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Daniel Bastos wrote:
> What you mean (or what is meant) by self-regulation? Some effect of
> free trade?
Self-regulation is the notion that everybody's actions, whether through
goodwill or pure greed (though probably assumed the latter in every
case), balance each other out and so prevent any one particular greedy
individual from taking unfair advantage of those who don't happen to be
as greedy--all the greedy ones hobble each other in an attempt to keep
everyone but themselves from getting all the money, but since there's
more than one of them...you get a fair market.
The only problem is it doesn't turn out that way, and you do need a
(supposedly) impartial watchdog. That's the government. Proponents of
pure free trade insist that any intervention, period, breaks capitalism
and allows things to become unbalanced, instead of recognising that the
government just tries to reduce the disparity that'll be there anyways.
Then there's the (somewhat peculiar, imo) notion of individual liberty.
It was a novel thing to found an entire country holding that concept
as sacred, the way the USA was, at the time. It hadn't ever actually
been tried--it was a grand experiment. So you drill into your citizens
that belief, and that 'the government' as an entity that since time
immemorial had just taken freedom away from ordinary folk (along with
nobility, but since that was explicitly left out of the USA, in theory
doesn't affect the situation ['cept it does, 'cuz you get class
striation, with the rich people becoming the de facto nobility]), was
something bad. So when you have government needing to grow and have
bureaucracy, it bothers people.
Just my opinion.
</rant(?)>
--
Tim Cook
http://empyrean.freesitespace.net
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