On Free Markets and Government Regulation:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

One thing that does not surprise me these days is to see people making multiple millions of dollars advocating laissez-faire systems where they'd benefit greatly but very few others would. The question I have is a simple, if provocative one: isn't it better said that free markets are best made free by government regulation? The height of the Laissez-Faire era co-incided with the robber barons, and it was not a co-incidence. Bereft of things like the income tax and anti-trust laws, essential government regulations for any society making a pretense of freedom much less trying for the real thing the result was the emergence of wealthy and powerful men like Gould, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Astor, and Carnegie.

The "free market" system led not to freedom but to things like said robber barons calling in the US Army to disperse strikers with gunfire into the ranks of said strikers. It led to things like Black Friday, a known incident where a Robber Baron deliberately triggered an economic depression in 1869. The regulations that emerged under the Progressives, FDR, and the Great Society have led to a much deeper prosperity minus the brutality of right and left that resulted in the age of Laissez Faire at its finest, when poverty was also much vaster and deeper than it is today (when one out of every five Americans goes hungry).

So the question I have is simple: if Tea Party anarcho-capitalism gets its wish to rescind things like the income tax, like direct election of Senators, like the Federal Reserve, and like the various anti-trust laws that have been in effect for most of the 20th Century, how do they intend to deal with the emergence of latter-day Jay Cookes who'd have immense sums of money and like their predecessors would be just as keen to have Federal troops disperse any workers foolhardy enough to ask for their rights?

X-posted to my LJ and The_Recession.

Comments

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That argument linked would be better if Miss McArdle didn't love Argumentum Ad Hominem. But that's the conservative arguing style these days. Not in the least pretense of civility only "I'm right and everyone else is evil."

I cannot name a single Republican politician who thinks that atheists are even citizens of the United States.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

That argument linked would be better if Miss McArdle didn't love Argumentum Ad Hominem. But that's the conservative arguing style these days. Not in the least pretense of civility only "I'm right and everyone else is evil."

Those are even shorter than the book. Try reading them.

I cannot name a single Republican politician who thinks that atheists are even citizens of the United States.

I know two personally, being an atheist citizen who's worked for them. Enough of that, really.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

I did read them. I noticed much of her counterargument was not so much the methodology as her claims that the argument made was a lying deceptive one made by a lying deceiver. Her article had far more personal attacks than methodological criticsm, to the point that I was not sure if the methodological criticism of proportion was in fact criticism or another bit of how the person there is a lying cheating deceiver.

In a professional argument, one does not use those words. Sure, I could cite from a liberal blog something I agreed with or from Michelle Malkin on the once in a blue moon occasion I agree with her, but that's not an academic citation, which I assumed you realized was in fact what I was referring to.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

I don't think you really read them, because that's not what the articles do. Not in the least. Unless one cannot poke holes in a study without it being some attack, which, in that case, no one can win.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Bullshit. Professionalism does exist.

[badlydrawnjeff.livejournal.com]

And she seems entirely professional.