You know, I thought that recent American Republican presidents - Reagan and the Bushes - showed that while they were socially conservative, they were fiscally more liberal than Clinton.
And this non-sequiter has what bearing on anything?
It’s not our fault Republicans elect economically illiterate glove puppets who rack up the bills and leave it to the Dems to pay.
The flaw in the OP’s premise is that when examples of Little Government- such as the market crash we’re still recovering from- fail, these are never taken as reasons why we need *more *regulation. No, it’s just further indication that *any *government is bad government.
Apparently, we’re just supposed to let businesses do whatever they want. Who are *we *to judge them?
I don’t want to get into another interminable inconclusive debate, and I don’t think anyone here supports Soviet-style central planning, BUT …
In American-style government, Wall Street writes the financial-reform legislation, and the drug and insurance industries design UHC legislation. To call this liberal-style “big government” is absurd.
Sam, one of your problems is that you’re treating capitalism as if it were a sharply-defined, monolithic system. It’s like arguing for “God”; well, everyone has their own definition of God.
Everyone believes in some level of government regulation, including you - unless you think we should go back to the days of travelling medical gurus hawking Dr. Butthole’s Snake Venom Brain Tonic Now With Twice The Mercury - the question is how much.
Yes, I do believe generally in a market economy over a command economy, but I’m realistic about things like competition and greed, and a market economy needs a set of rules to flourish.
Six of the seven countries that rank higher than the US in economic freedom have socialized medicine, and the seventh (Switzerland) has mandatory private health insurance, with subsidies for those who cannot afford it. So according to your cite, socialism is the way to go.
Oh, we’ve been here before just in a recent thread and the exciting intellectual answer is:
“Different countries are different.”
I’m afraid if you cross-examine long enough to make this answer intelligible, you’ll learn that the other countries don’t have a large minority trying to sponge off people of a different skin color.
So the US is unique in this weakness of socialism, and only the rugged individualism of the libertarians can save us?
I don’t understand the OP at all. If I am reading it correctly, he says that, due to a lack of regulations, we had a huge financial crisis. As such, a bunch of whiny liberals started clamoring for bigger government and more regulations. Turns out that didn’t work so well, either. So far, from where I am standing, the scoreboard reads
Free Market: 0
Government Regulations: 0
Bottom of the 4th inning. Whats the point being made, exactly?
Hello? It staved off another major economic collapse, until the regulations passed after the Great Depression were largely erased or subverted. So far, the pro-regulations side has all the facts supporting it. The other side just has “government bad!” taken as a matter of faith.
I was simply trying to recount the logic of the OP, not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing with it.
That said, unless you have a parallel universe handy where the stimulus et al weren’t enacted, you are going to have a hard time convincing me that the actions by the government had a major impact on staving off a major economic collapse. Sure it is possible. It is also possible that the economy would have rebounded on its own, without dropping us much, much deeper in debt. I simply don’t know, and you don’t either.
I mean no offense, but could you cite some of these same people? I’d be extremely suprised if there were many, or many notables, actually calling capitalism a failure. It seems like hyperbole.
It’s not just ‘regulations’.
I can accept this statement: “The failure of the derivatives market shows that the current system of financial transactions is flawed and needs reform.” That’s a fair statement, and we can debate the nature of the reform required. Some of it might require more government regulation, some of it might require less, and some of it might just require different regulations.
But what I heard after the crash was more like, “Those free marketers had their chance, and this is the result. Now it’s time for government to raise taxes, invest in jobs, stimulate the economy, bail out corporations, increase regulations across the marketplace…” It very rapidly became about a lot more than merely fixing the financial system. Suddenly we had government with ownership stakes in car companies, coming up with subsidies for everything from cars to appliances and weatherstripping, creating new health care systems…
Opportunists on the left simply tried to use the financial crisis as a way to push big government solutions to a host of things that had nothing to do with the crash.
Sam, maybe we can encourage our colleagues to simplify things a bit and go back to first principles. Instead of talking in generalities about ‘Big Government’, or left vs right, we can boil it down and work our way from there.
If we exclude laws enacted to remove coercion by force and/or fraud, as well as simple transfer payments (e.g. taking $$ from person A and giving it to person B) government regulations are always designed to prevent a voluntary transaction from occurring between two parties.
So if ‘Big Government’ types are for more regulation, they must be for restricting transactions that would have otherwise occurred in the absence of ‘Big Government’.
So perhaps we can ask them…exactly what transactions are occurring, or could occur, or have occurred, between consenting adults that you believe should be outlawed? Why?
Let’s deregulate everything completely so that big banks and little hucksters can sell whatever they can to everybody who will buy it without fear of consequences because liability is limited! Drill baby drill, without any safety features! Socialize those losses!!! Privatize them profits!!! That’s how the gulf oil spill is going to work out, and that is how the credit debt swaps worked out!! As long as those actually responsible never have to be held liable in a court of law, the big corporations can trickle down that piss onto the real people.
Excellent. We have our first response.
P1. Why would people buy those things that the ‘hucksters’ are selling? If someone is a huckster and approaches you with a product or service, do you buy it? Why or why not?
