@farmerman,
farmerman wrote:Quote:government created monopolies.
The US has a history of the "Guilded Age" when there were NO regulations and the monopolies of the rich were on the backs of the workers and the poor. We needed to actually fight for such things as "child labor laws" and onerous work rules.
Ive maintained throughout my history here that, without regulations, businesses would operate pretty much like they do in China today. People would be sold defective and toxic goods, workers would be exploited , and health rules would be non existent.
farmerman,
You take todays wealth for granted and conclude that the poverty and drudgery of the 1800s was the 'fault' of markets being too free. But the reason people were poor back then was because society was poor. They simply didn't have the necessary productive capacity to produce all the stuff they needed. There wasn't enough stuff to go around, no social policy could have changed that. You can't have higher standards of living unless you have the capacity produce it.
That's what happened when free markets were implemented in Europe and America in the late 1700s. The era of strong laissez-faire economics produced the most rapid progress in human history, poverty went from being the norm to being the exception.
The poverty and drudgery of the laissez-faire era was actually an improvement compared to the alternative. People willingly moved to the cities to work under those conditions. They moved there because the truly grinding poverty of the countryside was even worse.
That this wealth wasn't just collected by few rich people, while the rest remained poor and in drudgery, is explained by elementary supply and demand economics: When a commodity is abundant, it is cheap; when a commodity is scarce, it is expensive. In the early stages of industrialism (such as in the west in the early 19th century and in China today) industry is still only beginning to be implemented, but there are lots of workers, so labor is abundant. Thus employers have to pay just enough for people to survive and working conditions are very bad. But with more industrial production more labor is needed and demand catches up with the supply of labor and labor becomes scarce. Then employers have to offer better pay and working conditions to compete for labor. That's why working conditions and pay improve, because of the advance of free market enterprise, not because of government regulation.
As for child labor, think why a family would make it's children work. Because they need the income of the child to survive. Child labor is reduced because the free market improves productivity. Now the labor of the adults has enough purchasing power to feed the whole family. If government simply bans child labor, the family would starve. Which is precisely what happened in third world countries where western activists managed to get child labor banned, the children went into prostitution or starved.
The supposed "monopolies" in free markets were actually anything but. Nobody could ever produce an example of a monopoly that was not the result of government intervention in the economy. The supposed evil businesses of that era were actually highly beneficial to society, especially the poor, as they created huge improvements in productivity and thereby cheap products that raised standards of living.
