A common argument i hear among libertarians is that in a pure free market, individuals will be able to pay for private healthcare/no welfare will be needed etc. because everyone will be richer. The wages of the bottom rung of society will be higher.
So how does a free market facilitate this? In a capitalist society, as inequality increases, why will the capital owners simply not exploit the working class and supress wages?
Secondly, an argument i often hear is that the reason 'big business' exists is because of government protection for these corporations through subsidies and other forms of 'crony capitalism'. In a free market, large exploitative corporations wouldnt exist in the first place and probably would never form. This sounds too utopian for me, without anti-trust laws, large monopolies and oligopolies are sure to form because they take advantage of barriers to entry, particularly natural monopolies. What would be a free market counter to this?
RonPaulLol: do you think higher corporate tax rates could increase investment?
do you think higher corporate tax rates could increase investment?
That's silly, it's like asking if the government raised my taxes, would it leave more money for me to spend... the answer is "no" by elementary arithmetic.
given a choice of reinvesting profits into their business or paying tax, don't you think higher corporate tax rates would encourage inward investment?
I have no idea what "inward" investment is, but I do know that investors seek to move their capital to where returns are the highest. If you understand ECON 101 (the part that even Keynesians concede), pushing investors to invest where returns are lower does not result in economic growth, it slows investment and growth.
Clayton -
Those are all good points, EmperrorNero. I would much rather live in a corporatist society than in a pure socialist society, although the pure socialist society would certainly be less hypocritical. It's important to note though that these people installed modest economic reforms while not striking the root of the issue: Corporatism. That is basically the thing that drives libertarians crazy, RonPaulLol. Libertarians will often not be apologists for free market rhetoricians or state-nurtured abominations like Boeing, GE, Goldman Sachs, AIG, etc.
RonPaulLol:do you think higher corporate tax rates could increase investment? given a choice of reinvesting profits into their business or paying tax, don't you think higher corporate tax rates would encourage inward investment?
Why do you think it should be up to the government to (effectively) dictate the level of internal investment for businesses?
The keyboard is mightier than the gun.
Non parit potestas ipsius auctoritatem.
Voluntaryism Forum
look at pinochet in chile
Chile was so bad with free market reforms and economic liberalization that the civilian authorities that came later continued such policies, and by the way Chile now has a classical liberal pro-free market president.... dont talk about topics you dont know nothing about.
the market liberalisation of russia took two decades to get living standards for most of russia back to where they were in the old USSR.
I stop reading after this, Im sorry but this is too LOL for me.
and if someone loses their job, then suddenly there is no welfare state to pick them up and they can no longer afford private health insurance, then what?
will they be left to die?
RonPaulLol:and if someone loses their job, then suddenly there is no welfare state to pick them up and they can no longer afford private health insurance, then what? will they be left to die?
Yes, but someone else can get his treatment. There is no net loss of health care in society.
Also, in a free market you can insure yourself against everything, including losing your job and not being able to afford health care.
RonPaulLol: and if someone loses their job, then suddenly there is no welfare state to pick them up and they can no longer afford private health insurance, then what? will they be left to die? This is what family, friends, community, religious organizations and charities are for. That is the social safety net. I can't count the number of initiatives I've seen to raise money for a local child dying of cancer and they raise large sums of money this way, just from the goodness of strangers' hearts. Welfare, on the other hand, systematizes idleness and deceipt and rewards most handsomely those who are most shiftless and conniving. Hardly a recipe for a happy, healthy society. Clayton - http://voluntaryistreader.wordpress.com | Post Points: 20
I still don't understand the fear that without a welfare state people will be left to die. Why not offer them help if you care about it? Why not find more like-minded people(surely everyone in support of a welfare state love to help the poor) and create a charity? I'd love an answer for this.
Humanity isn't given enough credit for its generousity.
I live in New York City and in the streets of manhattan people are always panhandling- try befriending one of them and you'll find that some of them earn $100 a day tax free. There was this one guy in Bryant Park who came up to me and a group of friends and started to make some poetry based on what each of my friends looked like- we thought he had some damn good talent and gave him the cash we had. I saw him go to another table and talk with some tourists and eventually they took pictures with him and gave him $40 for less than 5 minutes of work!
