Free marketers are accused of not caring for the environment and having a “devil take the hindmost” attitude toward the halt and lame.
What if that is not true? What if we do care, and have a better way to accomplish the goal of just distribution of goods and services, and a better way to assure pristine environment?
What if we are exasperated with the obtuse regime of the progressive movement to these problems?
Occupy Wall Street proposes to have the government reign in big business. That is like asking Bonnie Parker to keep a lid on Clyde Barrow. Three Nobel Economics laureates won demonstrating the regulated always capture the regulators, when the government does the regulating.
I am told the govt cleaned up Lake Washington... 100 years before the govt was busy overturning 800 years of law that defended the environment. It was called property rights. If your actions on your land diminished my enjoyment of my land, then I could by law stop you.
But come the progressive movement and collectivization and utilitarianism, huge centralized meat packers could foul the rivers because we needed the mass slaughter houses for cheap food and war. It was the government that changed the rules to benefit big business.
Govts paved the way for it to get dirty
Huge steel plants belched noxious air and gave us acid rain. But but but, without these things we would not have steel for skyscrapers, and war. Not true. Trapping pollution before it leaves the factory may be more expensive, but not too expensive. But by giving industry a pass, the government made pollution damned profitable. See The Transformation of American Law, 1789-1860.
We are told govt ended Jim Crow laws...but, govt STARTED the Jim Crow laws, wrote them, it was business that ended them. See “The Walls Came Tumbling Down,” by Dr. Abernathy.
Progressive want wealth distribution, money transfers... but the market offers wealth creation and more better cheaper faster... division of labor brings optimal employment and more goods and services at a lower price... subsidies to Walmart and bank of America keeps SOME things cheap, but those very wealth transfer schemes starve the wealth creation action. progressive need to end the focus on how much money some one has and turn to what is the array of goods and services, is it getting wider, are prices falling? That is true wealth.
The charge the progressives must answer is their “do-goodism” appears to be a halo on oppression, an exercise of libido dominandi. We are for the same goals, but the unwillingness to even consider anything except failed means suggests a lack of good will and perhaps even more sinister motivations.
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