100 years of whatever this will be

There's no inevitable historical process that results in utopia. Nominal "socialisms" tend to combine the political outlook of Trotskyist Marxist-Leninism with the Whig history of liberalism, resulting in the worst of both worlds; the belief that 1) all answers have already been discovered, and 2) that they will inevitably be implemented as the people recognize these answers to be truths and decide that in the world of technologically provided abundance created by capitalism, there's no reason to wait.

They believed that the ultimate expression of history is democratic socialism, and that capitalism is a necessary step to get to there from feudalism. To believe that democratic socialism is the ultimate expression of capitalism itself is very strange - capitalism has no moral center that needs to be expressed. It's a physics metaphor that believes that the greater good can be emergent without a moral center.

Democratic Socialism, as seen in European countries, is a system granted and implemented by the US after the devastation of WWII, intended to keep them out of the Soviet orbit. It was funded by the intense military expenses of the US which allowed Europe to ignore military expenditure (for social expenditure), and regulated in the beginning through intense covert operations in Europe using the stick of assassinations to break up parties and eliminate influential people ambivalent about or friendly towards the Soviets, and the carrot of employing well-known socialist intellectuals through unprofitable foundations and public expenditures on their weirdest art and expressions as counter-programming to a Nazi-redolent (i.e. degenerate art) Socialist Realism and Stalin's hatred of modernism.

European democratic socialism was a strategy of capitalism to suppress change, not to encourage it.

If markets under all the regulatory schemes we have were actually "functioning", we would not have all the economic issues we have. For example, we would not have the supply chain issues that are currently making the news. We would not have had the crash of 2008, or the Great Depression for that matter. I could go on and on.

> there's no credible way to claim that there aren't any functioning markets these days.

I made no such claim. You're attacking a straw man.

Your point about finding the right time to refactor is spot on. The answer isn't always "NO", but rather, there's something of an art and intuition to understanding if a huge refactor is really a net positive.

Lead developers should understand that failure to do this puts the business at risk, since hiring and maintaining competent developers is critical, and nobody is going to want to stick around to work on an outdated, unnecessarily complex system.

There's some fairly obvious ones: we had a problem where a chemical we were using in many products (CFCs) was destroying a critical part of our atmosphere – ozone. CFCs were cheap, so in free market competition, companies were optimizing for short term success with the unaccounted for externality of increasing skin cancer rates in humans and other animals. Regulation is brought in to patch that externality – successfully helping the world transition to alternative technologies

You can see regulations as part free market capitalism, you just have to zoom out from individual corporations and consider the system patching out local minima with regulations to help achieve global minima.

I mean there's a sliding scaling from sophisticated regulations like CFCs and basic ones like laws against theft (despite it being cheaper to simply steal products from other people). I'm not sure you'd call laws against theft a regulation but it's in the same spirit as the CFCs example

Of course, regulations without careful thought and planning don't lead to optimization either – but the point is, from experience we've learned systems with 0 global regulations tend to have issues and enter in to local minima – so the trick is working out the right level and quality of regulation

Well, if you define "work" as benefiting as many people as possible, then no they don't work. That's obviously the point the author was making.