Here I am stuck in the middle.
In my younger days I had very strong opinions about how I thought the world should be run. Of course those opinions varied depending on the mood I was in. I contemplated national ID cards (this was in like 1982) and being able to track the movement of everyone to what a Randian society would actually look like. As I’ve gotten older I’ve tempered my views somewhat and tried to make them more consistent with each other. (Monitoring every citizen doesn’t work well with a Galt’s Gulch economy).
Yet I still find myself a bit torn. Some of that is not understanding all the details. So I read and learn. Today I read The Conservative Nanny State which discusses how the wealthiest in this country use government to keep money flowing upward. I’m also reading The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression. One point in this book is that the protective tarrifs were what caused the depression in the first place, and both Hoover’s and FDR’s refusal to remove them prolonged and deepend the depression.
The one argument in The Conservative Nanny State that I found interesting is that most (if not all) free-market proponents both complain about the inefficiency of government AND claim that it’s unfair for government to compete with private business. It would seem that free-market theory would have inefficient businesses – even if run by the government – at a disadvantage. If the government really sucked that bad at running a business then why would private business be so afraid of government run business? Could it be that government run businesses aren’t as inefficient as we’ve been led to believe?
Take this example from page 14 of The Conservative Nanny State:
Back in the late 1990s, several express mail companies actually went into court to try to force the U.S. Postal Service to abandon an ad campaign that was proving very effective. The Postal Service ads pointed that its express mail service was much cheaper than FedEx or UPS. After the courts refused to outlaw the ad campaign, the express mail companies went to their friends in Congress, who effectively tamed the competition.
The U.S. Postal Service is not funded by any tax dollars. It is completely self-funded. Yet it was prohibited from promoting its services because private enterprise couldn’t compete? Where exactly is the logic in that.
Lest you think that The Conservative Nanny State is a “let the government run everything” book, there are arguments about getting the government out of the way on the issue of debt. From page 59:
In a free market economy, businesses know that investment decisions don’t always work out as expected. Sometimes businesses invest in developing a product that turns out not to be as good as they believed, or that doesn’t have the market they anticipated. They may invest based on trends, such as rising oil prices, that do not continue, leaving them with large losses. Or, they may extend credit to people, businesses, or countries that turn out to be bad credit risks. No one expects that the government will step in and sustain the demand for a bad product. Nor do we expect the government to intervene to make sure investors’ expectations about rising oil prices are realized, for example, by buying up massive amounts of petroleum. But when it comes to making bad credit decisions, the nanny state conservatives do expect the government to step in and bail them out.
In a truly free-market there would be no government intervention. Companies making bad loans would be S.O.L. if the people those loans were made to couldn’t pay them back. It could be claimed that the current financial crisis we’re in stemmed in part from changes to the bankruptcy laws back in 2005. Lenders were more likely to lend money because they knew that they could benefit from the fact that it was harder for people to say “I’m broke, I can’t pay my debt, I’m filing for bankruptcy protection”.
What the new laws did was effectively put ALL the responsibility for the loan on the part of the borrower. It indemnified the lender who could shirk his duties in making sure the loan would be repaid. Higher risk loans deserve higher interest rates. You see that on corporate and municipal bonds and bond ratings. Credit scores serve a similar purpose for personal lending. So why would someone with a credit rating of 600 deserve the same low interest rate that someone with a score of 800 might get? They shouldn’t. The score of 600 is a higher risk and deserves a higher interest rate.
In exchange for the higher interest rate, the lender is also taking a risk that the loan won’t be repaid. That’s factored into the higher rate. But when the bankruptcy laws changed lenders realized that their risk was lowered. Someone with a 600 score now had the same risk as someone with an 800 score. Why? Because the government was turned into a debt collection agency.
You can read the entire book online for free (yes, free – there’s even a section on why copyrights and patents are a form of protectionism that are a drag on the economy).
After reading it I feel better about my weird combination of free-market and socialistic views and I hope someday soon to be able to articulate them better.