I agree with you 100%. Can you tell the crazy people on the internet that? I have seen them say, verbatim, that the corporations will pollute less if there was no regulations prohibiting them from polluting, it’s no different than a homeless guy crapping his pants on the bus in terms of crazy.
Before attributing the economic boom of the United States in those years to free-market libertarian principals and exploitation of the workers, you would have to correct for the effects of the country being amazingly huge and flush with natural resources and not burdened with all the baggage of old Europe.
Basically, any idiots would’ve been able to make massive wealth if they stumbled upon an entire country back then (with no qualms about genocide).
Well, then, that’s easy. Like video games, television, and movies, they self-regulate because they fear federal regulation. It’s just a second order of effect of regulation instead of a first order effect.
I do not attribute the economic boom of the United States to free-market principals and exploitation of the workers. I attribute it to free-market principles only, and where the free market is, there’s little exploitation of workers. A 19th century working poor person in the USA, if he didn’t like his current employer, could walk out and look for a new employer. If he didn’t like any of the employers in town, he could move to a new town. If he didn’t like any of the employers in the entire state, he could move to a new state. Consequently employers in the USA have always had to compete for workers, and this has always been good for workers. By contrast, workers in countries such as France and Italy during those times were not free to move about as they pleased, nor to freely negotiate with employers for what they wanted. The results are plainly apparent in that the standard of living soared upwards for American workers throughout the century. The same did not happen in Italy or most of Europe. Moreover, while American history includes some cases of labor unrest, it does not feature rioting workers taking over entire cities or toppling governments, as happened many times in Europe. (I assume we’re all familiar with the silk worker riots in Lyon.)
History proves this to be false. 19th-century Brazil had plentiful natural resources but it did not give its people prosperity the way the United States did. What Brazil lacked was a free economy. Likewise for 19th-century China. And Russia. And India. But perhaps the clearest case is Argentina. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Argentina was among the wealthiest nations on earth, and a popular destination for immigrants from all over, just like the United States. It had plentiful open space and natural resources and certainly seemed destined for greatness. But starting in mid-20th century, Argentina went down the path of socialism and today is poorer than its neighbors.
It’s also worth noting that many of the world’s richest countries are not blessed with plentiful natural resources and vast open spaces: Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Denmark, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Israel, …
Open space and natural resources do not produce prosperity. Economic freedom produces prosperity.
Right. An interesting example of this occurs when movies start self-censoring after 1934 because of the Hays Code.
Except in reality, Will Hays was hired in 1922 to start regulating what was seen as the excesses of Hollywood. He was mostly ignored, and the Catholic Church, then an extremely powerful institution, was offended. A pair of prominent Catholics then wrote a code reflecting these concerns, which was adopted in 1930. This was the famous Hays Code, which was in effect during what is now called pre-Code Hollywood, when the early sound movies included large number of risque scenes. It wasn’t until 1934 that Joseph Breen, another moral Catholic, took over Code enforcement and got the studios to back down.
The Code saved Hollywood, but it’s folly to say that no regulation was involved. In 1933 the Church created The Legion of Decency and Catholics, a huge chunk of the audience in the critical Northeast, heavily populated areas, were forbidden to attend films given a C (condemned) under penalty of sin or something. The government was also threatening to step in and the Depression had cut film attendance, so further loss could be devastating. You can talk about this as being responsive to their market, but that’s nonsense. The market loved those pre-Code films. It was only large, repressive institutions that cared and only they who could make their power felt.
In reality, the government is one of a competing mass of interest groups that create regulations. You will never have a free market merely by removing the government. That can only occur if your ideology defines out other institutions as meaningless. Which is, of course, what some believe.
The economic boom of the late 19th/early 20th centuries is too complex to be ascribed to free-market principles only. Even if it were, free marketers conveniently overlook all the ways that government aided and abetted one side and repressed the other. The U.S. had instituted a set of protective tariffs to help the growing industrial base that were so onerous that Great Britain was scrape-off-the-ceiling furious about them. The government ignored the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and allowed trusts to control over 300 industries before the tide turned against them. The government actively worked to break union power, often supplying federal troops to break strikes, and denied them support through the courts. The courts also found that most of the things we take for granted today and that were being fought for by the progressives - child labor bans, minimum wages, length of workdays, safer conditions - were illegal bans on contracts.
There was no free market in the days of laissez-faire. There was a formal, institutionalized, governmental bias in favor of big and bigger business and against workers and unions. It was as unfree a market as any Socialist paradise. To call it free you have to be willfully blind to the realities of the time.
And, of course, quite often vice-versa.
Is Milton Friedman your average economist? He was a rock star economist, he was in it for the ego-boo and all the hot groupies, man!
Yeah, the big ones. Want to get stepped on, mammal?
This is it, right here.
Ah, the “no true Commie” argument. Here’s a tip: Marx did not advocate either the ends nor the tactics of the Khmer Rouge, therefore they were not the true Marxists.
The “we’re the True Scotsman” argument? The USA succeeded for geographic and geopolitical reasons. Once fossil fuel technology developed, the USA’s territory was suddenly very fecund. Texas has unusually large natural gas deposits and oil fields, while the eastern US (conveniently purged of indigenous people) has a mountain range full of coal and lowlands suitable for massive fiber-crop production. The Western US had enormous copper seams in the middle of what was practically desert. It’s geology, geography, and geopolitics.
I’m not going to spend a day doing the mirror image of puddleglum’s post #73, but it would look something like this:
Every significant country that has tried capitalism has either had genocide, slavery, or both.
Pure anarcho-syndicalism has been tried once, in Spain, and the fascists ate their lunch. But every country that has tried some moderate central planning has grown. That includes the USA.
Your theoretical “free market” still has to face economic reality. That freedom to walk away isn’t impeded by evil government creating monopoly, unless the very ownership of property is evil government creating monopoly. Society needs laws, or customs, or regulations, that ensure that individual freedom. Remember your Rousseau.
And those “workers” taking over was a bad thing? Yes, workers’ revolts in the USA were generally defeated by armed conservative action, and died off after the moderate social democracy of FDR and Truman came into power–at the same time central planning became mainstream, and the economy began a 20-year boom. You really think this proves that we need to repudiate FDR and Truman?
Those are rich small countries. How many people do they support? Again, scientific economics cares about numbers.
Further, Denmark has a massive welfare state, the Netherlands are radically communitarian (or they all would drown), Singapore is authoritarian, Israel is an army with a religion or something (and unstable now), Japan is corporatist and protectionist if not dirigiste. None of them are your libertarian paradise.
What of the other two? Switzerland is propped by topography–there’s geopolitics again–and crooked bankers.
And then there’s Hong Kong. I don’t know much about it, but it’s been a vassal of the British Empire and then China, not really geopolitically self-sustaining, but able to leverage its trade position between great powers. Maybe it is what you’re looking for, but it’s not the USA either. I wonder, how important is HK now that China proper is the world’s manufacturer, and outsiders trade directly with Shanghai and Shenzhen?
…Are you sure about that? Think hard.
Isn’t this one of those Constitutional Amendments?
A well regulated Free Market being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to buy and to sell shall not be infringed
When was the energy industry re-regulated? Finance, I will concede, has to be well regulated because it poses a systemic threat to the economy otherwise. However, other deregulated industries have thrived, such as the airlines, trucking, energy, telecommunications, and beer.
This is absolutely hilarious. Thrived? Every major airline has gone bankrupt multiple times since deregulation. They are merging in desperation to create something too big to fail, but they will fail anyway since - I’m paraphrasing here - the merger of two mediocre companies gives you one big bad company. And I don’t know what you think of by energy companies, but the poster child for energy deregulation is Enron. It was not an aberration, merely the largest such.
This isn’t an argument against all deregulation. As an MIT Study of the trucking industry notes, “Regulation can help, hinder, or be neutral toward competition.” Deregulation does tend to drive down rates, but it also - necessarily - tends simultaneously to drive down service and customer satisfaction. These are trade-offs of varying importance to varying segments of the economic community. Not including customer reactions to modern airline or telecommunications policies is the same as not including externalities when looking as the effects of energy production. The bottom line is that mindless assertion that deregulation is always a positive is always laughable. It’s an ideological position of the sort we’ve been mocking in this thread.
