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Electric cars became more affordable across much of the world in 2025 — except the U.S
(restofworld.org)
this post was submitted on 03 Jun 2026
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I'm sorry, but I have to vehemently disagree.
Europe is a useful example but not in the way you think.
The Nordic and Western European mixed economies you're pointing to weren't built by capitalism behaving itself. They were built by strong labor movements, socialist parties, and the credible threat of communist revolution making concessions politically necessary for capital to survive. The welfare state wasn't capitalism working as intended but was capitalism being forced to share under duress. The moment that pressure lifted, the erosion started.
And it is eroding. Housing crises in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin. Healthcare privatization creeping into NHS and other systems. Austerity gutting social programs across Southern Europe. The same private equity firms extracting the same rents from the same essential services. The guardrails aren't holding because capital accumulates political influence the same way it accumulates capital. Continuously, patiently, and structurally. It doesn't need to win every fight but instead keeps the pressure on, just aa it has in the US.
The US didn't fail to regulate capitalism in that Americans are uniquely stupid or uniquely corrupt (they are plenty of both though, I'm American, I know). It failed because capital had enough runway to capture the regulatory apparatus before the guardrails were fully built. Europe had a head start on the welfare state and is watching it get dismantled anyway. The difference is timeline rather than trajectory.
So yes, regulated capitalism produces better outcomes than what we have. Which is authoritarianism, greatest wealth disparity, lowest health outcomes, etc etc. The question is whether those outcomes are stable without continuously fighting the same structural forces that produced American oligarchy in the first place. History suggests they aren't. Which means the guardrails aren't a solution. They're a holding action that requires winning the same political fight indefinitely against an opponent that compounds its advantages over time.
At some point you have to address the root, not just keep patching the symptoms. And that root, friend, is capitalism. A system designed to extract profit. The foundation is to amass profit, and the only way to do that is through exploitation. Capitalism rewards the most narcissistic, the most unempathetic, the most willing to exploit. And whenever capital amasses, it just becomes a simple math problem where buying influence results in deregulation which results in greater profits.
We've a planet full of life, nature, food, wonder, and instead we created debt, war, and capiralism. How can such a flawed system ever be implemented "correctly?" Instead, the American way is the intended implementation of capitalism. It always was.
The period after WW2 was one of two periods in Western Europe, were wealth inequality went down in the last thousand years or so. The other one was the Black Death, when a lot of people died and that lead to worker shortages. Honestly a lot of deaths in WW2 might have also been a big part of why the post war period was so pleasant.
Makes you think about the low fertility rate in a different way.
The welfare state isn't capitalism working as intended. That wasn't what I was saying, nor am I saying that the welfare state is a result of capitalism. That was ultimately a result of workers fighting for their rights.
What I am saying is that the government not leaning heavily into laisez-faire capitalism, and them interfering in capitalism where needed, is what is making the European capitalist model largely work as capitalism is supposed to work. The government is there to prevent negative externalities and prevent monopolies from forming.
Ultimately the "correct" implementation of capitalism doesn't exist. Only one which creates the most benefit for the people while reducing its negative outcomes.
It is a tool you can use in places where it makes sense to use it in order to drive innovation and lower costs to consumers.
The government can set regulations in order to guide capitalism to that outcome, and can directly interfere to do things themselves in industries where it deems fit to do so.
Edit: Fixed a typo in my first sentence, making me say the exact opposite of what I was trying to say..
We're closer than we were, and I appreciate you engaging honestly. But I think the "capitalism as a tool" framing is where we still fundamentally diverge.
A tool is neutral. A hammer doesn't have preferences on what it impacts. Capitalism does. It has a built-in optimization function that rewards specific behaviors regardless of who wields it or what guardrails are placed around it. It rewards the accumulation of capital. It rewards externalizing costs onto workers, communities, and ecosystems because those costs don't appear on a balance sheet. It rewards buying political influence because the return on investment is demonstrably higher than almost any other capital deployment. That's the system executing its own logic correctly.
You're describing a government that "interferes where needed" to correct those outcomes. I'm asking who controls that government and why we should expect it to maintain that independence indefinitely against an opponent that compounds its political influence the same way it compounds its capital. Europe is the test case and the results are coming in. The interference is losing ground. European governments haven't stopped wanting to intervene but because the structural pressure never stops and the political will to resist it has to be continuously regenerated while capital only has to keep pushing, it is a system you'll never win against.
You said it yourself: the correct implementation doesn't exist. Only one that minimizes harm. I'd push that further: a system whose internal logic actively works against minimizing harm isn't a tool, but instead a system doing what it was designed to do. The harm is the output of the optimization function running correctly.
At some point "we need better regulation" becomes "we need to replace the thing that keeps eating the regulation." That's where I am. With as much abundance as we have within the world, why must we restrict ourselves to a single system of economics that has been proven to fail, that is both anti-democratic and anti-life?
As is often said, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, eh?