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Politics : Mainstream Politics and Economics -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: koan who wrote (24337)	8/21/2012 6:33:14 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 85487

Why didn't free markets end slavery or segregation? Why did governments create and protect slavery as an institution and impose a large amount of segregation themselves why forcing others to do so in ways they didn't want to? Your arguments seems to be that markets aren't perfect, so we need big government, but big government's record in this area was worse. And if you answer because of government, then you are implying we can function without government. In general - No, there is no such implication. Criticizing big government in general and/or specific actions of government, is not criticizing government in general. And if you do criticize the government in general by criticizing the common flaws of government, and thus calling for it to be smaller, possibly only minimal, is not calling for functioning with no government. More specifically in response to your claimed point - Its ridiculous to try to take - "Government acted unjustly, and also hampered the proper function of markets, when it imposed segregation" - and present it as some sort of call for anarchy. We cannot have a government that is run only by capitalism. And we can't have government that is run by frogs either. Which is a non-sequitur, but no more than your statement is. Getting the government out of the way for most market transactions, doesn't even vaguely resemble "capitalism running the government", and to the extent "capitalists running (or really just influencing) the government" is seen as a problem 1 - "Capitalists" != "Capitalism" 2 - The more government tries to control markets the more participants in markets will try to influence governments. If you want business out of government, the best way to do that is to get government mostly out of business (mostly because it does have a legitimate role in dealing with fraud, and serious non pecuniary externalities like pollution) P J O'Rourke put it well - "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."