RE: Your political views
December 16, 2010 at 3:18 pm
(This post was last modified: December 16, 2010 at 3:20 pm by TheDarkestOfAngels.)
(December 16, 2010 at 6:28 am)Micah Wrote: If a company's efficiency cannot be matched, that's a good thing. Production costs go down, which allows higher wages, or better products, or both. Monopolies are more prevalent when they are given an edge by the government. Governments set high regulation standards that raise the cost for competitors and end up giving the said business a higher market share. More monopolies exist when the government intervenes than when a free market exists.Bull. Without government intervention, there's nothing stopping the rich and powerful from simply filling the gulf of power left behind and taking whatever they want.
History has already shown and fought a number of bloody battles that led to the regulatory environment that exists now that allows things like Unions to form, which many of the companies (railroad, steel, and meat packing are prevelent examples) fight tooth and nail to make sure never happens. Even today, these companies will say anything and do anything to prevent any chance of paying or treating their employees fairly (assuming they're not already).
Monopolies don't form because the government regulates their competitors more than them, they form because they outcompete, outsell, purchase, or quash through brute force their competition until they're the only seller in town.
(December 16, 2010 at 6:28 am)Micah Wrote: You cannot enslave someone whether they owe you money or not. It is possible to become indebted to your boss, but you can default on your loan and force them to take the loss for their bad use of credit. Enslaving debtors is not a part of a free market.This is a practice that's already been done and is still being done in some ways. The company essentially sets itself up to be your only source of food and shelter and if you bail, they sue you (assuming they don't do something more extreme, like shoot you.)
(December 16, 2010 at 6:28 am)Micah Wrote: The government's role in the economy is to enforce contracts and to protect against fraud. If a consumer is hurt or becomes sick due to the consumption of a company's product, they can hold them liable. A free market provides courts. Instead of holding producers responsible to the consumers, they have been made responsible to the government.
A free market allows consumers to set the standards based on cost and quality.
Holding producers responsible to government is the same thing as holding producers responsible to people. It's things like that why they are elected into office.
In a lassiez-faire economy, private enterprises are the only people who can report things like that and they can be bought and sold and owned by the responsible party or one that is sympathetic. Hell, companies that are powerful enough (through money or corrupting public officials) can sway the courts, control information, and so on.
I don't know what kind of optimism you have about people who own businesses over running government, but history is rife with examples of the kind of abuses I'm talking about. It takes a tremendous amount of willing ignorance to assume that the free market will just work itself out when it's already proven beyond a reasonable doubt that as soon as someone has enough power and not enough stops in exercising that power, they can wield it to do whatever they damn well please. There has rarely been a positive outcome of that kind of environment.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan