Black Moclips wrote:1) Of course there is corporate waste. However, a corporation that wastes doesn't stay around for long does it?
Actually, large corporations can sustain significant amounts of corruption and waste both because their competitors have the same problem and because their losses are offset by the vast advantages of being a large corporation. But I'm really much more concerned with abuse than waste. Both government and corporate waste have been greatly exaggerated for polemical purposes.
Furthermore, a corporation wasting its resources does not impact me personally, unless I'm an owner of the company. I can choose not to do business with such a corporation. In this case, the market will punish the business if it doesn't change course.
Corporate waste in the sense of inefficiency may not have much impact on you, but corporate abuses can have very significant impact on you. Unregulated corporations have a tendency to pollute the environment, unsustainably plunder natural resources, employ strongarm tactics, exploit customers, sell unsafe products, and establish monopolies. These kinds of behaviors are difficult for a laissez-faire free market to self-regulate.
2) This of course, is not a new argument, but the standard zero sum fallacy - in otherwords, the pie is finite, and if he gets more, I get less. I reject this view, because wealth doesn't just exist, its created! The gap between rich and poor may grow wider; however, the bottom rises as the top ceiling expands.
I agree with you that the pie is not finite, and to some extent one could say that all boats are rising. However, even with welfare, unemployment benefits, universal public education, and graduated income taxes, the income of the wealthiest Americans has increased considerably more than the income of the poorest Americans. Without these government programs, the disparity might be even greater. So I say again, "economic opportunity under free market capitalism is decidedly unequal." It seems to me that a society that claims to stand for "equal opportunity" should take measures to level the playing field.
There are numerous counterpoints to your view and I won't give them here, other to ask a question. Tell me how the creation of Google, and the billions of dollars of wealth it has created, the jobs it has provided, has made anyone, anywhere poorer?
I'm not sure why you think I'm arguing against the existence of Google. My beef is not with markets or corporations as such, but merely the kind of untaxed and unregulated markets that the Tea Partiers apparently stand for.
But I'll humor you, anyway. Google for the last several years has been exploiting tax loopholes to cut its corporate income tax rate to a total of about 2.4%. This can be compared with the 35% standard corporate rate and the 25% rate of the average household. Because the rest of us don't have the resources to exploit such loopholes, we end up picking up Google's slack.
Also tell me how anything within the realm of the imagined powers of the Federal government, could do as much economic good as Google (without violately private property freedoms of course).
You're comparing apples to oranges. It's not really the government's job to create wealth. It's the government's job to regulate wealth-creation and wealth-distribution (among other things). Having said that, I am aware of some examples of publicly-owned companies that have performed very well. In Sacramento, customers of the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District have paid an average of about 30% less than customers of PG&E. SMUD has been very well managed, and my family counts itself lucky to be in the district. Sometimes public ownership works, and sometimes it doesn't. Voters have to consider these issue on a case-by-case basis, not on the principle that all government ownership is bad and all private ownership is good.
3) I’d like to see the historical evidence that the government has actually prevented an economic shock through regulation or policy and that we are better off because it, in contrast to letting the correction/shock happen. I think it is pretty likely that in any example brought up, it was the government’s policy or interference that led to the potential shock in the first place, and its subsequent actions were to solve problems that it created itself. But hey, I’m open to discussing it.
It's hard to know what would have happened in any given instance, but it's worth noting that we haven't had significant bank runs in this country since the Great Depression, even under conditions such as the U.S. savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. This is probably due to institutions put in place during the New Deal, such as the FDIC.
Peace,
-Chris