The Free Market
Maybe the conservatives are right. Why should the government always interfere? Why not let everything self-regulate? After all, that is only the most fair and effective means for a productive society, right?
Therefore, we should erase all criminal laws from the books, and get rid of the police. People will self-regulate. After all, if they do something bad, everyone else will disapprove, and that will be bad for them, right? Crime will disappear and everyone will treat each other equitably.
Oh, I’m sorry—that’s not what conservatives mean, is it? After all, you can’t trust the people to behave without regulation and police oversight. But corporations? They’re bound to be honest and fair—that’s their defining characteristic, isn’t it? Left to themselves, they pay everyone a fair wage and never act contrary to public interest, right?
Man, it was hard to type that and not break up laughing so hard that I misspelled everything.
Let’s face it: corporations, if viewed as “people,” are essentially psychopaths. Their single common priority is to make as much money as can be achieved. By nature, they have no moral restraints; in their context, what can be bargained for to accentuate their profit is by definition “fair,” no matter how it may seem from an objective moral perspective. If they could get away with paying workers nothing, defrauding customers, trashing the environment, bypassing safety standards, and in doing so avoid criminal prosecution and sidestep any litigation, they would do so—in a heartbeat.
Which is why people like this stand out so radically:
There are a lot of things that can be said about this guy, but he stresses the one key point, which applies to so many issues of what government does in terms of businesses: If businesses acted in a fundamentally moral manner, government intervention would not be necessary.
If businesses paid their workers a wage that would ensure that they at least could work 40-50 hours a week and not sink into poverty, a minimum wage would not be necessary.
If businesses would see to the basic safety standards for the workplace, OSHA and the regulations that govern it would not be necessary.
If businesses paid workers equally, laws like the Lily Ledbetter Act would not be necessary.
If businesses did not discriminate on the basis of race, then Affirmative Action and quotas would not only be unnecessary, but they could exist and yet never kick in!
I could go on and on, but the theme is always the same: government never intervenes in business in order to interfere. Government only intervenes when businesses violate basic moral values and mistreat people and their environments in the name of excessive greed. Not survival, mind you—but greed.
Conservatives’ number one agenda: to stop government intervention.
That is equivalent to them trying to stop police from “interfering” with people’s actions, like robbing stores, committing acts of violence, etc. and instead, allowing the “free public square” to “self-regulate.”
Funny how we never hear them advocating that. It’s as if they don’t believe it would actually work.
Government is the only competition to the truly wealthy, as a competing power center that can lessen if not eliminate their existing wealth, their control of the property that creates wealth, and thus ongoing happiness.
The autocratic state police power like what got going in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin is the pathological case of governmental power over-imbalance, smashing all private wealth into bits and picking up the pieces for its own purposes.
Democratic W Europe got kinda weird in the 60s and 70s as the left-labor parties won office. George Harrison’s “Tax Man”, the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Mainstreet”, Abba engaging in all sorts of shenanigans to avoid Sweden’s rather punitive taxation on high income aka “the 1%” earners. IKEA today also does weird things I believe to avoid punitive taxation.
The rich do not like that sort of regime, no sirree, and shout down any attempt to point out how much better Europe’s economy is working for people compared to ours.
“The 1%” do not “make” this money, they collect it — just like the taxman — largely from people below them on the income pyramid.
And it’s become government’s job to attempt to backfill this flow, returning money back into the paycheck economy, closing the loop such that the system is sustainable.
But what the rich clearly don’t want to have happen next is that they get taxed more than they are already. They’re playing poor-mouth, and using their control of the mass media to disempower people’s consciousness of what’s been going on, and what we can do at the ballot box going forward.
(I don’t really understand what the deal with Obama is now — he’s not the bomb-throwing leftist he was on the streets of Chicago, nor what happened to Bill Clinton, or what’s happening with Hillary for all that matter.)
Paging Chomsky, the System wants to keep the debate between the far right and the center right . . .
Privilege is simply the individual liberty enjoyed from “Private” “Law”, afforded to some but not others.
Privilege in the USSR came from connections to the Party apparat.
Privilege in a true egalitarian democracy should not exist at all.
Privilege in a minarchy would the status quo, he who has the gold makes the rules.
The 1% like that regime, like it a lot!
The other thing the 1% hates-hates-hates is “fiat money”.
It’s like playing Monopoly with the bank able to just give money to other players! How unfair!
Speaking of which I thought this chart:
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/JPNASSETS
was interesting, this is the Bank of Japan’s ‘quantum easing’ program of just giving money to the government to spend.
http://www.boj.or.jp/en/announcements/release_2015/rel150331c.pdf
~10T yen per month of new purchases! That’s ~Y80,000 per person, per month.
If the BOJ were just sending that money to every Japanese household everybody could stop working!
