Sneering at "free stuff" is a vicious Repuke attack on the very idea of public goods.

[HereSince1628]

34. IMO wherever market incentives don't work private enterprise/free markets shouldn't

I basically agree with what you've said, although I'm not real certain about elections being wholly publicly funded.

But by nature I'm sort of like Bernie Sanders, a person that doesn't want to get lost pursuing details in the tall grass at the start. I sort of like contemplating general rules.

Most generally I don't think free market capitalism should be allowed to work where it causes harm to individuals and or communities/states/nations.

Government exists to protect us from bad things. Mostly that's from things that other people (foreign and domestic) intentionally (and often with malice/selfishness but sometimes with indifference or negligence) do to the rest of us.

One of those places that markets don't work is where there are monopolies, or where there are incentives for collusion to reduce competition and to get into price gouging/price setting. Just because consumer traffic will unhappily bear a cost, doesn't mean that it's good for the community that a capitalist/investor should make the price as high as possible. The only way monopolies should exist is a public enterprises, where any push for profit puts the profit in the hands of the investor/tax-payer. Where communities allow monopolies (such as in utilities) pricing has to be tightly regulated.

Another place where things don't work is where circumstance compromises consumers' capacity to be discerning purchasers. One of those places is healthcare. People will always get very sick, sooner or later deathly sick and people who care for them are going to be in awful places where their reasoning defaults to "do everything" rather than doing what's reasonable. Sick children especially, but sick intimates and sick close relatives create these circumstances and in that circumstance Having consumers in that tight spot isn't an excuse to over-charge but it certainly is in the capitalist model.

Another place where things don't work is where 'insider clubs' are created that give some "member' consumers a break and then grossly price gouge others... mostly to create the illusion of a discount to the insiders. These circumstances incentivize gouging because the service provider needs a very high 'regular sticker price' so that a 'discounted' price can be offered to people who become members. This promotes upward pressure on prices because it creates 'innate value' that should be harvested by business. This clubbing thing is done in relatively small ways for most retail, but it's done in huge ways with health insurance and health-care. It's perverse for an emergency room to charge more for a poor, jobless person. It's as perverse for anyone to pay $20 dollars for a days plastic ware or a day's facial and toilet tissue as it is to pay $5000 for an MRI that could reasonably be priced at $500 (including typical profit margin). It's perverse to lie about discounts while raking in profits from the money students borrow. But it's especially perverse that these inflated prices are used to mostly to have a circumstance where fake discounts still yield inflated prices.

I can go on, but you get the idea. In circumstances where free market incentives produce perverse, unwanted, commonly harmful outcomes, the market shouldn't be free at all. In the same way, where insistence on public enterprise would result in perverse, unwanted, commonly harmful outcomes, private ownership and private markets shouldn't be excluded.

There are perfectly good places for private enterprises which really can promote some 'good'' within communities. In particular, circumstances wherein high risk that tax-dollars would yield benefits to too few is a great place for private ownership and open-markets. And in this, I'm thinking about things such as sports/entertainment venues. And that doesn't mean that there aren't circumstances in which a community may want to incentivize private investment in order to provide to the community a product that would otherwise be unavailable.