Monte wrote:
And those businesses could not have done business without a government to enforce contracts for them, no matter the scale. In fact, if you look at the relationship between government and private industry in the gilded age, I think you'll find that there was a good deal of regulation (although it mainly served the interests of the wealthy elite). Only after the consequences of that sort of governance - the Great Depression - did government start working for interests beyond just the wealthiest people. We have slid a long way back towards that sort of relationship between government and big money, and lo and behold we are struggling our way out of a near-depression. Shocking, that.
Your logic is ridiculous. If there wasn't a government to enforce contract law, then private businesses wouldn't do any business ever? That's ridiculous. People would still trade, they'd just have to be much more cautious. A de-facto standard of contract would develop itself because businesses would depend on their good reputation to maintain patronage. In fact, this said phenomena exists today in the form of media publications that do nothing but review products and services and websites where people can exchange information about the quality of different services.
Quote:
Actually, they do. There are those that believe that supply creates demand. It's just not true. In order for there to be demand, people must be willing and able to purchase various goods and services at alternate prices. The more aggregate demand, the more businesses will flourish as money flows through the various sectors of the macro economy.
You are forgetting, or maybe you never considered, that demand is the same thing as supply. Your demand is your supply. You cannot demand anything unless you are able to supply something in return. The currency in which you barter is just the quantitative measure of this. Unless involved parties can supply something, no one can demand anything, because
demand requires purchasing power. Economics is just the exchange of supply.
Adjectives like "aggregate" and "macro" don't lend any credence to your argument. There is no "macro" economy. Our economy is just an economy. There's no special qualifier that makes in "macro" in any sense. All you are doing with your wildly gross misuse of those words is demonstrating you haven't spent any time reading or studying basic economic theory in any school and simply responding based on your best guess at reasoning which helps supplant what you want to be right.
Quote:
However, government regulation definitely provides customers. Customers can be more sure of the safety of products. They work in jobs that provide minimum benefits, wages, and worker safety. As a result, they can afford to purchase more and are more willing to spend money. Public education helps consumers make informed choices (and, you know, teaches them to read and do math), which helps competition. Public transportation increases commerce by moving people about more cheaply. More customers means more sales. Cheap access to the internet allows commerce to flow more freely online. Food preparation regulations help to make people feel more secure about eating out. And they do it more often. Social Safety nets help encourage people to take entrepreneurial risks they might otherwise avoid for fear of being tossed out in the street should their efforts fail.
Except that you are presenting a false dilemma. Private industry is capable of everything you mentioned above. In fact, government supplanting funds which might go to private ventures which could provide the exact same role detract from the efficiency that some of those services could be executed with.
The government overseas things such as food and health standards. But even so, it's still insufficient in many cases. The fundamental problem with government is it is not run like a private venture. Private venture must make maximum return on its investments by creating the best possible product or it will risk obsolescence.
If Consumer Reports begins to turn out terribly inaccurate and uninformed product reviews, for instance, they risk losing their customer base. You might argue that they have more to gain by being corrupt and getting kickbacks for favorable reviews, but the service of accurate product information will be taken up by another venture which will supplant and make them irrelevant should this happen. Of course, if people refuse to hold them to a high standard by continuing to purchase a malfeasant product, that is another case altogether.
Quote:
So, let's think about this for a second. Let's say there was no government.
Bob goes to your store. He wants a widget that costs nine chickens (you see, there is no unified means of currency without some form of government regulation).
Stop right there. The chickens are currency. Currency is just a marker used in place of money. Money is not dollars or francs or yen. It is a concept which proposes wealth can be measured quantitatively and traded without actually moving around durable goods or providing services instantly.
Currency used to represent money has existed long before government created centralized currencies. People often traded depository notes represented actual quantities of rice or goods they owned.
Quote:
He takes the widget to the counter, and when you ask for your chickens, he says "**** you, and **** your chickens".
He's broken the contract. Enforcement of the contract now relies entirely on who is the faster draw. In this case, it's bob. So, not only do you not have your nine chickens, you now have a sucking chest wound to deal with. And without a government, you have no recourse to deal with Bob, who broke your contract and then shot you.
So, government must exist in order to enforce contracts. We all subdue ourselves to a common rule of law in order to mitigate these circumstances. Yes, people will still rob stores. But we as a society have rules about that sort of thing, and a due process in place to deal with it when it happens.
That's a vast oversimplification of what would actually happen. Now everyone knows that trade with Bob carries the risk of death/injury and/or loss of property. He has compromised his own business. This is no different than Toyota's malfeasance building and selling cars that have bad acceleration control.
The fact of the matter is, people obey rules of common law not because it is law, but because doing so facilitates business. If I constantly walk out of restaurants (assuming an absence of law enforcement as you are suggesting), restaurants will simply stop serving me. Those who do business with restaurants might refuse business to me as well because me taking robbing the restaurants hurts them mutually. The Written Law is simply a codification and exact specification of what constitutes the laws which best help facilitate these ends, because ultimately, that is the goal of law.
Quote:
Here's another example -
You sell prescription drugs. You develop a drug that you claim cures cancer. In reality, it merely makes cancer patients feel a bit better, but actually hastens their demise. Because we live in your world, where government regulation does not exist, you were never required to actually prove that your medicine works.
You are very wealthy. You have many chickens. And you use those chickens to pay off doctors to pimp your crappy drug. Desperate people come to those doctors, afraid for their life, and bring all their chickens. Oh, how the fowl flows into your giant coop. Your chicken profit margin is through the roof, and a lot of people are dead. But who cares? You made your wealth, and even if folks stop buying your crappy product you walk away rolling in Denver omlettes.