Yes we all remember how workers were being exploited so badly in late 19th and early 20th century United States. That’s why immigrants were flocking here in droves.
The U.S. probably did look good in comparison with the opportunities in Europe, just as the slums of London offered opportunities to farm workers who moved there.
It’s not much of an argument that bad conditions are better than horrible conditions. Why not look at the actual behavior of the workers, including immigrants, who were there at the time. They were loud and activist in opposition to the owners, across all industries, all immigrant groups, and all locations. And they kept up that continual opposition until after WWII, when conditions finally changed.
The big airline companies aren’t thriving, but discount airlines have sprouted up in their place. The airlines needed protection from competition because they had an unsustainable business model. The market is still working that out. But there is no shortage of air travel.
Enron isn’t energy, you’re thinking of utilities. And utilities deregulation wasn’t federal, it was state, and different states had different experiences with it. Stupid deregulation, like California did, where you deregulate price on one end but not the other, is of course going to fail. Texas’ much smarter utility deregulation went much better and is still in effect.
Definitely. Regulation is like any other use of force, sometimes it’s justified, sometimes it’s not.
Also, when the term “deregulation” is used, it’s usually not actual deregulation so much as allowing competition and the market to set prices, whereas previously the government set barriers to market entry and used price controls to compensate for the fact that they were controlling competition. The airlines were deregulated only in the sense that discount airlines could not enter the market. Obviously, safety regulations were not abolished. In the case of California’s electricity abortion, they deregulated the wholesale rates, but kept the retail rates regulated. That’s asshattery on wheels and would have resulted in a crisis even without Enron’s crimes.
This is the problem with this sort of very vague, very general, very absolute discussion of regulation of capitalism (not the above post, the whole thread). A regulation can be a disclosure requirement, a safety standard, a subsidy, or a barrier to entry that favors existing firms (or countless other things). These will all produce wildly different effects, as will removing them.
Being pro or anti regulation in a vacuum is meaningless, because regulation (and deregulation) is such a broad spectrum.
In short: absolutism of any type in this matter is foolish.
Ok there’s nothing wrong with unionization and opposition to management per se. For example, the 8 hour work day was already being adopted in most industries before government mandated it.
Enron was a conglomerate, and had many, probably dozens, of businesses. It’s utility segment was a very minor portion of the company, although the only one that survived whole. Warren Buffett bought it, in fact. What got Enron into trouble was its energy trading business. That’s why I said I didn’t know what you were referring to by “energy” and we seem to have different definitions. It’s not worth the hijack.
Many people believe that the government just up and passed a law requiring the 8 hour work day and everybody rejoiced. That’s not history, and it’s impossible to tell what you believe. The 8 hour work day was implemented slowly and piecemeal precisely because the government needed to step in when too many major industries refused to make those concessions to their own workers.
This may represent a fundamental gap between the conservative/libertarian principles and the progressive/liberal principles. The former will allow small bodies to claw gains to themselves and scorn any group who is too weak to do so. The latter sees groups as equal under the law and will work to set standards so that accidents of size, type, location, industry, or circumstances don’t keep them from succeeding.
That argument per se was thought to be settled over the 20th century. All groups and all individuals will not be treated equally or even fairly, but minimum standards thought necessary to a modern civilized country were placed into law. The fraction of those standards that affect the workforce actually served to improve the economy just as the fraction of those standards that affect civil rights served to improve the society. Neither had the dire effects prophesied by their opponents.
I’m suppose that there’s some homily like “the battle for freedom must be continually fought” buried in the current resurrection of these dead arguments. Politics is not, except exceptionally, about rights: it’s always about where the line should be drawn. That’s true even in the most seemingly absolute issues like guns and abortion. (Can an individual own an atomic bomb? No? How about a tank? No? How about an assault rifle? Can an individual have an abortion in case of incest? Yes? If the life of the mother is as risk? Yes? How about if the life and health of the mother is at risk?) The history of the this country is an endless series of moving the lines toward the more progressive side. Moving them back provides few victories and those are normally short-lived. And even those move the line back only to a place that would have seemed wildly extremely progressive at one point.
The future always wins. And the future is always progressive. You can never go back home.