Would market failures be the norm or the exception, without government bailouts and other supports? Does a capitalist economy tend to reach a constructive or a destructive equilibrium? I'm pretty sure it's the self-destructive one via the formation of monopolies, plutocracies, kleptocracies, etc.

So yeah, the existence of central banks in capitalist countries makes for an implicit admission that the economist's rationale for capitalism (that capitalism heads in the direction of stable, viable equilibriums between sellers and buyers, satisfying everyone in the most "optimal" way) is bogus. The market failures are the norms, which means capitalism, by itself, as in laissez-faire capitalism is suicide.

Indeed, democracies are fragile and vulnerable to demagogues, as the ancient Greeks pointed out.

Who do you think has more power in the Oval Office, the president's chief economist or the advisory Office of Government Ethics? Why do you think politicians listen more to economists than to ethicists, if economists supposedly leave all the room in the world for moral considerations? I posit a lingering climate of scientism in the academic culture war, to help account for such asymmetries.