[quote=jpinpb]In a real free market, as a perfect example, the financial mess we’re in, the government would NOT intervene, certainly and especially to the extent it has. So imo, this is not to be considered a free market at all.[/quote]
But in real life, there is no such thing as a totally free market. (Well, I guess anarchy could be considered a free market, but somehow I don’t think that’s what most freemarketeers want) And I’m more than willing to agree the govt should not have intervened as they did in the current financial crisis. (And I think a really strong argument can be made that they way they intervened was “because undue influence by people who were giving big fat campaign contributions”, which is a nice euphemism for corruption)
But, assuming we’re gonna have some rules to our society, the question is who makes them, and who enforces them, and how do we keep things as efficient as possible? My argument is that the efficiency is overwhelmingly determined not by whether govt makes the rules or the free market makes the rules, but by how much corruption your system ends up having. And ultimately I don’t think that’s something that gets regulated, but is a social/cultural value that needs to be promoted by the people in the society. But hey, what do I know, I’m not a “social scientist”.
But I do want to stress that we need to be watchful of what the original poster is hinting at. That the answer to our problems is more regulation. He makes this argument by denouncing less regulation (what he’s calling libertarianism) and suggests since less regulation was a failure, clearly more regulation is better. While I agrain that less regulation didn’t work out very well, I’m not in agreement that more is better. Just because A is bad, doesn’t mean the opposite of A is good. The opposite of A could easily be even more bad than just A.
