Good grief....I have never suggested that a more powerful central govt run our entire economy. When asking the question, Do we have too little or too much govt regulation in America today when it comes to regulating business, I would say that the answer is industry dependent. In some industries, there is too much govt intervention. In others there is too little. Obviously, on wall street, there has been too little in some areas and the wrong kind in others.
We need to have an honest economy and a balance of power. Excesses and abuses do occur when there is an unbridled free market. Just look at the standard of living and environmental conditions in countries where companies can do whatever they want with no regulations enforced at all. Or look how it was in America prior to the American labor movement. Sorry, we’re not going back to living in tenement houses and living in squalor so a small minority of unscrupulous people can live like kings. We don’t do that here in America which is why we have the strongest middle class in the history of the world. We won’t be exploited the way third worlders will and the fact that they allow themselves to be, is why they have the standard of living that they do.
Furthermore, tax payers bailing out free enterprises is not a free market. You seem to want it both ways for some reason and assign an extremist position to me so you can argue that rather than my true position. I understand that is probably what you need to do to feel you have won the argument though.
You say that I assigned an extremist position to you. Ok well then I’ll take the extremist position which is my belief anyway. My extremist position is that there should be NO government regulation, management or running or interfering with private businesses or the free market (capitalism). The only time government should get involved in the economy is when there is a dispute between 2 private businesses or individuals and that should be done in a court of law. The due process of law based on objectively defined laws that are there to protect private property rights as in contracts, private property, intellectual property, fraud etc. must be used to settle disputes, lawsuits etc. but that’s it.
We don’t have too little regualation in some industries but too much government regulation in all industries (EPA,FDA, FEC,FCC, FEDeral Reserve, FDIC, Fanni mae etc) and too many government agencies(thousands of them) and too many government laws, thoasands of uneeded laws that cripple the free market and that unjustly criminalize inocent American citizens. Government is too big with an over $4 trillion annual budget. Anyone that thinks government should not be shrunken dramatically is either uninformed, doesn’t know anything about economics or is a democrat/Marxist.
For example how would you or a government burocrat who is much less intelligent, more corrupt, and less accountable than you regulate or manage the pencil building industry?
“I, Pencil” is written in the first person from the point of view of an Eberhard Faber pencil. The pencil details the complexity of its own creation, listing its components (cedar, lacquer, graphite, ferrule, factice, pumice, wax, glue) and the numerous people involved, down to the sweeper in the factory and the lighthouse keeper guiding the shipment into port.
There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.
Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
No one person or government agency can create a plan or run such a complex process. Only the free market can do that . And that is just one product , a simple low tech pencil. Now the free market produces millions of such products and services without any government idiots planning that production or having anything to do with it. The only thing a government idiot can do is interfere with those countless actions of thousands of people that are producing that pencil because a government idiot cannot understand even one action of one expert in that process much less how all these thousands of people cooperate voluntarily to create a pencil. A government can only dictate force people to act with threat of guns and impisonment and government can never get all those thousands of people to cooperate as effficiently as the free market (capitalism) can or even at all because government / socialism doesn’t work.
Everyone including many conservatives should read Milton “Friedman’s Free to Choose”. In that book he does show that the countries with the smallest government did better economically and technologically, the U.S. in the 19th century, Britain around the same time, and Hong Kong in the 20 th century.
Government is too big. It’s excessive laws and regultions and agencies are crippling private industry. It’s huge buggets are taking away investment capital from productive private industries and are sqeezing out the private sector. Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin are right big government is not the solution to our problems , big government is the problem.
The only functions of the government should be the courts, police , military, immigration control, border control, and that’s it. and you know then taxes would be about 5% instead of the 60% they are now and we would be a free people instead of on our way to loosing our freedom and our prosperity as the government grows.
The unfettered growth of government is the most pressing problem we have. All efforts by should be taken to reduce the size of government, it’s agecies and laws and regulations and increase these regulations as you and liberals and even other freepers suggest.
Why wasn’t this huge government needed in the 1800’s when America went from a small farming country to the number one world economic power that the world had ever seen from 1800-1900?
You say that I assigned an extremist position to you. Ok well then I’ll take the extremist position which is my belief anyway. My extremist position is that there should be NO government regulation, management or running or interfering with private businesses or the free market (capitalism). The only time government should get involved in the economy is when there is a dispute between 2 private businesses or individuals and that should be done in a court of law. The due process of law based on objectively defined laws that are there to protect private property rights as in contracts, private property, intellectual property, fraud etc. must be used to settle disputes, lawsuits etc. but that’s it.
We don’t have too little regualation in some industries but too much government regulation in all industries (EPA,FDA, FEC,FCC, FEDeral Reserve, FDIC, Fanni mae etc) and too many government agencies(thousands of them) and too many government laws, thoasands of uneeded laws that cripple the free market and that unjustly criminalize inocent American citizens. Government is too big with an over $4 trillion annual budget. Anyone that thinks government should not be shrunken dramatically is either uninformed, doesn’t know anything about economics or is a democrat/Marxist.
