real world.

I should have made clear that the religion of free marketism reigned supreme from the 1840's until the depression (at enormous human cost).
It's been the sporadic agenda of purists ever since.
I'm all for it.

I can certainly agree that it is time in memorial that any Government of any type can or will, let alone do anything that has not jeopardised and destroyed the public and society . That’s what predatory parasites do.

Paul and Squeers , you are mistaken in your historical definitions of actual events and its chronology .

But Here is a Book in Audio file format ; titled Chaos Theory; Easy listening and Narrated by Jock Coats from Oxford . That will give you in General terms examples of what Peter has mentioned. And more Advanced theories.

And before you jump to the conditioned conclusion of the actual content of the file , maintain Objectivity to Ideas before you launch into criticisms of them.
It is a fun and newly conceptual Thinking , Juxtaposed to the Status Quo ( Not the Rock Band ether )

ummmm, ok ; This will help ;
http://mises.org/media.aspx?action=category&ID=215

Squeers

“I responded to "your" personal remarks. You addressed nothing of substance to me, did you?”

I was only saying what you yourself had told me in an earlier post – that you hadn’t read Marx, although obviously channelling his and Keynesian theory. And it is obvious that you haven’t read and don’t understand Austrian theory. These are not insults, just factual observations.

And I did address substance to you. I showed reason why government’s attempts at manipulating the economy cannot and do not make society fairer or more affluent. They produce results that the interventionists themselves don’t want; only they blame them on the market as you do in the following paragraph, based on the same factually false premises.

‘Free market’ means only that the price in a transaction is determined by the agreement of the parties.

You do know, don’t you, that the Federal Reserve has existed since 1913, and its entire mission and function is to manipulate the supply and price of money? The libertarian critique of this, is that inflating the money supply falsifies price signals and therefore the market’s steering mechanism. It draws capital away from productive activities, as determined by the masses, and causes malinvestment in bubbles on the basis of rising prices. As a result, the capital structure is unsustainably distorted. When the artificial boom inevitably collapses, we get the bust, with massive social dislocation and injustice.

This is not the result of a “free market”, since the supply and price of money were controlled by government. I have shown above why this problem would and could not happen on a free market – because capitalism is a system of profit *and loss*.

Only government is able to legalise counterfeiting and fraud, and socialize losses. The GFC proves Keynesian theory wrong, and Austrian theory right. Government attempts at economic management just produced their predicted results, that’s all.

So it is not the free market that produced fascism and Keynesianism. As with communism and socialism, they're all produced by a belief in government economic management.