If you're about to argue that there wouldn't be business cycles or depressions if we managed to overthrow capitalism, I don't think people are going to disagree with you lol

The cyclical nature of economic health has less to do with a particular form of human economy and more to do with how self regulating complex systems behave.

Most open system that tend towards homeostasis will exhibit boom-bust feedback loops (ecosystems, metabolism, gene expression, antibiotic resistance, human economies, etc.).

I'm not sure it's either possible or desirable to fight that at a fundamental level, although I do think politically it's a very good reason to provide a strong financial safety net.

I'm not sure what you mean by capitalism, but human economies are fundamentally self regulating homeostatic systems. You can engineer around that to make them more human friendly, or just, or dampen the swings, but you can't fight their fundamental nature.

No, I’m saying that without the Fed and the federal government acting to rationally steer markets the markets will go off a cliff and not come back. Just like Bernanke said here. Regulators matter. When the government stimulates the already hot market with lax taxes and high spending it’s like pouring liquid oxygen onto a flame.

But that's demonstrably false. Pre-Fed the economy went off a cliff several times, and came back. Look at the Panics of 1857, 1873, 1893, and 1907.

Now, I think I agree with your larger point, that without the Fed this would be much worse.

> I’m saying that without the Fed and the federal government acting to rationally steer markets the markets will go off a cliff and not come back.

So how did markets exist at all when the Fed was created? By your logic, they would have "gone off a cliff and never come back" long before that.

> When the government stimulates the already hot market with lax taxes and high spending it’s like pouring liquid oxygen onto a flame

Even after all the stimulus so far? No diminishing returns, ever?

True, in most communist systems instead you get really slow growth, with occasional pauses in growth at all alongside frequent severe shortages of essential goods.

Gotta love the despotism too.

I’m not a communist. Probably the market the US spread through the globe from 1945-2017 was a highlight. A pretty well buffered system, but not without it’s hard lessons and squandering of the individual wealth. There are clear examples of exploitation.