America is not a "free market" capitalist country. I would say it's of the lack of a free market that enabled the wealthiest to capture that wealth that would otherwise have been more evenly distributed. There is an enormous amount of regulation in the US (and other countries) designed to make it nearly impossible to compete with the established actors in the market.
- fungible goods (i.e. stuff like toilet paper where you have 100s of vendors most people can't really differentiate much in terms of end result): good luck with that for any kind of complex good
- perfect information symmetry (i.e. the vendor and the buyer and seller know exactly the same about the product): can't happen when most buyers are individuals and most sellers are companies with full time people employed to work on their products
- low barriers to entry for vendor: good luck, in the real world you need time, capital, experience, etc to enter a market, and even when you're there, there's stuff like brands, marketing, reputation, etc
Etc.
Plus, even if this absurdly perfect model would be achieved, you still have to put stuff like social welfare somewhere in there. Why? Because some people are just plain bad at basic economics (president Truman was close to dying in poverty during his old age), and you can't just let them starve to death.
Nobody thinks a perfect market, or perfect anything is possible. It's just a theoretical concept. None of the imperfections you mentioned can be solved by a state or any other form of coercion.
Facebook polls are neither secret nor verifiable. Facebook knows how everyone voted, and voters cannot verify that Facebook is reporting the correct result. Those problems can theoretically be solved with cryptography (assuming the voter has full control of the device used to cast their vote), but not in a way the average voter can understand and verify.
Another problem with online voting is that malware can infect a voter's device to spy on how they vote and/or change their vote. I don't think there is a solution to that problem.
Online voting is a terrible idea. The only way to have secure elections is to publicly count every ballot by hand. If you think that's too expensive, you think electoral democracy is too expensive.
I don't find any gender's "locker-room talk" funny and would rather not hear it at all, but if one gender's version of it is on Netflix, the other's should also be.
I think casual sexism is harmful, but I think unidirectional casual sexism is likely much more harmful.
It wouldn't be an arms race, it would just be treating everyone equally, albeit equally poorly. Unbalanced sexism looks more like an arms race as the those who are in the victim group will try to reverse the roles, and if they succeed, the new victim group will try the same. By far the most common justification for sexism seem to be perceived unfairness and sexism by others.
“I used to be with ‘it’, but then they changed what ‘it’ was. Now what I’m with isn’t ‘it’ anymore and what’s ‘it’ seems weird and scary. It’ll happen to you!”
