Timelordwho wrote:
Quote:
Also, you kinda left out the part about opposition to government intervening in the free market. Obviously, the government should be directly involved in managing our nations military. It should not be so directly involved in managing our markets.
Why? I think it should be actively involved in dampening the business cycle, to create more continuous economic functions, and thus more
correctly correlate good ideas and profit, and bad ideas with loss, as well as muting the social strife associated with preventable market disturbances.
It's degrees though, hence my statement about being "so directly involved" (as it is in the military for example). Passing legislation to prevent market failures is one thing. Adjusting lending rates and monetary supply is as well (hence why I don't get all flustered about the Fed). The danger is when the government goes beyond the broad strokes of macro economics and starts directly meddling in individual industries. When it decides that it knows what a "good idea" is and decides to artificially manipulate the market to make those good ideas pay off, while those it dislikes it calls "bad ideas" and makes them less profitable.
This is why conservatives have so much trouble with the whole "Green energy/jobs" deal. If those jobs are good jobs, they should be good whether the government intervenes or not. The deal with Solyndra is a classic example, but it just the most obvious case. In all cases, we're losing money because somewhat by definition, if those companies were the best investments for our market to put capital into, it would. The very fact that the government has to step in and shuffle money around means that those *aren't* good investments.
They may be good for other reasons having nothing to do with economics, but that's a different argument. I've always said that if you can convince people that the cost of subsidizing green energy jobs is worth paying for the cleaner environment you get then that's all great. But when you try to sell those sorts of things on the ground of it being a "good investment", or somehow helping our economy or creating more jobs, you're lying.
And that's what we mean by keeping government out of business. It's not about broadly defined and applied regulations to all business, but the process of (at the risk of repeating a phrase of rhetoric) "picking winners and losers" in the market. Government is *not* supposed to do that. It's not government's job to decide that Solyndra's product is the best way to produce solar power, or that GE's wind turbines should be more profitable than they would otherwise be. The free market does one thing incredibly well: It determines the relative values of things. It sucks at keeping the environment clean. It sucks at ensuring our borders are secure. It sucks at ensuring that no one is discriminated against.
But it is by far the best way to determine what things are the best relative investment. We should be using that instead of trying to fight against it. We should hail those who succeed in the market and attempt to emulate them, rather than castigate them and attempt to punish them for their success. I just see the sorts of protests going on with the Occupy folks as a grand example of exactly the wrong thing to do for the wrong reasons and at the wrong time. We need to embrace success, not punish it.
Edited, Oct 12th 2011 7:12pm by gbaji