trouble is without regulation everyone who is not the company pays the price they avoided. supporting deregulation is the calling card of the corporate shill.
Regulations do not have to be about controlling externalities. Consider the case of airline flights. At one point in the US airline flights were strictly regulated by the FAA. Nobody could fly any flight except the ones the FAA approved and they could only charge the prices the FAA allowed. Then the airline industry was de-regulated and chaos reigned! Prices went up! Prices went down! Nobody knew which way was up! And yet, within not terribly long, the prices stabilized. In fact, they generally stabilized at a lower level than they were under the regulated regime. They have since gone up, and some flights stabilized at a higher level but deregulation led to more good for more people.
Next, consider the sugar tariff. Because of the sugar tariff, domestic producers of sugar sell sugar for about twice the world price of sugar. Because they cannot sell all the sugar they produce domestically, they also sell sugar to the rest of the world. If we deregulated sugar (and thus allowed free trade to prevail), the domestic price of sugar would drop by a large fraction of its current level. High Fructose Corn Syrup would no longer be economically preferential to sugar, so total acreage of corn would go down. Well, total acreage of corn that is turned in to high fructose corn syrup. Food would taste better, and people would be happier. Ironically, both sugar growers and corn growers love the sugar tariff.
Author
Topic: Doc Helgoland's Asylum for the Politically American: T+0 (Read 1412397 times)