Economic Extremism – Too Much of a Good Thing
Allow me to juxtapose two viewpoints for a moment. First – what I perceive to be a fairly common view amongst neo-liberal economists:
The huge improvement in people’s standard of living over the last hundred years has been one of the biggest successes of Capitalism. The ability of capitalists to offer loans allowed entrepreneurs to generate improved growth and employment. With money from investors, companies have been able to achieve enormous technological advances, resulting in leaps in quality of life for many people. The improved efficiencies of competitive industry have lowered prices of many goods, lifting millions out of poverty.
The main thing standing in the way of even greater improvements in people’s happiness and standard of living, is that the markets are still not yet free enough. Government is stifling the markets with regulation that raises the costs of doing business and discourages investment. State benefits discourage workers from finding more enriching jobs, instead encouraging reliance and stagnation.
Despite the US’s historic progress in the direction of free markets, true libertarianism, in which the government is small enough to completely free the market from interference has never truly been attempted. All of the economic and societal failings of the US can be traced back to the government interfering with the free market – whenever a problem arose, the US government attempted to introduce legislation to resolve it, rather than allowing the market to resolve it naturally. This exacerbates the problem rather than resolving it, so we should instead strive to further reduce the size of government, until true free-market libertarianism can be achieved.
Second – an alternative, equally extreme view…