Fiat money also eliminates the rich’s monopsony position wrt capital investment. Abe is not under the thumb of the ‘bond vigilantes’ like Clinton allegedly was in the 1990s, the BOJ has his back now.
Man, Japan has simply *got* to start seeing inflation sooner or later with this printing. It’s mind-bendingly immense if it can continue indefinitely.
http://i.imgur.com/xwTnQ8G.png
is an interesting comparison of nation’s per-decile incomes.
Japan comes out pretty well; I like how their bottom-most 10% is at the same level as our bottom 10-20% at least.
Common law tort is sufficient. Regulation is just molasses around the feet of go-getters.
There is also a mischaracterisation of regulation as ‘something the government does for the good of its electing constituents’ for ‘fairness’ etc. This isn’t true. If regulations came from direct democracy (all voted on in referendums) this would be true.
Much of the time, regulations are beneficial to existing businesses, as they raise the barrier to entry to new competitors. Or sometimes they make it more difficult for existing businesses, such as regulations which tend to favour domestic firms over foreign ones, or regulations that restrict a ‘new way’ of doing something (e.g. taxi companies versus Uber).
Regulations, and much of new laws generally (including actions such as going to war in Iraq), are made for the benefit of minorities (corporations, interest groups etc), and always under the guise of ‘for the common good’. ‘The people’ merely tick one of two boxes (representing two people who weaseled their way up a party ladder by trading favors effectively) on a form, and that constitutes the sum of ‘the electoral mandate’ for 4 or so years. The remainder of the time, access to those politicians is reserved to lobbyists and other members of the political class. Groups then based on the size of their wallets, redirect democratic looting using lobbyists as their levers. The more money you have, the more and bigger levers you can buy. Such is the constitutional nature of the democracy the Left love so much.
Regulations are an outright bad thing, and under the actual meaning of the Commerce clause (which could hardly have been made more clear unless they added “no seriously, just ‘keep regular’, just ‘between states’, just ‘actual occurring commerce between people’, OK?”), are unconstitutional at the federal level.
Also on affirmative action, it’s an outright bad thing for minorities. It cheapens their qualifications (the bar was deliberately made lower for them), and it increases discrimination. Why would anyone hire a minority to work for them, if they can ‘call discrimination’ if they’re fired for incompetence etc, versus a non-minority who can’t? It’s a real thing – I’ve talked to businessmen who outright say “yes we don’t hire blacks anymore, my friend X sacked someone and got f-cked over because they were black and sued for discrimination”.
Funny how racism in favor of whites never has that effect on qualifications for whites. Clearly racism not only exists, but gives a bigger boost to whites that affirmative action ever gave to minorities. So, how come affirmative action “cheapens” things for minorities, but racism never does the same for whites?
Obviously, if the argument has merit, then so does the companion argument. The exact same logic would apply. And yet I never, ever hear the conservatives who say that affirmative action cheapens the accomplishments of minorities also say that racism cheapened their own accomplishments.
Sorry, calling bullshit on this. Really, it’s pretty obvious.
First, this is kind of like the returning-Vietnam-vet-got-spat-on story: it’s always a friend of a friend, or some guy you heard about somewhere—but never a verifiable source. Go ahead, give me an actual case name or number on one of these cases that happened to a guy known to the guy you know.
I have seen the exact same phenomenon with affirmative action in terms of people reporting that offices have to hire unqualified black women or else they will get sued by someone or otherwise punished. When I ask for a source it’s always some unidentified person they once talked to. And it’s never true, because affirmative action never says anyone must hire anyone who is unqualified for the position. Go ahead, call up the EEOC and ask.
But this claim? That all a minority who does poorly at their job has to do is cry “racism” and they can successfully sue? That’s utter BS. Obvious BS. Two huge reasons immediately come to mind. First, suing for racism is not easy. It takes rather serious, verifiable evidence in the affirmative to back up the claim, and is rather involved. Don’t think so? Call up a trial lawyer, say you’re Hispanic and got fired for incompetence, say that you have no evidence except that you are Hispanic and got fired, and see how eager the lawyer is to sue.
Second—and this should be clear to anyone—if it were that easy, then we’d be seeing lawsuits nearly every time a minority was fired. We’re not.
No doubt these “businessmen” you have talked to did not actually know people that this happened to, but instead they likely also heard the story from someone who said they knew someone who it had happened to. It no doubt started as an urban legend at best, or just a BS story someone invented at worst. Most likely it’s part of the ongoing smear against A.A., like the story I quoted above. Conservatives love spreading these stories, always representing it as solid fact.
Or else the story came from someone who actually did commit racial discrimination, but rationalized it by claiming the person was inept and they sued because the bleeding-heart system made it so easy.