Re: Townhall.com – 1/8/2009 – “The Ten Big Lies About America” – Rebecca Hagelin

Speaking of lies ….

Liberals do not “love to argue that it is government – not the spirit or will or hard work or free markets and free citizens – that can cure economic ills.” What liberals argue is that government and hard work and the free market are all necessary components of curing economic ills and that spirit, will, and work of citizens and the free market together, without government, are sometimes not sufficient. That the New Deal did not “cure” the depression is obvious, but that the New Deal was of no help is just plain absurd. The final “cure” of the depression was WW-II, a fact that perhaps illustrates only that the New Deal was not a large enough intervention --- employing huge numbers of workers as soldiers and financing the production of massive amounts of military supplies was.

There are very few who would make Big Lie #5. What really is believed by liberals is that “The power of Big Business can and sometimes does hurt the country and its people”. Government regulation and/or after-the-fact enforcement can deter big business from its occasional misuse of their market power, and in the rare cases where private enterprise has failed miserably to meet market demands on its own, government has moved in to do the job either on its own (TVA and Bonneville rural electric power supply) or as a driving force on private enterprise (regulated monopolies for rural telecommunication). Government regulation is not required because all Big Business (or even most Big Business) is evil, but because a few Big Businesses sometimes do harmful things. Banks use surveillance in their branches not because they think their customers are bank robbers but because they understand that some of their “customers” may be bank robbers and surveillance helps deter robbery and catch robbers after-the-fact. Quality assurance doesn’t assume that all production runs are bad, only that statistically some are, and that catching the bad products before they get shipped and catching bad production processes before the products are produced is cost effective. Government would be deficient if it did not act in a similar way on behalf of its constituency, its citizens.

It is not true that when “governmental regulators crack down on a given company, they most often harm, rather than help, the interests of its workers (and shareholders, obviously)”. Sometimes they do, sometimes they do not, depending on what and how they intervene. I fiercely dispute the notion that government requirements for audited financial statements harm the shareholders of the audited businesses. The audits are not free, but they are cost effective deterrents to any potential dishonest or careless management actions.

While it may be true that “the boss … can’t benefit in the long term at the expense of his employee .... They either prosper together or fail together”, in fact bosses are often driven by the short term, not the long term, and as such often do benefit at the expense of his employees (and at the expense of non-management corporate ownership), just as unions often act to benefit employees at the expense of their employers.

Over involvement of government in the free market is a serious problem, but assuming that any involvement of government in the free market is too much, or that anyone who favors any government involvement in the free market is an enemy of the free market is absurd and a Big Lie.