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While the idea of government intervention in the free market is classically dismissed by right-wing politics, the reality of the past 40 years has been heavy in

While the idea of government intervention in the free market is classically dismissed by right-wing politics, the reality of the past 40 years has been heavy intervention by US and many other Western governments. However, unlike the forms of left-wing intervention that free-market thinkers decry, this intervention takes the form of tax breaks, bail-outs and guarantees against market failures by governments to industries and individual corporations. This has produced what's been called "socialism for the rich" in many countries, where financial institutions are free to act without fear of any consequence of negative repercussions. Just as steel mills were in Soviet Russia, or rice farmers in Mao's China. Witness this week's apparent bailout guarantee by the UK government to Nissan, the TTIP, or the way the Japanese government behaved towards its financial sector in the 1990's.

aminok 10y ago
A tax break is not government intervention.. And no, it hasn't been all 'right-wing' intervention, though I'd certainly agree that there has been a lot of that. There's been a ton of new 'left-wing' intervention in the form of growing welfare programs and authoritarian prohibitions on free association a la affirmative action, anti-private-discrimination laws, etc.
- vanderZwan 10y ago
  When you are a sculptor, you can (among other materials) use clay or marble. With clay, you start with nothing and fill up the space until you get the shape you desire. With marble, you start with a slab and cut out the bits until all that is left is the statue you desire. You're claiming that only one of these two things is sculpting, and the other is not.
  - aminok 10y ago
    The government doesn't own what we receive in private trade. Taxing what we earn is government intervention. This is the conventional understanding. What you're doing is what Orwell describes as doublespeak.
    - vanderZwan 10y ago
      > doublespeak This is rich coming from someone equating financial intervention with violence.
      - aminok 10y ago
        "financial intervention" I would laugh if the ridiculous lengths you're going to in order to euphemize violence and imprisonment wasn't so fucking terrifying.
        nindalf 10y ago
        Logic and coherence appear to be playing an ever decreasing role in your comments.
        aminok 10y ago
        It looks logical and coherent to me..
      - knucklesandwich 10y ago
        This is classic libertarian bullshit. Ask them how they enforce private property and watch the web of insane bullshit about how market intervention is "violence" unravels. Hilariously, the newest trend in libertarian thought is to embrace something like feudalism without reservation, which is basically the inevitable consequence of a libertarian society.
        aminok 10y ago
        Typical passive aggressive leftist bully talks to the crowd, over the head of the libertarian, instead of addressing the libertarian directly. Way to go with the straw man arguments too. Orwell on socialists: >The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.
- knucklesandwich 10y ago
  Hoo boy. Can't wait for the Rothbardian argument from you about why a marketplace for infants is a good idea. Also love the revisionist history that welfare has in any way grown. It hasn't, in fact it's been scaled back dramatically since the 90s, and the consequences have been horrendous: http://www.demos.org/blog/2/12/16/welfare-reform-was-quite-bad http://www.demos.org/blog/2/12/16/welfare-reform-was-quite-b...
  - aminok 10y ago
    How about you act like a decent human being instead of making ridiculous strawman arguments against me? Regarding welfare, I was being vague, so let me clarify: social welfare spending has increased substantially over the last 40 years in the US: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-driving-growth-in-government-spending/?_r=0 http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-... In Western countries in general, social welfare spending is substantially higher now, as a percentage of GDP, than it was before the 1970s. Social democracy on the scale we have today is a relatively recent phenomenon. Regarding your claim that welfare reform has had "horrendous" consequences, it is overly narrow and simply assumes no broader and longer-term negative consequences from compulsory income redistribution.
    - knucklesandwich 10y ago
      > How about you act like a decent human being instead of making ridiculous strawman arguments against me? Love the calls for civility from the person proposing that anti-discrimination laws were bad. Also "the free baby market" isn't really a leap from any of these hardcore libertarian views. > In Western countries in general, social welfare spending is substantially higher now, as a percentage of GDP, than it was before the 1970s. Social democracy on the scale we have today is a relatively recent phenomenon. This has absolutely nothing to do with program expansion, it has to do with an aging population. It's an increased percentage of GDP because the population is skewing older: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs-images/45xxx/45543-land-Population1.png https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs... > Regarding your claim that welfare reform has had "horrendous" consequences, it is overly narrow and simply assumes no broader and longer-term negative consequences from compulsory income redistribution. We can debate about how absurd it is to say that the 50% of the population who can't work (and would provide basically nil extra productivity to the labor force if they were unjustly forced to rejoin it) shouldn't have income redistributed to them, but I suspect this is a point of philosophy we'll never agree on.
- drieddust 10y ago
  > A tax break is not government intervention.. It is, a big corporation should not be served a bread buttered on both sides. Tax break is a form of risk mitigation. Corporations are supposed to be awarded tax break to allow them to take risks and move us forward. Does it really happen?[1]. I am not sure why a big group whose over all interest is to preserve status quo should be allowed tax break and keep on earning billions in return. Why they should not be allowed to die if they are can't compete? [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/mariana_mazzucato_government_investor_risk_taker_innovator#t-522779 https://www.ted.com/talks/mariana_mazzucato_government_inves...
  - aminok 10y ago
    Nothing you wrote supports the ridiculous notion that expropriating less of a corporation's income is a form of government intervention.

