If Freedman had trouble in South America then that's entirely due to the weakness and inherent corruption of the (extractive) institutions there, the existence of which inherited the weakness and corruption of their forebears (in this case mostly the Spanish and Portuguese). North America inherited the classical liberal tradition of Britain, which itself had driven the industrial revolution. That is why the industrial revolution happened in Britain and not in Spain or Portugal and it's the main reason why South America is so much poorer than North America despite being arguably at least as blessed with natural resources and settled around the same time.

If you're talking about investment banks and banks in general, even there government involvement has made them MORE of a risk, not less. Investment banking used to be separated from retail banking for starters. Then you have government savings guarantees which alter behaviour (who cares, the government has guaranteed the money). Then there's the 10,000 (yes TEN THOUSAND) pages of regulations government imposes on the financial services industry to try to control it, that has the perverse affect of making it much harder for new entrants to arrive in the marketplace (cost of compliance). Worse, nobody, not one single legislator, understands it or has even read it. Who could? It would take a lifetime. They still pop up with new rules and regulations every so often, with no damned clue what the consequences of their actions will actually be.

The fact that banks blew up was because of Government, not despite it.

When there's no longer a compelling reason to think morally or to aspire to be moral and to act in a moral way, as seems to be the case today because "the government" has taken upon itself the responsibility to behave in this manner, then fewer people will have that sense. You will have no choice but to extract their "help" at the point of a gun when the chorus of "something must be done" starts up because some group or another has a perceived `disadvantage'.

Except when it isn't. It turns out that if the free market is focused on making the CEO and his cronys rich

So what? Who cares if he gets rich? I don't. It isn't as if he's keeping his cash in a shed at the bottom of the garden is it. Whatever money he has control over is working 24/7 in the world economy, investing in other businesses, new technology, creating jobs.

But regardless, read back your own comment. You are hypothesising a CEO who's making poor investment decisions. What do you think is eventually going to happen to his business and money? Yea - he's going to lose it. The chances are he wouldn't have made it in the first place. If you want a good ceo to make poor investment decisions, simply give him a government contract.

Now your average commissar doesn't give a crap whether he makes a bad investment decision or not. It's not his money. He doesn't care.

Is it? Sweden has neo-liberal economic policy, a small population and lots of natural resources. Indeed, Sweden adopted neo-liberal economic reforms precisely because socialism was slowly destroy it.

In my view having a choice in the matter of whether to aid your fellow man and deciding to do it is a more moral act than being compelled to at the point of a gun or a prison cell.

Many years ago, the rightmost elements decided that a strong government was not beneficial to the wealthiest citizens and in fact was a threat to them. Therefore, the goal became to reduce the size of government to the bare essentials - the smallest possible size that would protect them and their hoards - and then, control it.

Wow. You're full of shit aren't you AC. Please compare the supermarket shelves in the USA with those in Venezuela or North Korea and then come back here and tell me why big government controlling the means and distribution of production is a good idea, compared to the free market, with people providing each other with services in return for a token of exchange (currency).

The free market is far better at both optimising the use of resources, matching them with people's desires and making investment decisions than government is. When it comes to science, the problem with government funding is that it attracts activists and other idiots who suck all of the oxygen (funding) out of the room in the interests of what are essentially political objects.

Of course plenty of corporations suck up to government in order to leech funding in various ways, taking advantage of the idiocy of the civil service when it comes to managing such projects. This isn't the free market in action, it's corporatism and it's not much different from the kind of socialism you desire. For example, Solyndra in the USA, managed to bag half a billion dollars from the US government (a government in debt by $17,000,000,000,000) and piss it up the wall.

Fundamentally at stake, the critics say, is the social contract that cultivates science for the common good

The critics are probably lamenting a reduction in their funding, as Marxist shills often do when they're getting less from the long suffering tax payer. The Golden Rule here is to always invoke the "common good", as long as you don't tell people that you'll decide what the common good actually is, not the people paying the taxes.

I wish the authors of studies like these and those at NASA who commission them would read Popper's The Poverty of Historicism. It would save them a lot of time, effort and the possibility they'll make gigantic fools of themselves.

Yes, socialism works very well indeed until the money runs out, which it inevitably does and will in Norway's case as well. To say Norway is doing splendidly well because it's ploughing through its savings, compared to other countries, is to miss the point.

Norway? Oh dear!. The Mythical Oil Wealth Fund:

First, the oil fund is a mathematical artifice. At three-quarters of a trillion dollars, the Norwegian Oil Fund appears to provide plenty for a country with scarcely 5 million citizens. Yet the country has accumulated a foreign debt that, at $657 billion, is almost as massive. Subtracting the debt from the fund’s $740 billion leaves a balance of only $83 billion. In other words, there is a treasure chest, but it is almost empty: Njord’s prize for future generations is only a little more than 10 percent of its putative value.

Socialists are very good at spending other people's money, aren't they edjs.

Why don't you give some examples of countries that are successful economically that don't enjoy the fruits of economic liberalism? I realised Marx' ideas were asinine by the age of around 13. Why didn't you?

Not in the UK they don't. Owen Jones, for example, is one of the loons I'm talking about. He's all over the TV, radio and newspapers here.

Neoliberalism is a political philosophy whose advocates support economic liberalizations, free trade and open markets, privatization, deregulation, and enhancing the role of the private sector in modern society.

Wiki

That's what Thatcher was all about.

What's more depressing is that these stories make it onto slashdot. The stupid in the environmental movement is painful to consider.