I remember Nixon trying and failing to use govt. interference with the markets by slapping wage and price controls on certain industries.
And briefly he tried general wage and price controls, which I believe had not been tried in the US since FDR, and never before him, or since Nixon.
I'm always really against almost any form of price controls, mainly since they tend to work so horribly, they distort production and consumption choices and generally reduce economic efficiency.(unless they are set so as to essentially have no effect, either price ceilings far above what anyone would pay, or price floors so low that no one would sell the item at that price). Even if they could somehow work well (and generally they don't work well and often work horribly), I'd still be against them for libertarian, and constitutional reasons. I think its not of the government's business to set prices, and that its just wrong for them to do so, and also the constitution IMO doesn't give the US federal government the power to do so, except for goods or services that are traded between states or between countries. Commerce within a state should largely be free of federal control.
It was the memory of this that modern day Republicans have used to adhere to a totally free market philosophy.
Not really. Very few republicans would adhere to a totally free market philosophy. Certainly no modern president has, not even Reagan. I'd probably extent that to drop the modern and just be "no president". Hoover gets attacked for adhering to laissez-faire, but the reality of his administration was quite different, he was very interventionist (less so than FDR, but FDR was #1 in terms of promoting government control of the economy). In the 19th century there was all sorts of government intervention supporting canals and then rail roads, etc. The best candidates might be the very early presidents, and after them maybe Calvin Coolidge, but even for them you'd have to drop the "totally", and leave it with just "free market philosophy", and I wouldn't even apply that much to either Bush (despite their lip service of the idea), or to Nixon (who was probably the most interventionist Republican president in our history).
I think the confusion about Republican's being such massive supporters of "totally free markets", comes from some of the lip service some prominent Republicans give the idea, but when you look at their actual policies you see something different. Reagan at least had some policies along those lines (tax cuts, tax simplification, some deregulation), but no president since him (regulations climbed under every president since, and look at all of GW's spending, and while GW did cut taxes he didn't have a real tax reform). |