aminok 10y ago

A tax break is not government intervention.. And no, it hasn't been all 'right-wing' intervention, though I'd certainly agree that there has been a lot of that. There's been a ton of new 'left-wing' intervention in the form of growing welfare programs and authoritarian prohibitions on free association a la affirmative action, anti-private-discrimination laws, etc.

vanderZwan 10y ago
When you are a sculptor, you can (among other materials) use clay or marble. With clay, you start with nothing and fill up the space until you get the shape you desire. With marble, you start with a slab and cut out the bits until all that is left is the statue you desire. You're claiming that only one of these two things is sculpting, and the other is not.
- aminok 10y ago
  The government doesn't own what we receive in private trade. Taxing what we earn is government intervention. This is the conventional understanding. What you're doing is what Orwell describes as doublespeak.
  - vanderZwan 10y ago
    > doublespeak This is rich coming from someone equating financial intervention with violence.
    - aminok 10y ago
      "financial intervention" I would laugh if the ridiculous lengths you're going to in order to euphemize violence and imprisonment wasn't so fucking terrifying.
      - nindalf 10y ago
        Logic and coherence appear to be playing an ever decreasing role in your comments.
        aminok 10y ago
        It looks logical and coherent to me..
    - knucklesandwich 10y ago
      This is classic libertarian bullshit. Ask them how they enforce private property and watch the web of insane bullshit about how market intervention is "violence" unravels. Hilariously, the newest trend in libertarian thought is to embrace something like feudalism without reservation, which is basically the inevitable consequence of a libertarian society.
      - aminok 10y ago
        Typical passive aggressive leftist bully talks to the crowd, over the head of the libertarian, instead of addressing the libertarian directly. Way to go with the straw man arguments too. Orwell on socialists: >The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.
knucklesandwich 10y ago
Hoo boy. Can't wait for the Rothbardian argument from you about why a marketplace for infants is a good idea. Also love the revisionist history that welfare has in any way grown. It hasn't, in fact it's been scaled back dramatically since the 90s, and the consequences have been horrendous: http://www.demos.org/blog/2/12/16/welfare-reform-was-quite-bad http://www.demos.org/blog/2/12/16/welfare-reform-was-quite-b...
- aminok 10y ago
  How about you act like a decent human being instead of making ridiculous strawman arguments against me? Regarding welfare, I was being vague, so let me clarify: social welfare spending has increased substantially over the last 40 years in the US: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-driving-growth-in-government-spending/?_r=0 http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/what-is-... In Western countries in general, social welfare spending is substantially higher now, as a percentage of GDP, than it was before the 1970s. Social democracy on the scale we have today is a relatively recent phenomenon. Regarding your claim that welfare reform has had "horrendous" consequences, it is overly narrow and simply assumes no broader and longer-term negative consequences from compulsory income redistribution.
  - knucklesandwich 10y ago
    > How about you act like a decent human being instead of making ridiculous strawman arguments against me? Love the calls for civility from the person proposing that anti-discrimination laws were bad. Also "the free baby market" isn't really a leap from any of these hardcore libertarian views. > In Western countries in general, social welfare spending is substantially higher now, as a percentage of GDP, than it was before the 1970s. Social democracy on the scale we have today is a relatively recent phenomenon. This has absolutely nothing to do with program expansion, it has to do with an aging population. It's an increased percentage of GDP because the population is skewing older: https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs-images/45xxx/45543-land-Population1.png https://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/images/pubs... > Regarding your claim that welfare reform has had "horrendous" consequences, it is overly narrow and simply assumes no broader and longer-term negative consequences from compulsory income redistribution. We can debate about how absurd it is to say that the 50% of the population who can't work (and would provide basically nil extra productivity to the labor force if they were unjustly forced to rejoin it) shouldn't have income redistributed to them, but I suspect this is a point of philosophy we'll never agree on.
drieddust 10y ago
> A tax break is not government intervention.. It is, a big corporation should not be served a bread buttered on both sides. Tax break is a form of risk mitigation. Corporations are supposed to be awarded tax break to allow them to take risks and move us forward. Does it really happen?[1]. I am not sure why a big group whose over all interest is to preserve status quo should be allowed tax break and keep on earning billions in return. Why they should not be allowed to die if they are can't compete? [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/mariana_mazzucato_government_investor_risk_taker_innovator#t-522779 https://www.ted.com/talks/mariana_mazzucato_government_inves...
- aminok 10y ago
  Nothing you wrote supports the ridiculous notion that expropriating less of a corporation's income is a form of government intervention.