The lead, front-page news article in today's New York Times begins: "Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat and a sharp critic of big banks and unregulated capitalism, entered the 2020 race for president on Monday..."
"Unregulated capitalism" is a straw man if there ever was one, a fictional concoction that Senator Warren and the New York Times would prefer to focus on as a way to avoid other, more relevant, and more complicated issues. Very few real people are actually for "unregulated capitalism," and those people, if they indeed exist, don't have much power. The last two Republican presidents have been George W. Bush, who regulated capitalism by signing into law the Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002, and Donald Trump, whose administration has regulated capitalism by, among other things, having the Food and Drug Administration move to ban menthol cigarettes, ban flavored cigars, and sharply restrict sales of flavored (such as cherry, vanilla, melon) electronic nicotine delivery systems.
Even the most libertarian or anarchist leaning fringe elements of the Republican Party would retain criminal or at least civil penalties for things like fraud or breach of contract, and they'd allow mechanisms, such as competition, trade associations and online ratings, that allow firms and customers within capitalism to self-regulate.
"Unregulated capitalism" versus "regulated capitalism" is a phony debate that is a poor substitute for the debate that is actually happening, over whether the existing levels of regulation best fit goals such as protecting consumers and maximizing economic growth and international competitiveness. It's not clear to me whether the "unregulated capitalism" framing is the Times' or Senator Warren's, but no matter where it's coming from, it's not particularly useful.
