Free market capitalism has provided some good. More good than its rival ideologies, I’d imagine. Unfortunately, this has been used too often as an argument to stave off government intervention.
Looks pretty well thought out to me.
Wait, though. Isn’t government intervention what exacerbated the financial crisis in depression-era germany, when the government printed money and plunged the country into a state of hyper-inflation? This is true, and people were making shoe-leather stews to a greater degree than even the down-on-their-luck Americans, in the pre-WWII years. In fact, doesn’t government intervention consistently cause problems for the functioning of the free market? The Wealth of Nations specifically personifies the innate wisdom of letting companies duke it out as an invisible hand, guiding every transaction.
This is basically an evolutionary theory. That by competing with one another (that is, businesses) for nourishment (customers) in an ecosystem (the economy,) eventually, the best and strongest, with all the best tricks, will prevail. To a fair extent, this is true, and they prevail to a fantastic degree, propagating all over the world, spreading their influence. Watch the discovery channel some time, though, and you’ll see some of the sick tricks evolution comes up with. An invisible hand is not necessarily a benevolent hand, and these are some cases setting precedent, where we as humans intervened in free market development, lest it intervene in ours.
One particularly sticky wicket of capitalism is cheap labor. Cutting corners, making your company as nimble and light as it can possibly be. One trick the economic beast took advantage of for literally thousands of years, of course, was slavery. If you can produce your product without paying your workers, your overhead will be significantly lowered. Of course, when absolutely everyone is employing this trick, how is one to survive without it? It is a nasty business, but if we give it up, then surely some other country without scruples will be able to buy and sell ours in short order. Slavery is worse in brazenness, but similar in spirit to…
Child labour. If you hook ‘em young, you’ve got them for life. This is especially effective if you’re keeping them long hours, and not providing them with enough money to pursue any other options for social elevation. This may sound an awful lot like a dictatorship or totalitarian regime, but domination rears its ugly head of its own free will, sometimes. With children it’s so easy, too. Make sure not to regulate their working conditions, though, because they’re a little harder to keep them down when they’re older. Not impossible, though.
Sweat shops. Yet another case of disregarding the spirit, but obeying the letter of the law. Kind of. Sort of. To be fair, these employees tend to be highly motivated, since their career options are grim, to say the least. If you were to choose between soldering motherboards and the slippery slope to turning yourself and your entire family into sub-human scavengers on the massive ad hoc garbage dumps bordering your town, you might strap on a ground bracelet too. Although you might end up with…
Poison. For some reason or another, there always seems to be some company that somehow took something ridiculously toxic, or bio-hazardous, or radioactive, and put it in our toothpaste. This, a lot of the time, is due to the relatively light pricing, but really, why are we making this stuff so readily available to toy manufacturers, if it’s killing us? You’re not thinking outside the box. You can cut corners by buying cheaper materials, but you can also hire people who don’t know what they’re doing. You can deal with people who have a lot of something that no one in their right mind is going to buy and process. Let the marketing department deal with it on the other end!
You know, this was supposed to be critical of victorian era industry, but it’s getting a little bit to current right now. The point is, as with child labour laws, the abolition of slavery, and our current battles against sweat shops and contaminated goods, these were all changed, with positive effects, by government regulations. It is not always just the people in charge making the political move for partisan reasons.
Businesses flourished, in the absence of slavery and child labour – they absolutely bloomed, and were forced to develop better practices and more creative operations. There really is such a thing as being too big to fail, but a little bit of a stress test (like when you drastically change the environment) is how you determine exactly who is too big to fail. The ones who are don’t, and they’re better, stronger, more ethically evolved for it. The problem with a free market is that sometimes some communism, sometimes some fascism can creep in and steal a little market share. Sometimes, legislative intervention is a moral imperative.
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