Compared to what? I think "better" isn't a bad place to start when deciding how to run a nation. The track record of various levels of state control versus economic freedom over the past century is written pretty clearly.

There are a lot of people smarter than both of us that have made the case that many of the "fixes" applied to the free market system over the years have been the cause of a lot of its problems, not a cure. Most of these fixes were applied over the past century or so by those who believed that they could "cure" business cycles, failures, economic downturns, and other natural corrections of a free market system. The net effect was that of putting a penny in the fuse box, and the resulting problems required additional "fixes." The Federal Reserve system is one of these.

So, we ended up with a "mixed" economic system, with thousands of laws and regulations, all the way down to how big the holes in Swiss cheese are supposed to be, and people look at this kludge and say, "See? The free market doesn't work." Their answer, of course, is to add more layers of state control.

At this point, there's really no turning it around, so this discussion is academic. I'm hoping that we can at least put the brakes on in the inevitable ratcheting toward complete socialism, but it doesn't look good. There's a large contingent right now pushing for socialized medicine, something that will pretty much wreck us, and the appeal of "something for nothing" is probably too great to overcome.

Even some attempts to move back to the market are stymied by how little Americans seem to know about the principles.

The "deregulation" of banking and the energy industry in California showed the complete lack of comprehension of market forces by those who set up those situations, including mistakes a ten-year-old should have spotted.

Remember, that the definition of a "Rube Goldberg" device is that an enormous amount of complexity has been added to a machine that does not need it to work. An effective anti-trust law could be written on two sheets of paper, since some of the ideas involved, such as predatory pricing, are largely theoretical, and have rarely been observed.

I think you need to do some reading up on this subject. It's gotten beyond my capacity to explain.