does the government have too much control over the economy?

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I have the same issues. Mainstream economics has too many starting assumptions that are wrong, unproven, or ideologically motivated.

OK, I'll agree on the idea that something such as family connections should certainly have less influence on opportunity. However, there is enough opportunity in America that most are not unfairly excluded, and there is progressively more equality of opportunity- feel free to look up Harvard's and Yale's new financial aid policies for a demonstration of this. The claim that we shouldn't receive all the benefits we can gain through inborn talent, however, seems a bit suspect. If people are not to be differentiated by situations beyond their control, such as socioeconomic status of their parents, and they also should not be rewarded or punished for their own natural merit, then what is left? You are left with a relativistic sea of "it's not their fault that they can't..." in which no one deserves anything and you have no basis for making any determination as to a distribution of wealth. The claim made there is that people should not be able to benefit from having access to better opportunities, nor should they be able to benefit from greater talent. That reasoning, taken to its logical extreme, claims there is no difference between the murderer and the philanthropist. It takes away personal responsibility because no one is able to control either their situation or their inborn talents.

I don't believe there should be equality of outcome, as long as there is equality of opportunity to within a reasonable range. Trying to ensure equality of outcome for those who don't make use of their opportunities will continually divert resources away from more efficient uses (by "efficient" here I mean maximizing overall economic well-being, productive output, progress in science and technology, etc) and thus push society as a whole into poverty. As an example of equality of outcome, I will occasionally hear someone whine about how not enough Americans are getting college degrees. This is absurd: some people are simply too stupid to obtain a college degree, and some don't need one for their preferred career. So why should we make extreme efforts to have colleges award more degrees? We already have enough college graduates to fill the demand for them, so there is no benefit.

Well they aren't going to "print" money because that would create severe inflation on top of our already weak dollar. The government is dumb, but not that dumb.

Let's get one thing straight, we ARE in a recession. It's not going to happen, we're already in one.

The tax rebate is a desperate, drastic move by the government. They should have acted on this years ago instead of focusing on this BS war on terror...at that time, this recession could have been prevented. On Monday, the feds cut interest rates by .75%, the last time they did this was 1984. Why did they do this? Because the stock market was crashing, and a panic sell-off was going to happen. So they acted. The rebate is no different. It's a panic move to stop the already spreading panic about a bad economy.

I think this rebate will help short term, and I think it's a good move on the part of Bush, for a change. However, it should have been done long ago. Our economy turned into a recession, because we spent too much time and money on Iraq. Shame.

They are printing money. Quite a bit of it, in fact. That's one of the main driving forces behind the inflation we're currently seeing- the crude quantity theory in action.

more like not enough control, the goverment is pretty much controlled by greedy corprations and bush is their puppet. if we had a good president who would put more restrictions on big business, we'd be alot better off.

Ugh. Rawls. I won't lie, may hatred of that man is primarily driven by the fact that Political Liberalism was one of the worst written books my eyes have ever had the misfortune to see.

Nozick's entitlement theory is much more satisfying than Rawls' Political Liberalism IMO, if for no other reason than it doesn't justify using force against other people in order to force on them your ideal world. The idea that someone should at gunpoint subjugate me to some construct smells like theocracy.

And Nozick possessed at least some talent with the written word.


I will not. People have opportunities because rational and independent entities have directly or indirectly bequeathed the products of their labor onto these people. If people did not receive these well that's tough: they have no right to the fruits of others.

Government has barely any right to do anything, including putting it's incompetent hands into the economy.

So you have no problem with an inheritance-based aristocracy of Capital?

The United Sates government definitely doesn't have enough control of the economy imo. By control, I mean regulation.

Except for a very lean version of Locke's "enough and as good" proviso on appropriation, yes. Most wealth and power were produced, and it is a violation of someone's rights if they cannot use and distribute their wealth as they see fit. Rawls is the most shameless enslavement of the talented and the productive to the masses I have ever heard of (although this objection extends to people who try utilitarian justifications of Libertarianism as well).

I support redistributive methods only inasmuch as it can be proven that the people who have property have, in some way, a broken line of entitlement (which often has happened). Rawls however values simply the end of people having wealth without any respect to the wills of the people who produce and maintain it.

It is "the masses" you despise that are the ultimate creators of wealth. Also, the rights that create the human environment that allows people to accumulate wealth are creations of society. Private property itself is a social construct.

What about the wealth and power that was seized? While there are a large number of hard working entrepeneurs that have converted their sweat and a good idea into wealth, there are many others that can't say that for themselves.

This is much more apparent in the US, where CEO compensation is extremely high and generally lacks any relationship to performance. The trick is to appoint cronies to the board of directors and milk the company for all you can.

A friend works for a company that is losing money. Everybody there just had their paid vacation time cut by two days, which would have saved the company $3 million, except that they decided to give the CEO of this company a $3 million bonus for cutting costs. Company loses money, workers lose benefits and morale drops, CEO prospers.

People as a whole don't create anything. They provide the means for those who can create. And I don't hate them, I just see them for what they are: consumers.

I don't think private property is a social construct, I believe it is a right which we create governments to protect.

monty: It is compatible with Nozickean libertarianism that, upon identifying that some link in the chain of entitlement through which people have acquired some thing is unjust, then the final property is unjust, and therefore may be rectified. My opposition to liberalism it doesn't distinguish between the government's right to such rectification and the government's desire to redistribute wealth because it refuses to recognize the sovereignty of individuals.

If a company is badly run, it has a market and shareholders to answer to. It's employees are trading their labor with the understanding that they have to play by the company's rules. No one is violating anyone's freedom here, so the government shouldn't be stepping in.

I don't think you realize how arrogant that sounds. The reader may reasonably infer that your support of free markets comes from this dichotomy you make and the tacit belief that you belong to the productive, creative class and not the servile consumer class. In other words, the theories you support support your self-interest but perhaps not the interest of the people at large.

Directly or indirectly, a large portion of our wealth derives from something that was seized. For example, one could reason the computer program you wrote depends on (at least) a computer whose parts were mined from lands that were seized from native/aboriginal peoples through use of force. Terra nullius was rare except in the most inhospitable of climes (now it's basically just Antarctica).

I'm allowed to be an ass about it: I'm from the working class. I work someplace with the most mediocre bunch of half-literate burnt out lazy people you can imagine (though I love them all dearly). Left to their likes, we would still be in the paleolithic. But they all have cars and houses. And then they complain they don't make enough money? What are they bringing to the table? But they reap all the benefits of living in a rich first world country.

Unfortunetly, most of the people in New Orleans don't. You'd think that the richest country on Earth would have had the city rebuilt and its' people back to somewhat normal lives by now.