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Politics : Libertarian Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (8413)	6/6/2011 11:41:05 AM
From: TimF	2 Recommendations Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13056

Extensive government control of commerce has a high correlation with reduced economic growth and lower prosperity. Crony capitalism, state ownership of the means of production, a system like the liscence Raj, any system where you need to rely on the arbitrary decisions of burocrats or politicians to start or conduct a business, etc. all are harmful to prosperity, and we can see clear examples of that harm all over the world. Less visible is the harm caused by regulations in countries that have more responsive political systems and less corruption. With such a political system, and when you start off relatively wealthy, you can have a lot of regulation and still have prosperity. The regulation has a cost, but its not enough to sink the economy in most cases. The US became one of the wealthiest nations in the world when it had far less extensive regulation, to perhaps a lesser extent the same is true for many of the other wealthy relative highly regulated countries. Much of what their governments do amounts to operating as a parasite on the private sector, but the private sector is healthy enough to grow even with the parasite. Put an equivalently sized parasite on a poorer country, and/or a country with a more corrupt less responsive political system (so that it imposes the same level of regulations in a more perverse and wealth destroying way), and the parasite will destroy the vitality of the host, which is why a country like Pakistan can't have the same level of regulations or government spending that a country like the US can have (even after adjusting for Pakistan being smaller).