There's a continuous spectrum of things you can do, not discrete, and definitely not binary. So my suggestion is, and I'm far from being alone, is reign in the plutocrats. No one cares about them while the average person's life is getting better, but boy do we care when that stops happening. Especially when we see their lives continue to get better while the quality of our lives decrease.
>Government regulation matters because we want high competition. There's ways to have supply and demand price determinations without them being wildly out of control and without plutocrats.
is mutually exclusive to
>we pay people the lowest amount we can that is enough to keep them from going to another job.
This system is the same as shopping at a store that sells you the same goods at a lower price than another store. I do not see what this has to do with a “plutocrat”. Buyers have been buying goods and services at the lowest prices they can find for at least thousands of years.
Governments often set floors for wages. In fact, this is called the minimum wage.
> This system is the same as shopping at a store that sells you the same goods at a lower price than another store.
That's how it works in a perfect world, but not how it works in reality. In a perfect world monopolies wouldn't be an issue. The reason they are an issue is that with a monopoly it is very easy to manipulate the market that you control. The reason we generally break up monopolies is because they are actively manipulating said market and stiffing innovation. We tend to not go after monopolies that aren't doing this.
> I do not see what this has to do with a “plutocrat”.
A plutocrat is someone who's power is derived from wealth. A plutocracy is a form of government where that power, derived from wealth, is instrumental to political power. You may think that this is universal to all governmental systems, but it isn't. Often we see the reverse (wealth derived from political power vs political power derived from wealth).
Anti-trust laws, IP laws, the SEC, etc are all designed to prevent this from happening. I think the problem you're running into is that you're taking perfect models (spherical cow in a vacuum) and assuming that they work identically in the real world. This is naive just as it is naive to assume a spherical cow in a vacuum falls out of a plane at the same rate as a living cow. There's an approximation and you can get some useful planning from the simple model, but it is going to have significant errors in the real world experiment.
What it comes down to is a lack of sufficient complexity and nuance in the model you're using. An econ 101 course or even a B.A. in economics will not be enough to sufficiently understand the economy in high detail. It is really easy to overestimate the utility of our knowledge and mental models because we tend to not measure likelihood of events based on random samples but instead have a large selection bias (getting random samples is also quite difficult).
>we pay people the lowest amount we can that is enough to keep them from going to another job.
Minimum wages, labor laws, safety standards, anti trust laws, and all of that can exist, but I am still going to expect buyers to pay the least a seller is willing to accept. And conversely, a seller is going to demand the most a buyer is willing to pay.
What you're not getting is that this is theory, but not the world in practice.
Start using supply and demand to determine the price of money. Supply and demand elsewhere is a sham if you set ceilings and floors on the interest rate.
Until then, it will be like democracy. The worst system, except for all the others.