The EU is a social market economy. It currently slants more capitalist but nothing whatsoever stops member states from taxing the hell out of billionaires shifting it more towards market socialism.
What really doesn’t fly in the EU is the free market <-> unregulated market equivocation that peddlers of institutional market failure enjoy so much. The free market model relies on perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information, in the real world you need regulation to approach that ideal. If you want to see actually unregulated markets have a look at black ones where there’s not even regulations against offers you can’t refuse.
And that’s why the EU is legislating things like caps having to stay attached to plastic bottles: Because not doing it would allow companies to continue to externalise microplastic problems they generate and, innovation costing money, they wouldn’t do it on their own (the new caps aren’t even more expensive per piece it’s just some R&D and very small changes to bottling machines.)
The EU is a social market economy. It currently slants more capitalist but nothing whatsoever stops member states from taxing the hell out of billionaires shifting it more towards market socialism.
What really doesn’t fly in the EU is the free market <-> unregulated market equivocation that peddlers of institutional market failure enjoy so much. The free market model relies on perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information, in the real world you need regulation to approach that ideal. If you want to see actually unregulated markets have a look at black ones where there’s not even regulations against offers you can’t refuse.
And that’s why the EU is legislating things like caps having to stay attached to plastic bottles: Because not doing it would allow companies to continue to externalise microplastic problems they generate and, innovation costing money, they wouldn’t do it on their own (the new caps aren’t even more expensive per piece it’s just some R&D and very small changes to bottling machines.)