Yet another great post over at Cafe Hayek. You can read it here.. Some worthwhile and thought provoking quotes:
“When we subsidize things that trade in the market, we benefit the well off and well organized at the expense of the most vulnerable members of society. This holds true whether in Bozeman, Boston, or Birmingham.” This includes labor by the way. The labor of a worker is just another thing that is traded on the market.
“The world is divided between those who do and those who do not understand that activist, interventionist, regulating, subsidizing government is generally a servant of the strong and entrenched against the weak and aspiring.”
“The world is divided into two kinds of people, those who want to prosper by competing and those who want to prosper by getting government to cripple their competitors. America is divided between genuine entrepreneurs and those persons whose entrepreneurship consists of turning government into a dispenser of privilege and injustice.”
There is a thing in economics called the law of unintended consequences. In a nutshell, it describes what happens when you concentrate only on the obvious, immediate effects of something while ignoring the unseen (because they are not allowed to happen) consequences. In every case, the powerful, the power mongers know exactly what will happen when government regulations limiting competition are passed, the general public goes along with it because it “sounds right”. I cannot emphasize enough that whenever a law that suppresses competition is passed, it is the few that benefit and the many that suffer.
If you would like to see what the hell I’m talking about, read this and this.. That last link is to one of Bastiat’s best essays, and everyone that I know that has read it cannot disagree with it regardless of their political leanings. It’s an eye opening read, it certainly changed my views on many things…
Isaac