At the risk of being more annoying, consider your simple apples - to grow them you need ground (a licensed real estate system, county taxes, road maintenance, fertilizer that is not harmful to people, farm equipment that has to be manufactured from raw materials and sold and involved a whole other huge chain of people where government regulation plays a role), labor to harvest and process and ship the apples (throw in the payroll tax system plus accountants), the interstate road system to get the apples where they are going (federally funded), the truck itself and the gasoline (manufacturing and safety standards), the supermarket chain that sells them that may be a public company with all the attendant SEC regulations, and so on.
How many people are involved in setting up the regulations for real estate, equipment and vehicles, fertilizer, gasoline, traffic, public supermarket companies, etc.? Can you measure the impact of regulation on each dimension of each input factor? Where would you start cutting back on all the various regulations for land/transport/food/fertilizer/distribution/marketing and so on? What would you sacrifice first - apple quality, road safety, labor safety, protection against monopoly pricing, accounting standards for the publicly traded supermarket...the list goes on and on.
And that's just for a simple apple to crunch with your morning snack. Complex societies don't function with idealistic "free markets" in the ideological sense.
;<) |
