| TheRealMafoo said: My guess is that people who think pure capitalism is bad, also think that if the government does not help those who can not help themselves, that there is no other mechanism for such action to take place. 100 years ago the US government did not care if you starved to death, and yet, people still got fed. Relying on the government to mandate morality is never a good idea. |
The sad thing is that people who look to the government to “fix” things rarely look at the long term performance of the government on the things they tried to fix. One of the primary examples is how the government’s intervention into the housing market to make homes more affordable and increase home ownership has consistently resulted in massive housing inflation that makes homes far less affordable; and this has/is occurring in many countries (Canada for example) which don’t have the same kind of banking de-regulations as the US had. From what I have seen in my lifetime, I would say that the fundamental rule of government intervention in the economy is that the force of the government’s action in the economy is always less than the force of the market’s reaction to bring the economy back to balance.
Another example of the unintended consequences of government action is welfare. Because a person on welfare can not meaningfully improve their education or experience their employability steadily drops while they’re on welfare until they become entirely dependent on the system. If you compare this against a person who struggles to get by on the wages of entry level positions you will notice that after a relatively short period of time (2 to 4 years) the opportunities available to the working individual are dramatically better than the person on welfare. In other words, in the long run welfare makes people worse off ...
