What role should the government play in society?

Cpt_pineapple
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What role should the government play in society?

With all the talk of Socialism vs Capitalism, I want to know what role should the government play in society and why?

 

 

For me, I am a Capitalist. All the government should do is:

 

1] Keep the peace, provide services such as police/fire/ambulance and health care, but also open those up to competition. For example a public hospital and a private hospital. If the private hospital wants your cash, then it would have to provide adequate service. If you so choose a private hospital, then you can get insurance through a private company, and opt out of taxes for the health care. That way if [or should I say when] the government lets the health care go to shit, there is alternatives. Competition is key for Capitalism.

 

2] Limit the laws it can pass, so that lobbying will either be illegal or pointless. If the government is limited as to what laws it can pass, then lobbying is pointless. There will be no more lobbyists to petition for the government to basically outlaw their competition.

 

 

I mean do we need laws of course, but do we need so many?  Do we really need the government to decide what is good or not?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


geirj
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Mr. XC wrote:This should

Mr. XC wrote:

This should have been brought up by now, but I noticed that it has not:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly

And oligopolies, for that matter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oligopoly

 

 

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Cpt_pineapple
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Errr an

Errr an observation:

 

 

Wouldn't the government running a program be, by definition, a monopoly?

 

 

Just a thought.

 

 

 


Mr. XC
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V-22 Osprey Economy

Cpt_pineapple wrote:

Wouldn't the government running a program be, by definition, a monopoly?

It would, although the framers of the U.S. government never intended for the government to be running large programs.  The federal government was supposed to live off of excise tax.

Going back to the Halliburton discussion points raised, if we had functional and enforced monopoly laws, Halliburton would be either regulated or split up.  In fact, our nation had many laws that protected competition, but we seem to be in the process of shifting from free markets to central planning, socialism, and corporatism.  You cannot mix these different economic systems and expect the best of any system.  You will also get some dangerous side effects that may not be present in any system alone.

If free market capitalism is a turboprop aircraft, and then what the U.S. has today is a V-22 Osprey economy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYeLishJ_Js

It may look like a turboprop to some, but it is very different and more complicated in design, requires more complex training, and has additional failure modes.  I suspect that the U.S. economy will suffer the same fate as the aircraft in the above video.

It seems that some people today think that the U.S. has a 100% free market system, or that you can somehow mix this system with others as the U.S. has done and blame the free market system for the results.  This just shows that those people do not understand what a true free market system is.  When you set the interest rate, the capital ratios of fractional reserve banks (or use practically any unbacked currency), or the age of retirement, then you have central planning.  This can wreak havoc on a free market system, as it depends on the self-regulating nature of the marketplace for these things.  Central planing will create huge distortions in the free market system, also known as mis-allocation of capital, the cause for just about all large recessions.  Historically, politicians, economists, and mathematicians who contribute models to economists are incompetent at central planning.  Socialism tends to have elements of central planning, which also creates mis-allocation of capital.  I do not think that I need to explain why corporatism is bad.  Perhaps an ideal socialist economy would be functional, but I would not expect it to work with corporatism also in play.

"Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. ..." -- Thomas Jefferson


ZuS
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The whole competition

The whole competition survival of the fittest model is completely inefficient, if the well being of the community is the objective. By it's very nature it is a competition for resources, power over consumers and most importantly power over the rule-making institutions. Everything that happens in this commercial war is only exceptionally of any benefit for the society at large, while the rule is that it is extremely destructive.

A typical class in microeconomy twists and turns and distorts and stretches the actual truth about unconstrained capitalism to have it appear as something it is not. Just take the governmental regulation of prices as an example - I was tought that any intrusion in form of pricesetting on the part of government is going to upset the delicate balance of supply and demand. Of course, the supply&demand model is about as accurate as a musked on a distance of 10 miles, mostly because of the vicious disregard for any rules, ethical, moral, societal or microeconomical by the tyranical institutions called corporations. This you will not get to read in a book on microeconomy. Unless you read Bertrand Russel's Power: A new Social Analysis or just use your brain, you might live your life believing that government really is the root of all evil. While in fact the government in US mostly is just the PR department of the collective corporate front against the "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders" (a term coined by Walter Lippmann, refering to the public at large).

So where does this leave us? We certainly need to end the reign of tyranical institutions that run the govenment at the moment. We also need to fight for our history and against misconceptions in eceonomy, social, formal and hard sciences. We need to understand the economy on a higher level and leave the stupid little one-liners out of the discussion - we don't need the mind-poison propagated by executives trying to find excuses; some for us, but mostly for themselves. We must understand that we are partly here because millions before us BLED and DIED so that we can lift our heads up from the factory floor where our children would be working 16 hour shifts and be beaten if they stopped for a brief rest. And we are partly here because the same tyranical institutions have found other places where they can do as they please with what is euphamistically called "human resources".

We are far from the promissed land and we will have to bleed more to get there. You have no rights, you have no choices, you have nothing if you wait for it to be given to you by the "democratic system". You have to organize your community and together make your choices, assert your rights and fight for every inch of collective good.

Logic is a systematic method of coming to the wrong conclusion with confidence.