Regulation of corporate and private sector activity by a government that is "big enough" to do it invites disaster. Because all regulation and rules, especially when applied arbitrarily by government officials, favors the bigger monsters over the little guy.
Rules to "protect" us from bad food in restaurant also "protect" the biggest restaurant chains from little itsy bitsy Mom and Pops. My wife cooks lots of food a 1000 times better than McDonald's hamburgers, but how many regulations and permits would we have to jump through to just (legally) sell ONE MEAL to a neighbor? Even ONE?
All the blah blah about we have to stop monopolies. Bill Gates is the epitome of your monopoly-loving hustler, but two things happened to him. (1) he got anti-trust heat put on him until he (a) started donating to politicians in significant amounts, and (2) Linux stopped his takeover of Internet servers from Unix, and slowed down his hubris. And has forced them to offer their stuff dirt cheap to Germany and Peru.
Railroads have lost big to air and road vehicle transport, after our government "protected" us from predatory corporations and "protected" their unions from the free market.
The minimum wage is another example of a supposedly well-intentioned measure to "protect" the poor worker from abusive wages by his corporate masters, but the one who loses the most is not the corporate master, he's okay, but the guy who has a choice between starving and working for less than minimum wage. Minimum wage is an artificial limit on the labor pool, and the people at the very bottom are kept out of it. A late close relative of mine could have benefited from a bottomless minimum wage, and someone may have been able to benefit from his limited abilities if they were allowed.
Austrian economics is the best description of how it works in the real world.
Regulation of corporate and private sector activity by a government that is "big enough" to do it invites disaster. Because all regulation and rules, especially when applied arbitrarily by government officials, favors the bigger monsters over the little guy.
Rules to "protect" us from bad food in restaurant also "protect" the biggest restaurant chains from little itsy bitsy Mom and Pops. My wife cooks lots of food a 1000 times better than McDonald's hamburgers, but how many regulations and permits would we have to jump through to just (legally) sell ONE MEAL to a neighbor? Even ONE?
All the blah blah about we have to stop monopolies. Bill Gates is the epitome of your monopoly-loving hustler, but two things happened to him. (1) he got anti-trust heat put on him until he (a) started donating to politicians in significant amounts, and (2) Linux stopped his takeover of Internet servers from Unix, and slowed down his hubris. And has forced them to offer their stuff dirt cheap to Germany and Peru.
Railroads have lost big to air and road vehicle transport, after our government "protected" us from predatory corporations and "protected" their unions from the free market.
The minimum wage is another example of a supposedly well-intentioned measure to "protect" the poor worker from abusive wages by his corporate masters, but the one who loses the most is not the corporate master, he's okay, but the guy who has a choice between starving and working for less than minimum wage. Minimum wage is an artificial limit on the labor pool, and the people at the very bottom are kept out of it. A late close relative of mine could have benefited from a bottomless minimum wage, and someone may have been able to benefit from his limited abilities if they were allowed.
Austrian economics is the best description of how it works in the real world.