I’m pretty sure he has. In the past year, he specifically called out T. Boone Pickens for lobbying to pass the NAT GAS act. I’m sure if one searched one could find numerous examples.
But your argument is like blaming the smokers and giving the tobacco companies a pass. If government quit handing deals to some companies/industries and not others, then everyone would have to compete on even footing. So the government is largely to blame.
[QUOTE=MDKSquared]
Do we blame the person who made the wings, the person who used the wings and flew too close to the sun, or those who can’t clean up the resulting mess effectively?
[/QUOTE]
I’d say the folks who created the regulatory environment and situation that made it attractive to fly too close to the sun because of the supposed safety net that would catch them should come in for at least some of the blame as well. 
Just saying.
As to the OP:
Certainly. And good luck trying to do so. The trouble is that ‘corporate welfare’ means different things to different people, and while a lot of folks might automatically jerk their knee on hearing the term, they are going to be less disposed to getting rid of it when it’s their ox that is getting gored. As pointed out, there is the example of GM. That’s ‘corporate welfare’ after all, if we are talking about bailing out a failing corporation. Then there are the gas and fuel subsidies…which keep the price of gas relatively mild in the US, compared to other countries at least. Same goes for energy subsidies, especially for alternative energy projects. That’s ‘corporate welfare’ as well. And on and on. Personally, I’m a big fan of letting corporations that fuck up fail and be swept away, but that’s not a popular position when you start talking about the folks who work for those companies losing their jobs, so I’d guess ‘corporate welfare’ in it’s various incarnations and forms will be with us for a long time to come.
I don’t think anyone believes it is. But a lot of people insist that curing what the free market can’t cure is worse than the disease.
I disagree, and I point to the economic growth of the US despite government controls in place through much of the last century. Yet today we have market fundamentalists insisting that now that we’re not the world’s only economic superpower, the only course for survival is to concentrate more and more in the hands of fewer and fewer, and leave more and more people behind.
Agreed that there is significant value in avoiding the term.
Bankruptcy would not have wiped out the creditors’ investments as much as the bailout did! Those who should have been first in line to own GM stock were told to go take a hike. With a bankruptcy, they would have owned GM’s assets, which are considerable.
Yes the government made an investment. While I disagree with government investment in industry, that could have been done with a bankruptcy as well. We’ll never know what would have happened if the laws had been followed, so apologists for the bailout can’t claim that it “saved GM”. They can say that GM still exists. Meanwhile, we can point to the people who had their property stolen from them by the government, but I don’t see bailout apologists mentioning that.
Good point, but bad example, because with unrestricted capitalism, there is no “commons”. But the same point can be made regarding a limited resource, especially a slowly-regenerating one such as the forest of the Nortwest. Capitalism is great at maximizing the short-term value of the resource, as it uses it all up, and kills the ecosystem that sustains it.
I don’t think you made an argument about distribution. Free markets do an excellent job of distribution … just not to those who can’t afford the products.
The biggest problem with unhampered free-market capitalism is what economists call “negative externalities”. These are when there is a hidden cost that’s not borne by the customer. Usually these costs are to 3rd parties, e.g., society. An excellent example is pollution. A company can make great widgets at a super low cost and everyone is delighted, until we find out that the process has ruined natural resources in the area, depressing land values, causing illness, etc. If the costs of those problems had been factored into the widgets in the first place, they wouldn’t have been such a bargain.
The second biggest problem with free markets is the lack of a safety net. This is more controversial. (An argument against this being a problem is that the lack of a safety net incentivises people to be productive.) This problem exists on several planes. At the lowest level, it has no compassion for people with insufficient value to add to the economy, for whatever reason. But it can happen to productive workers as well. For example, an agile free market can rapidly change what types of workers are needed (in general, or at a specific locale). Workers who spent conderable time and effort learning to be productive in a given endeavor now find themselves valueless in the new economy.
Another big problem with free markets is that the theory is based on rational markets, which don’t actually exist. Fortunately, a reasonable approximation usually does exist. There are two issues: whether the people are behaving rationally (of course, sometimes they don’t) and whether everyone in an exchange has suficient knowledge of the facts of the exchange (which used car dealers try to make sure isn’t the case).
Finally, free markets just don’t seem to work well for certain kinds of products. Health care insurance is a good example. By the time you find out whether the product you’ve purchased is any good, you’ve spent years paying for it, and can’t switch to another vendor. Still, the argument could be made that imperfect as it is, it’s better than letting the government or a monopoly make the choice for you.
But to be fair to free markets, we’d have to compare them with an alternative. Like democracy, it’s a terrible thing, but better than any of the alternatives.
Of course, my arguments above are based on outcomes. There are also fundamental philosiphical arguments for capitalism. For example, the right to be the beneficiary of one’s labor. But I think we’re focusing on the pragmatics here.
I may be of poor comprehension so let me see if I understand a basic assumption here: since US Government has been traditionally and over a number of decades – and even currently – subsidizing food industry, oil and gas industry, railway industry, air transportation industry, sports entertainment industry and financial industry… do people still make a claim that US economy was/is “free market” based?
Can you elaborate on this more? It was my understanding that the “commons” was one of the biggest flaws of capitalism. What do you mean by “unrestricted” in this sense? If we have a lake full of fish and we both fish from it without any regulation – winner take all – we’ll both go for a mad-grab until the lake is no longer full of fish even though it’s in both of our best interests to figure out a sustainable way to give us BOTH more fish over the long run. Of course, like we see in Prisoner’s Dilemma, if I hold off and try to cooperate while you go ahead and plunder, I risk forgoing fish that I could have gotten from taking a plunder myself in mighty Darwinian fashion.
I am talking about the distribution of market participants, not distribution of resources (I’m talking in terms of statistical distributions here). If your market is basically a microcosm of wealthy people, it may be a great market because of all the underlying leverage but still be prohibitive to most citizens.
Your last sentence there is basically the point I am trying to argue: “Free markets do an excellent job of distribution … just not to those who can’t afford the products.” I am saying that just because a particular market is healthy doesn’t mean it’s good for everyone, or even most.
It’s not coroprate welfare or personal welfare that is the issue, the problem is it doesn’t solve anything.
You can’t give someone food stamps, Section 8 housing, low cost day care and so forth and just expect them to take the ball and run with it. They won’t know how.
Welfare should be an aide not a way of life.
But no one does that. They give them welfare and quit.
Same with corporatations. They give tax breask and such to big companies like Walmart (who are not alone in this) and they are able to compete a great advantage and thus the mom an pop places go out of business.
Then Walmart doesn’t make enough profit and pulls out. Thus leaving no Walmart and no mom and pop stores.
Again we gave Walmart the “welfare” without address the problem of the economically depressed area.
Welfare, whether corporate or personal must only be a temporary measure to help people, it shouldn’t be a way of life for an individual or a way of doing business for a company
Just to be clear, GM did indeed file for bankruptcy (on June 1, 2009). The “good” assets were then sold off to the government (well, technically to a new company financed by the government) under section 363 of the bankruptcy code.
Many of GM’s senior creditors were up in arms because they would have likely fared better in a traditional bankruptcy scenario, and in the spirit of bankruptcy law (which gives preferences to the most senior folks in the capital structure), that would have been their (the senior creditors) decision to make.