First of all, can we stop with the histrionic and over-the-top literary imagery? It's just ridiculous and doesn't serve to make your point any more valid.
In the above scenario, the doctors are risking their practice to prescribe medication that they know is harmful (or maybe are ignorant as to whether or not it is). Either way, it is the doctor's job to prescribe things which do not compromise his patient's health. If he does, he has no patients, and no one to "pimp" my crappy drug to. If he can't do so, I can't give him chicken kickbacks and the whole system falls apart.
And then of course, this is absent that there isn't some sort of nationally acclaimed review board who's sole purpose is to review medications so that patients have an alternative source of information to cross-verify any advice. And the option of getting second opinions. But what, but what, but what IF they are all in cahoots??? We must remember that the due diligence for protection of the consumer lies with the consumer itself. And of course that as long as the service provided by honest information is valuable (how can you argue that it's not) some company will provide it.
Quote:
Government serves a role in protecting consumers from business people like the example above. It is impossible and unreasonable to expect that consumers need to be doctoral-level experts in every product they buy. The government provides the infrastructure to enforce your contracts, and as a result, you must make sure that the products you sell are safe and effective. It's part of the deal. Your contracts get enforced, but you must submit yourself to regulations regarding product safety and public health.
Except no one expected consumers to do so, and that information can be bought. It's part of purchasing the expertise of a doctor. You are buying both his technical knowledge
and his goodwill. Only a doctor who consistently sells both is valuable. And businesses who do nothing but evaluate doctors on the merits of these two qualities will exist in private enterprise. That consumers are too busy to find one is a different and irrelevant matter. In fact, were there no
false (and believe me, it is false) sense of security for government to perform this role of due diligence on our own behalf, the need for such diligence would be greatly lessened.
Would you trust the government agency on swords if it stamped a sword for your use?
Quote:
When consumers are confident in products (because of strong safety standards and consequences for people who scam people), they are more willing to buy. That increases demand, and thus improves the overall economy.
Strong safety standards that lead to negligent consumers buying things that don't meet their expectations does not increase demand.
Government regulations are created and enforced by agencies that don't face the consequence of extinction for malfeasance.Quote:
A basic logical fallacy. The wealthy *might* be wealthy because they invested capital into ventures that returned a revenue. They also might be wealthy because they scammed lots of people out of their money. They might be wealthy because they participated in the slave trade. They might be wealthy because they inherited wealth. They might be wealthy because they won the lottery. They might be wealthy because they won a lawsuit. They might be wealthy because they robbed a bank.
We aren't discussing property theft. And even so, private property protection services can mitigate that. Do people not hire private security guards and form gated communities?
It is not a logical fallacy because you simply do not understand what wealth is and how it is created. Scamming people out of property just means you took capital away from those who are incapable or unwilling to wisely invest their funds. A fool and his money are easily parted and a fool who cannot protect his assets is incapable of making his wealth create more wealth. If he is, he's not a fool, is he?
If you inherit wealth, either you will use it to invest in venture which provide productive services and goods for society and maintain or increase your wealth, or you will not and you'll lose it.
Quote:
Quote:
In order for a venture to return a revenue, it must be more productive that what it consumes - it must have revenue leftover to pay dividends, recapitalize the returns and/or pay interest on bonds it issued under its own credit. Therefore, wealthy people got that way by placing capital with ventures that added wealth to society.
Again, a wild logical fallacy. Lots of very wealthy people got there with get-rich-quick scams that over time lost a ton of money, but in the short run paid them a great deal.
You didn't demonstrate how it's a fallacy, because you didn't point out where the logic is flawed. You posted something which is absent any significance to what was posted.
If a single person scams a lot of people, it means those people he scammed were incapable of managing their own funds responsibly. If they were, they wouldn't get scammed. "But how were they supposed to know?" How, indeed? Obviously not everyone he talked to bought his scam. Maybe some people considered it, did some research and realized it might be a scam, or the risk that it was a scam was too great considering the potential cost and supposed payoff.
Those are the exact same traits that describe those who posses good business acumen. It's not that good business people are somehow immune to scams, or that scams only target people that are not sharp in business dealings. It's that in order to not get scammed, you have to be at least some basic level of intelligence, wits, reasoning, judgment and vision. Those same traits are what enable specific individuals to figure out how to lead company which hires individuals who provide things better, cheaper, faster, greener and so forth.
Quote:
The CRA again? Really? It's already been debunked a thousand times. The vast majority of those bad deals had nothing to do with government's attempt to get more people into homes. In fact, the vast majority of defaults come from wealthy speculators and not the people with lower income. That old dog won't hunt.
Did I mention the CRA? Do you care to address the effects of subsidized low interest rates, tax incentives such as credits for homebuyers, itemized deductions and the like? What about the massive secondary market which provided incentivization to package what was inherently illiquid mortgage debt, secure it and sell it under the guise there was some supposed secondary market, which ultimately was just Federal mandate of not letting businesses fail and guaranteeing debt by capping losses due to insuring counter party risk?
Quote:
The bottom line also leads to a great many costs that the public must endure. They are called externalities. For example, when an unregulated company dumps waste into a river that provides water for the local population, the health problems that waste disposal causes constitutes a cost borne by an unrelated third party. Government plays a role in regulating that sort of thing in order to mitigate some of those costs.
You are completely ignoring the consumer's responsibility. If people would rather have cheap good than keep a river clean, it's because people just don't give a ****. No law is going to change that, because as long as consumers are willing to forgo green production in favor for cheap prices, manufacturers will supply goods that meet those requirements.
And to the contrary, goods that are marketed as "green" produced actually do sell. That is an example of how the market does allow consumers the ability to choose green over cheap. But ultimately, it is the consumer's choice.