: Perhaps laissez-faire should be applied to the behavior of large corpoations and their ability to manipulate their (and other) governments. Manipulating governments is laissez faire? How about governments that cannot be manipulated because their remit only extends to defence of 'negative liberty' and nothing else, not that such exists.
: Your ideal laissez-faire country may be as difficult to find as a socialists ideal "socialist" country.
Probably
: But if nearly every country in the world doesn't operate under the broad term "Capitalist", I'd like you to provide a better label - and why.
Mixed economy - because that is what they are. If they are not laissez faire (which they aren't) then they must be something else, if they do have some degree of free trade then 'mixed economy' is the best label. Socialists get very upset when various state-socialist-dictatorships get called 'socialist'.
: Why strange? If one believes that private ownership of the means of production, the natural tendency toward monopoly
What 'natural tendency'? Who does the most to enable coercive monopolies (the only bad ones) - regulative frameworks that bar competitors in one form or another.
: the "natural need" to wring the maximum amount of profit (surplus labor) from a workforce
Set against the need to compete for a workforce, and a better anf better one, in order to compete with eachother for consumers.
: I realize the question is to Lark,...but it's just possible that "the governed" (in a true democracy) Could Be the State in which individual responsibility becomes collective responsibility (versus No responsibility).
Collective responsibility is what exactly? Some*one* has to do the things required of it.
