Blogs For Victory

That is a quote from G. K. Chesterton, and I bring it up because of this bit by Veronique de Rugy:

…the truth is there is nothing most business people like less than free markets.

Think about it. Competition is good for consumers because it keeps prices low while increasing the quality and choices of products and services. Yet competition is hard work for businesses. They have to fight for customers by innovating and evolving in ways that consumers demand.

To avoid the gritty work of fighting it out in a free market, organized private interests…lobby the government for special regulations, preferential tax treatment and laws that keep out competition…

It is best described as “crony capitalism” – that species of capitalist activity which is really an alliance between State and Business to the detriment of the public. All too often, this is what we have in America as opposed to free markets. Liberals claim this is all conservative stuff – that this, indeed, is what we conservatives are for. Such claims are nonsense – the businesses which do engage in restraint of trade via government taxation and regulation are bi-partisan, but with a distinct bias in favor of which ever party is most willing to use the heavy club of government to regulate the market. Meaning, of course, that most of the time such businesses are allied with the Democrat party. But never let it be said that some people allegedly conservative don’t fall for this.

Every reason under the sun is brought forth, at one time or another, to justify intervention in the free market – safety concerns, however, are most often used. The dirty, little secret of such regulations, however, is that big businesses – and smaller but well-entrenched businesses – can afford the extra regulatory cost. Smaller businesses – and especially aggressive, young start-ups – are least able to carry the freight, and thus get frozen out. You think that no one in America has had an idea for a new type of car over the past 70 years? That GM, Ford and Chrysler are so good that no American can possibly challenge? Of course not – but the whole system of taxation and regulation of the auto industry makes it next to impossible that a new challenger will arise within America, and that is why we’re being blown out of the water by competition from places like Japan and Korea (and, soon, India and China, if we don’t watch out). And the big auto makers have lobbied hard to make this system what it is.

So, too, in business after business. People already well established in an industry use their money to lobby for regulations and taxes which freeze out competition. They are aided by pressure groups from unions (who also can’t survive competition, and thus attempt to forbid it), environmentalist groups (who will take a bribe from Big Corporation in a second) and various busy-body groups who only want their own axe ground and care not a bit about what happens to America, as a whole.

In order to reform our economy to return it to wealth-creation, we need to massively slash the tax and regulatory schemes which have been set in place. We’ll get screams when we do this but remember that all the shouts are from people who are doing well right now, while the rest of us are doing rather lousy. The screamers don’t care that our nation is going down the tubes – they’ve got the tax and regulatory system which keeps them fat, and that is all they care about. They are deathly afraid of one thing above all – that we’ll free up our country and allow anyone who wants to enter the market. That scares them because they know they can’t compete. They’ll be ruined; they’ll lose their place at the trough; they won’t be special and rich and privileged any more! It makes them wet their pants with fear…and so as we try to fix things, they’ll claim that we’re trying to kill granny and beat puppies to death with tire irons.

Pay no attention to them – do not, I implore you, buy for a moment the stories that everyone and everything will be ruined if we cut the business tax, eliminate some of the most onerous environmental and labor regulations and make it easier to enter the market. Once we get that free market, the stern discipline of market forces will ensure that businesses do the right thing – anyone who doesn’t will be exposed and ruined. The people who end up running business will be those who actually can do it – not, as today, just timer servers who got a leg up because they were befriended in long years past by someone else high up in the system.

There is no and will be no perfect system, my friends. Only God can provide that, and He will, but not until the End. Until that time, we can only do the best we can – and we can’t do our best if we’ve got a system which protects and rewards the incompetent while hamstringing the best and brightest.