Republicans & Conservatives: Archives

I couldn’t agree more!

I couldn’t agree more either. I think. Agreeing with David makes me question whether I understand what it is he is agreeing with. What can it hurt though.

Eric, I wonder of your glasses are tinted sometimes seeming to make you see ultra liberalism in some of the most centrist and moderate of opinions. I have since Reagan been a social liberal and fiscal conservative and neither in the extreme. All of my writings reflect that position. I get the same reaction from some on the left too! I am getting used to this concern over agreeing with me these days with a 14 year old daughter, though. :-)

I ‘preemptively’ comisserate with you. My daughters are 2, 3, and 7 and they’ll all be 14 soon enough.

Jack, rarely has there been a government such as ours.
Who was it that said, “what’s good for General Motors is good for America”?
America has been run by the corporations since the industrial revolution. They have set the wages and the profit margin. And for the last half century they have also set the price of a polotician. With the spate of corporate buy-outs the control of this country isn’t in Washington, but in corporate boardrooms and on Wall Street.
When Reagan started de-regulation at the behest of corporate America, is when things really went to shit.

Rocky

Charles Wilson, CEO of GM, said that in 1955. The statement has context. In 1955, when he said it GM made half of all the cars sold in the U.S. Car buying was a good proxy for economic prosperity, so the statement actually made some sense. The other famous quote along a similar line is Calvin Coolidge saying that the chief business of the American people is business. There is also context to this. Coolidge believed that the free market was the best way to ensure the prosperity and dignity of the people and he was right.

You seem to indict business for American prosperity. “America has been run by the corporations since the industrial revolution.” While I disagree with this statement (corporations are only part of a complex mix) I would be proud of the results. If corporations are responsible for the great country we currently enjoy, I say God bless them every one.

Consider the alternatives to free markets. In the lifetimes of people currently alive, we have heard that the free market was dead and that free market systems would be replaced by fascism, Nazism, communism, communalism, corporatism (in the political, not economic sense) and just plain anarchy. We have seen the results these things produce and free market is better than all the rest.

You may quarrel with the particular flavors of free market, but it is the only system that has shown itself capable of producing enough wealth to pull most of its citizens out of abject misery. By flavors, by the way, I include most countries of Europe, N. American and Japan, as well as places like Taiwan and Singapore. There are a lot of differences between and among them, but they all recognize the market determines the limites and possibilites of political power.

This is opposed to the other –isms I mentioned above. Most of them are on the garbage heap of history, but they thought that government could run the economy without regard to free markets. That is how they ended up on the garbage heap.

There are plenty of things I don’t like about America today. Some time I will write a long post about that. But when I consider all the alternatives, I would rather be here and I would rather live now than any other time or place I can think of.

Democratic government is a creation of people banding together to create a society governed by laws on which the majority agree tempered by a constitution that limits the power of the majority (the government). Under capitalist systems, business is a creation of investors (capitalists) banding together (sometimes) to maximize the return on legal (usually) investments. Notice that these businesses are often legal entities with rights of individuals, but that escape some of the individual responsibilities (they don’t vote directly and they can’t be sent to jail). Without government to temper the actions of businesses, you do have Ghengis Khan free markets. If you doubt that government needs to have a fairly heavy hand, look at places where or times when it doesn’t and see what happens to wealth and social unrest. Have a Merry Christmas everyone.

My experience is that the Republican Party’s definition of economic freedom seems to be more oriented towards eliminating checks and balances on the behavior of Corporate America than it is against intervention in the economic system.

Corporations need checks and balances on their behavior. No organization, government or otherwise should be set superior to the law, exempt from punishment for harmful behavior.

Certain duties are inherent for corporations.

A corporation must provide the best goods and services possible, and if lives or commerce depend upon those products, the greatest care must be taken.

It must also be honest and transparent about the state of its finances, because its investors have invested their money to make money. The investor, should have every opportunity to gain the information that will allow them to make their decisions, wise or not.

It should also be a duty of those inside and outside of the corporation not to act on information until it’s been made available in general. Insiders and those in contact with them should not get to play games with investments and finances within companies, trading on information before investors have a legitimate chance to discover these thing.

Corporations of late have become much more cynical and hard-hearted, allowing harmful and sometimes lethal behavior to go on. When dealing with certain industries, danger and risk are inherent in the system, but steps can and should be taken to prevent unnecessary problem, to strike a balance between necessary risk and needless risk.

It is useless for conservatives to advocate family values and moral behavior when the corporations persistently set an example of morally heedless behavior in both business and labor practices. If people are not held accountable for what they do between 9 and 5, we do little by sanctioning their behavior the rest of the time.

Jack and others, it is important to define terms for a debate to productively take place. I offer the following from Widipedia:

A free market economy is an idealized form of market economy in which buyers and sellers are permitted to carry out transactions based solely on mutual agreement without interventionism in the form of taxes, subsidies, regulation, or government provision of goods or services beyond simply the protection of property rights and enforcement of contracts. The free market is a mainstay of ideologies such as minarchism, libertarianism, and 19th century liberalism, as well as the Western understanding of capitalism. It is anathema to communism and some variants of socialism, although modern liberalism and other variants of socialism seek only to mitigate what they see as the problems of an unrestrained free market.

We have not had free markets since the 1929 Stock Market crash. We have had a mixed economy in which government invoked restraint, when it appeared warranted, over market players, and sought some measure of socialized policy to insure consumerism as a basis for growth of the capital markets. FEMA, K-12 education, Interstate Highway system, national parks and monuments, Minimum Wage laws, the Securities and Exchange Commission, National Defense, DoD, Pentagon, and many other aspects of our society have been socialized to either 1) provide for the nation where the private sector could or would not, or 2) provide for a maintenance floor of consumerism and quality of life for as many citizens as possible.

Subtract out of the corporations profits and earnings all of the consumerism that resulted from retired folks over the last 45 years which came from Social Security checks, and then ask yourself if our capitalism would be anywhere near as strong and dominant in the world as it is today? We are talking a few trillion in consumer sales that otherwise would not have taken place without our mixed socialized/capitalist system. Most retired parents now live separate from their offspring. That would not be the case if it were not for Social Security. Also, what about socialized education. Did not our great nation benefit from a large and growing pool ever better educated citizens as a result of socialized education.

One really must think in these macroeconomic terms if one is to debate rationally the subject of free markets vs. regulated markets.

I wouldn’t make the Winipedia the final arbiter, nor do I think it is useful to get bogged down in ideal systems. What I described as free market is the system the primarily relies on market forces. As I wrote, it requires strong government to make laws and enforce contracts.

There has never existed a free market as described in the Winipedia. Public education existed in the U.S. long before 1929. Much of U.S. infrastructure was built by government or with government/private partnerships. Our national park system was founded in 1876. The whole point of my post was to point to the false dichotomy between government and business. Whenever we get too much of either, it is a dangerous thing.

Academics like to set up ideal systems. They like to think. That is what they are good at. Reality is never so neat. The world paid a terrible price for Marx’s theorizing.

For me, the strength of the free market is the free part. Communism, fascism and many forms of socialism were monumental failures because they lacked flexibility. That is what I continue to advocate for our system. Don’t try to devise the perfect system. Humans can’t do that. We need to experiment, change, try new things. We will often be wrong, but we will always be better than the alternatives.