P2. Sounds like you are talking about externalities, like the environment. That could very well be fertile ground for government involvement. Let’s discuss.
P3. Difficult to tell what you’re getting at here. Are you one of the ‘real people’? Am I? Are we getting pissed on? By whom?
Well done. But I didn’t see anything up there about
- Mandatory health insurance
- Tilting labor law in favor of unions
- Taking governmental stakes in failing, private enterprises such as GM
- Bailing out the state’s Medicare funds
- Squandering money in high-speed rail and ‘green’ technologies
Shall I assume then, that you are opposed to such things?
It’s interesting that Sam isn’t talking about his own country, which has maintained much more “big government” control of business, particularly banks and the financial sector (despite heavy pressure to relax the “stifling regulatory burden”), and has weathered the economic storm much better than the US. (Oh, and we managed despite suffering under the intolerable burden of socialized medical care, too!)
Because without regulations and that evil “big government” you won’t have any way of knowing if they are “hucksters” or not, there won’t be many if any honest sellers of anything, and you likely won’t have a choice in in the matter; you’ll buy what you are forced to buy by your employer and/or the monopoly controlling the product. And that’s assuming that you just aren’t starving to death somewhere. How do I know this? Because that’s how it worked when the government didn’t regulate things the way it does.
I think your problem is that you’re mixing up views about emergency government measures in a time of severe economic crisis with views about routine government policies. Not even the most gummint-lovin’ liberal thinks that the government ought to be routinely raising taxes and increasing regulations and sinking billions into corporate bailouts and emergency stimulus measures, much less acquiring car manufacturers.
The trouble is that the regulatory pendulum swung too far in favor of the more extreme anti-regulation robber-baron types of capitalists, and as you note, it became widely apparent that the economy got seriously trainwrecked as a result. Some fairly drastic government intervention measures were required to prevent a major meltdown in the first place, and to soften the effects of the economic contraction in the second place. But recognizing that is not the same as saying that the government should always be intervening in markets to such a drastic extent.
Yes, there are some major government initiatives like health care reform and financial regulation reform that the government needs to implement not just as a temporary measure but as a general policy change, in order to fix systems that are broken. But you seem unable to distinguish such initiatives from catastrophic emergency measures that nobody supports except as a last resort, such as bank bailouts and semi-nationalized automobile manufacturers.
I suppose I’m what you personally would call a “Big Government type”, although I think that’s frequently just an inaccurate broad-brush label for people who don’t happen to be impractical Small-Government extremists.
However you want to handle the nomenclature, though, it’s not hard to think of various types of transactions that government regulations ought to prevent.* Most of them involve market failures of one sort or another, where the theoretical principles of ideal market mechanisms are inadequate to protect against real-life imperfections in a market system.
A classic example of such a market failure is information asymmetry. The average person who buys quack medicine, for instance, is usually much less informed about the contents and effectiveness of the medicine than the person selling it. It’s not good for public health when people are credulously dosing themselves or their children with mercury chloride, opium tincture, and other dangerous drugs because they don’t understand the risks involved.
- (In fact, the question is such a no-brainer that I’m surprised anybody expects us to take it seriously. I don’t really understand how libertarians can keep a straight face while portentously putting forth ridiculously heavy-handed and over-simplistic questions like “Do you believe that Big Government ought to be stealing from its citizens?” and “Do you believe that Big Government ought to be trampling on the freedom of its citizens?” The obvious answer is “No I don’t, but I’m not dumb or naive enough to believe that taxation is automatically stealing or that regulation is automatically trampling on freedom.”
I can’t help wondering: In what libertarian fantasy-land do these silly questions actually work to convince anybody who doesn’t already agree with libertarians? Has anybody in any of these threads ever said “Gosh, I never thought about it that way before, but when you put it like that, I realize that taxation is stealing! And it oughtn’t to be allowed! Vote Ron Paul!” Not that I’ve ever seen. These naively melodramatic libertarian arguments may impress those who already buy into them, but they just make everybody else go :rolleyes: .)
And this is the flaw inherent in deregulated free market idealism. It can only work in a perfect world where every consumer is completely and accurately informed about every product they buy and every seller is honest and forthcoming. It requires you to believe that every single person out there is at least as intelligent as you are.
But of course, not everyone is that intelligent, not everyone is that honest, and nobody can be that informed. The last people to be truly that informed about the food they eat and tools they use were frontiersmen, people who had to do everything for themselves. Our society has advanced because we’ve been able to specialize; the less time a person has to spend worrying about where their milk and eggs come from or the reliability of their transportation and shelter, the more time they have to spend advancing in their chosen field. And because they can’t take the time to worry about where their food comes from, someone has to make sure companies don’t sell shit disguised as steak. They’d sell you sawdust if they could get away with it. Good profit margins. That’s where government regulation comes in.
If a consumer had to research each and every product they bought from each and every seller each and every time to be certain they were the real deal and not hucksters, we’d lose 100 years of progress, easy. Post-industrial society simply can’t work that way.