Uneasy, barely controlled mixtures are the best we can hope for, and so far it's done a really good job.

You know my views on this, I believe that the libertarian paradise is just as unachievable in practice as the socialist worker's is. History has never shown us a working example of either. The closest we've come is the adversarial government/business/electoral mix we've got now. You can argue about the rules all you want, they may need constant adjustment, and it has plenty of problems, but it is the only game in town.

The government is loathe to give up the power to coerce, and the private sector isn't about to hand over the monetary power that makes things happen, so how are you going to bring some new paradigm into play? Time and again they have proven they'd rather join up against us than give in to each other. Even if you could successfully legislate some wholesale reduction in government influence, do you really think the private sector is going to show restraint and not rush in to fill the power vacuum?

The problem is not a political one, it's psychological and cultural. The people who run companies are the same ones who run government bureaucracies, they are careerists who crave power, not professionals who desire to make neat things. They are not necessarly evil men (although often they are!) but they are driven to run things. It is what they do as a hobby, for fun, for self-actualization. Add to this the psychology of large organizations, which seem to have achieved a limited amount of sentient consciousness, and you have a Frankenstein made not of flesh and bone, or integrated circuits, but administrative entities with a mind of their own which consume human beings and socila structures for profit.

If you need to convince yourself, look at how many men in government came over from the private sector, and vice-versa, as well as how often they jump back and forth. And the shadow world between them, the think tanks, non-profits, institutes, NGOs, etc are populated by the same people. They are the the suits, the power elite, and they have no politics, only ambitions. I'm convinced the only way to keep the society from becoming either a Brazil-type (the movie, not the country)
multilevel bureaucracy, or a state capitalist oligarchy (like China and Russia are rapidly becoming) and how we were during the first half of this century, is to keep them all at each other's throats.

I don't see any other way out other than to continue the way we are now, taking advantage of the dynamism and self-regulation of capitalism, but preventing it with regulation from eating the seed corn and consuming the whole world in a mad rush for profits. You can't expect the free market alone to regulate these people, any more than you can expect the electorate to regulate the politicians. These guys know every trick to frustrate the natural constraints of either the voters or the market.

I know I'm pretty long on theory and short on concrete proposals, but I think what we're doing now works pretty well, and it seems to be improving all the time, so maybe I'm not just blowing smoke. We are better off than we were half a century ago, and we've done it without either a Communist dictatorship or a corporate welfare state. And I believe that besides what we are doing, a democratically regulated capitalism, those two are the only other alternatives.