For example how would you or a government burocrat who is much less intelligent, more corrupt, and less accountable than you regulate or manage the pencil building industry?
“I, Pencil” is written in the first person from the point of view of an Eberhard Faber pencil. The pencil details the complexity of its own creation, listing its components (cedar, lacquer, graphite, ferrule, factice, pumice, wax, glue) and the numerous people involved, down to the sweeper in the factory and the lighthouse keeper guiding the shipment into port.
There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.
Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Pencil
No one person or government agency can create a plan or run such a complex process. Only the free market can do that . And that is just one product , a simple low tech pencil. Now the free market produces millions of such products and services without any government idiots planning that production or having anything to do with it. The only thing a government idiot can do is interfere with those countless actions of thousands of people that are producing that pencil because a government idiot cannot understand even one action of one expert in that process much less how all these thousands of people cooperate voluntarily to create a pencil. A government can only dictate force people to act with threat of guns and impisonment and government can never get all those thousands of people to cooperate as effficiently as the free market (capitalism) can or even at all because government / socialism doesn’t work.
Everyone including many conservatives should read Milton “Friedman’s Free to Choose”. In that book he does show that the countries with the smallest government did better economically and technologically, the U.S. in the 19th century, Britain around the same time, and Hong Kong in the 20 th century.
Government is too big. It’s excessive laws and regultions and agencies are crippling private industry. It’s huge buggets are taking away investment capital from productive private industries and are sqeezing out the private sector. Ronald Reagan and Sarah Palin are right big government is not the solution to our problems , big government is the problem.
The only functions of the government should be the courts, police , military, immigration control, border control, and that’s it. And you know then taxes would be about 5% instead of the 60% they are now and we Americans would be a free people instead of on our way to loosing our freedom and our prosperity as the government grows.
The unfettered growth of government is the most pressing problem we have in America. All efforts should be taken to reduce the size of government, it’s agecies and laws and regulations but NOT increase these regulations as you, liberals and even other freepers suggest.
Why wasn’t this huge government needed in the 1800’s when America went from a small farming country to the number one world economic power that the world had ever seen from 1800-1900?
And no I am not for any tax-payer or government bailout of any industry, or private company or government entity like Fannie Mae etc. That’s choosing winners and that is communism.
I am for the free market with NO government inerference at all except to settle disputes between private individuals in a court of law. That might be an extremist position to some especially to democRATs.
The best known statement of the principles of a free market, the kind of free market that operates in Hong Kong, was written on the other side of the world. Two hundred years ago in Scotland, Adam Smith taught at the University of Glasgow. His brilliant book, The Wealth Of Nations, was based on the lectures he gave here.
The basic principles underlying the free market, as Adam Smith taught them to his students in this University, are really very simple. Look at this lead pencil, there is not a single person in the world who could make this pencil. Remarkable statement? Not at all. The wood from which it’s made, for all I know, comes from a tree that was cut down in the State of Washington. To cut down that tree, it took a saw. To make the saw, it took steel. To make the steel, it took iron ore. This black center, we call it lead but it’s really compressed graphite, I am not sure where it comes from but I think it comes from some mines in South America. This red top up here, the eraser, a bit of rubber, probably comes from Malaya, where the rubber tree isn’t even native. It was imported from South America by some businessman with the help of the British government. This brass feral __ I haven’t the slightest idea where it came from or the yellow paint or the paint that made the black lines __ or the glue that holds it together. Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil. People who don’t speak the same language; who practice different religions; who might hate one another if they ever met. When you go down to the store and buy this pencil, you are, in effect, trading a few minutes of your time for a few seconds of the time of all of those thousands of people. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate to make this pencil? There was no Commissar sending out orders from some central office. It was the magic of the price system __ the impersonal operation of prices that brought them together and got them to cooperate to make this pencil so that you could have it for a trifling sum.
That is why the operation of the free market is so essential. Not only to promote productive efficiency, but even more, to foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1667407/posts
For its sheer power to display in just a few pages the astounding fact that free markets successfully coordinate the actions of literally millions of people from around the world into a productive whole, nothing else written in economics compares to Leonard Read’s celebrated essay, “I, Pencil.” This essay’s power derives from Read’s drawing from such a prosaic item an undeniable, profound, and spectacular conclusion: it takes the knowledge of countless people to produce a single pencil. No newcomer to economics who reads “I, Pencil” can fail to have a simplistic belief in the superiority of central planning or regulation deeply shaken. If I could choose one essay or book that everyone in the world would read, I would unhesitatingly choose “I, Pencil.” Among these readers, simplistic notions about the economy would be permanently transformed into a new and vastly more subtle—and correct—understanding.
http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/rdPncl2.html
Human freedom, wealth creation, and prosperity requires private property, free competition, and severely limited government. That most people including liberals/marxists and many who hold even other conservative positions don’t undertand this is why the government keeps growing and why the U.S. is on the road to tyrrany, oppression and the extreme poverty that socialism brings.