Tom I am with you on all of this with one exception; free markets. Would you agree that when oil prices went negative, that was market forces, but under a very special circumstance; the main market influence at that time was traders using the Robinhood app, trading with free money from the 4Tn per month stimulus which was being issued at the time?
The things which I believe confirmed this, were events like Warren Buffet declaring "Something has gone wrong with money", quiiting the markets, leading a charge of other whale (traditioinal) investors out, and some courts in the US changed the law to allow trading in bankrupt stocks to continue, and all the while, the dollar went up, whilst traditional capital like gold languished. Why would this not be because most of those folk were trading with free money, they had no interest in what would make money, only what they thought was valuable to them personally, products and services from technically bankrupt companies they knew and still loved, like Hertz (of course everyone wants to have access to cars for hire, when needed!)
To me it looks like what was happening was people voting with their free money, rather than investing for any kind of return. In other words, pure fine-grained democracy, maybe the only time we ever saw it in history.
What it did, is rescue a load of companies who would otherwise have been bankrupt, though by rights those companies should now be in public ownership, at least their valuable products were saved.
So I think free markets would be absolutely fine, in a free money world, which is what I think we have to have now, driven by nature.
As far as I can see, there is a solid physical reason for the inflation we are seeing, and it won't stop, until the problem is put right, the only way it can be, by issuing free money continuously, honestly reflecting the Joules of energy now being put to use from the sun.
It has a very different effect, from the extracted energy we are used to!
https://eric-bott.medium.com/demand-the-free-money-aab86f0e863d
