i like those photos. Nice huh ?
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Is government intervention and restriction of free enterprise always diabolical? I can think of some instances where it has not been. Some positive examples, just off the top of my head: the government regulated banks (Jefferson, Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, many others); freed enslaved labor (Lincoln); introduced anti-trust law and passed the Food and Drug Acts (Republican Teddy Roosevelt again, one of the great interventionist presidents!); created OSHA (Nixon); and to throw in a president of whom I am not at all fond, I applaud FDR’s minimum wage Acts of 1938. All of these seriously limited free enterprise in some way, by telling employers what they could not do (underpay workers, own slave labor, sell food and drugs without disclosing their contents, allowing unsafe work sites). All cost industry a great deal of money, all probably cause prices of the products to rise, and all incited extremely anger response. All were in my opinion excellent improvements…in the direction of a more just society and also a more prosperous one. I would throw on the pile that people are forced to buy auto insurance and to spend money on car safety seats for their infants.
I could give a list of other acts that I view unfavorably: just a couple – the Smoot-Hawley Act in 1930 (both were Republicans), which tried to use trade protectionism to get the USA out of the stock market crash and arguably caused or greatly prolonged the Great Depression; most of the moves by FDR; Reagan taking away the air traffic controllers right to organize (the union was PATCO), as I see it, a right of all American workers. There are plenty of others, but perhaps my readers don’t need to see more examples in order to be convinced!
My humble conclusion: let’s weigh the health bill on its own merits, not on the assumption that all government intervention is inherently harmful to the nation and to its economy or that it has as its primary or even secondary goal to rob citizens of their freedom.
