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Apr 15, 2004 It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government, other than every other form of government yet invented. The same can be said of Free Market economics, the system has all of the advantages of freedom and evolutionary patterns, but these lead to effects that are, to the individual caught up in them, anything from unpleasant to fatal. For instance, a new technology comes into being, lets say the PC, and you work for a leading manufacturer of typewriters. You have spent your entire life on the typewriter assembly line, and know that your employer has 25 million dollars invested in the line, plant, inventory, etc. You think your life is safe into the indefinite future. Five years later, the plant sits idle, the machinery rusts, you have lost your job, and your investments in the company. The owners are bankrupt. The building and equipment eventually have to be demolished and scrapped at public expense. But we have seen controlled economies fail again and again. Even tariffs and trade "protections," inevitably hurt the very people they are set up for. While artificially expensive goods can survive for a time, it stifles innovation, and the barriers will eventually be subverted, often at greater costs to those "protected" than what would be suffered if the protections had never been created. The trick is protecting the innocent victim in a free market economy, and the best solution is ironically based on the system itself. The biggest problem a free market economy faces is pollution. There is no economic incentive to protect "Common," items such as shared air and water; nor to protect such intangibles as silence and pleasant surroundings, parks, forests, things that are valuable to everyone but owned by no one. But these items are not, after all, owned by no one. They can be argued to belong to everyone. As such, an organization which wants to take such an item from us should pay what the majority of us agree is a fair price. Since we can't distribute this proportionately to every man, woman, and child (or could we...), the logical benefactor of such sales is the federal or local government. If the free market was applied to such things, we might charge fair prices for logging public forests, instead of charging a pittance, then closing areas to logging. We might charge polluters for emissions into air and water, then use the money to provide health care for victims, and research into cleaner methods. It sounds crazy, using the free market to protect the environment, but hey, it works in Europe, why not here? ------------ Email Aaron Baker: aaror@writing.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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