Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

To: Signalman

I haven’t read the book, but the review is excellent. And it shows why free enterprise needs to be free. Free enterprise allows creative destruction, which keeps the economy humming and growing. Big government allows restrictive destruction, and kills any economy it is set loose on.


4 posted on 11/03/2013 1:10:45 PM PST by Cicero (Marcus Tullius)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies ]


To: Cicero

I think what you’re describing is normal human behavior. The rise of bureaucracies, including the Fed which is a monetary bureaucracy, is an attempt to lower variances. We know that the attempt to do so, simply is capping the volcano. Eventually, it will blow.

Human beings love consistency and routine overall, but there is a subset that thrive on risk and change and chaos. So the two are in conflict. If you lower the frequency or work to temper it, you’re bound to misdial, get it wrong and in the wrong direction - communism, socialism, fascism - or wildly the opposite democracy and anarchy which both lead to dictatorships. Letting the frequency fluctuate naturally serves the second group of entrepreneurs, but creates huge disruptions in society.

We have a republic as the best political model to manage (you cannot control complex systems) the economic results of change and innovation. How do you set the dial correctly in a republic? How do you keep it in balance?

I believe our Constitution did that until the latter half of the 19th century. Progressivism rose up as cities grew and concentrated the losers into political divisions. The existing “winners” want stability as well and are attracted to the appearance of control via progressivism.

Government schools manage the classes/ranks of the hoi polloi creating tracks for them to live their lives. This satisfies the egotists among the losers who become bureaucrats able to “control” the entrepreneurial disruptors and tell them “no”. The rest of the government grew during a government created/generated crisis - the Great Depression.

FDR and his “Brain Trust” thought they could control the chaos. Toss in 40 years of progressive control of the media and the Congress and you get us to just past Johnson’s Great Society and Jimmy Carter. I believe we’re on the other side now, moving back toward the Constitution. I’m hopeful.

The Mommy Party has failed, but continues to attract. Can the Daddy Party thread the needle, hold the Congress for a generation or two and get us back to the Gilded Age (Twain’s epithet for what really was a great time of innovation and prosperity for America, riddled with a lot of disruption, but an enormous amount of liberty)?

Keep in mind that most of our unemployment and wage stagnation is driven by regulatory burdens place on people in urban and heavily urban counties by bureaucrats and politicians, more interested in control, than liberty. If the Feds, lead by a liberty loving POTUS, were to turn the big guns of the Commerce Clause against those ramparts, they’d fall fairly quickly.

By what right does a local body stop an individual food vendor? What’s the rationale? Does it violate Due Process? I think most local zoning, licensing and permitting laws do.


7 posted on 11/03/2013 7:08:30 PM PST by 1010RD (First, Do No Harm)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies ]

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article


FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson