The Ravings of Demented Rabbits

God Money

I'll have things to say about class, but I'll say them after class. For now, I have 15 minutes to kill, so here's an ICQ I got from Marechal:

So I am reading in this economics textbook, Marius ... and everything I am reading says regulation is bad. They've got graphs and charts and stuff proving it. So then I'm like ... "Well, duh." Call me a Republican, a capitalist, and a patriot, but yeah .. ... so I don't understand how you can be so pro-regulatory with minimum wage laws and lots of taxes and rent controls and welfare. It's bad economics. What am I missing???

What's missing is, essentially, two things. First is the lessons of the Industrial Revolution of the 19th and early 20th centuries, which in short form tell us that unrestrained capitalism is enormously detrimental to people and society; combined with the second, which is 250-300 years of political philosophy that tells us, essentially, that the duty of government is to provide the best possible deal to as many of the people it governs as possible.

We'll deal with the second concept first. It is essentially the ideal that the United States was founded on. Life, liberty, the persuit of happiness, no taxation without representation, etc, etc. Extrapolate this to the French Revolution and others throughout the world. Along with that goes a lot of earlier Enlightenment thinking, the English parliamentary movement, and a couple of others that escape me. The point is that modern government is built on the idea that it exists to serve the people.

Back to the first concept. The lesson that can be picked up from the Industrial Revolution is that business cannot be trusted to look out for the well-being of it's workers. Whether government actually looks out for the well-being of the governed is debatable, but we KNOW that business can't be trusted. That's as true of the 1870s as it is today - contrast the robber barons with Enron, frex. But we have minimum wage laws to provide a living wage to workers, because business, left on it's own, will not provide this - note the 19th century's company store syndrome for one, child labor records, and unsafe/unhealthy working conditions.

And it's classtime. More later.

Posted by Dwip at September 30, 2003 12:19 PM