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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (59737)	12/7/2002 6:53:55 AM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

The “invisible hand” model does not assume the non-existence of government. Barring an extremist fringe, even ardent invisible-handers are not anarchists; they acknowledge that an economy cannot function without a basic legal framework. They just want the government to stay completely out of economic matters. Even this, of course, is impossible outside the realm of pure theory: it is inevitable that the legal framework will have some impact on economic behaviour. My own feeling is that the role of government in the economy is analagous to the role of the referee in a soccer game. If the referee is overly intrusive, the game fizzles and dies. If the referee is overly lenient, the game becomes a brawl. The degree of strictness required is not consistent: there are games that require a very light hand and games that require constant intervention. The key is to scale the degree of intervention to make it appropriate to the nature of the individual game and the character of the players. Whether government is a “helping hand” or a “grabbing hand” is largely a matter of perspective, unless one is talking about one of the more egregiously rapacious 3rd world governments. We would all prefer to see government helping us and grabbing from someone else. It is not uncommon to hear people rail against government spending, then turn around and demand that the defense budget, already the world’s largest by a staggering margin, be increased by a huge percentage. In the American agricultural heartland, supposed center of folk wisdom, spending that subsidizes the urban poor is recognized as pure grab-and-dole. The same people see our enormous agricultural subsidies, which involve a good deal of grabbing not only on tax day but every time an American buys food, as entirely worthwhile and beneficial expenditures. Like most issues, it’s a balancing act that requires constant refinement, and those who claims to have absolute solutions are, like ideologues everywhere, talking through their backsides.