Now imagine the money people would save if they weren't burdened with so much taxes, they could afford to give more away. Imagine if the purchasing power of the dollar was still strong- that panhandler could find an apartment and eat and dress very well for himself! Things are made so much more difficult thanks to government regulation of life.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I find most people who are pro-welfare state and believe that people are too selfish to help the poor, are usually in a bad situation in life and angry that no one helped them. There are valid reasons for economic difficulty- look towards the people that have the power to redistribute wealth when no one else can.
"People aren't given much credit for being generous."
It's a contradiction. On the one hand, people are too miserly to be trusted to give enough to charity on their own, so they have to be coerced by the government. Yet, on the other hand, people are generous enough to elect the politicians who will coerce them to give to charity. It's like the contradiction between people being too ignorant and stupid to be trusted to make their own decisions, yet wise enough to elect the right leaders to coerce them into making the right decisions.
Clayton, to be fair to the welfare statist though, they may assume that if the percentage is something like 60/40 altruistic/selfish, then the 60% of altruists can coerce the 40% of selfish people to give to welfare which they see as being effective charity. So they are arguing that without the welfare, it won't operate as if it had 100% operational support, which they think it should have.
RonPaulLol: do you think higher corporate tax rates could increase investment? given a choice of reinvesting profits into their business or paying tax, don't you think higher corporate tax rates would encourage inward investment?
do you think higher corporate tax rates could increase investment? given a choice of reinvesting profits into their business or paying tax, don't you think higher corporate tax rates would encourage inward investment?
What do you think happens to capital that (1) doesn't get invested "inwardly", or (2) doesn't get stolen and squadered by the government? Gets "outwardly" lost in space, perchance?
If the welfare state weren't around social safety nets would still exist...RonPaulLOL are you really attempting to prove that there was no social safety net pre-modern welfare state?
Rothbard wrote something that goes along with the whole "you would just let people die under a free market" claim...
"Our example of the “worst possible case” enables us to analyze one of the most popular objections to the free society: that “it leaves people free to starve.” First, from the fact that this objection is so widespread, we can easily conclude that there will be enough charitable people in the society to present these unfortunates with gifts. There is, however, a more fundamental refutation. It is that the “freedom-to-starve” argument rests on a basic confusion of “freedom” with “abundance of exchangeable goods.” The two must be kept conceptually distinct. Freedom is meaningfully definable only as absence of interpersonal restrictions. Robinson Crusoe on the desert island is absolutely free, since there is no other person to hinder him. But he is not necessarily living an abundant life; indeed, he is likely to be constantly on the verge of starvation. Whether or not man lives at the level of poverty or abundance depends upon the success that he and his ancestors have had in grappling with nature and in transforming naturally given resources into capital goods and consumers’ goods. The two problems, therefore, are logically separate. Crusoe is absolutely free, yet starving, while it is certainly possible, though not likely, for a given person at a given instant to be a slave while being kept in riches by his master. Yet there is an important connection between the two, for we have seen that a free market tends to lead to abundance for all of its participants, and we shall see below that violent intervention in the market and a hegemonic society tend to lead to general poverty. That a person is “free to starve” is therefore not a condemnation of the free market, but a simple fact of nature: every child comes into the world without capital or resources of his own. On the contrary, as we shall see further below, it is the free market in a free society that furnishes the only instrument to reduce or eliminate poverty and provide abundance." page 339 MES
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Production is 'anarchistic' - Ludwig von Mises
Zachary Plaxco:If the welfare state weren't around social safety nets would still exist...RonPaulLOL are you really attempting to prove that there was no social safety net pre-modern welfare state?
I imagine RonPaulLol would argue that, before governments started providing social safety nets, there was never any "guarantee" that people "in need" would be helped. The illusion of certainty strikes again!
I think the problem that RonPauLoL and other welfarists wish to overcome is uncertainty in life. And while this is a noble goal, it is, unfortunately, impossible.