People, Personas, and Politics 36 – Unfettered Capitalism
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): People, Personas, and Politics
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/24
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Rick Rosner: Right now, in America, we are under the rule of the Republicans or the Right wing. I thought we could talk about Right-wing philosophy. The major philosophy of which, at least under the current thinking and for the 30 years, is that if government just got out of the way, then everyone would thrive.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What conclusions follow from that?
RR: You mean if worked? If it weren’t a kind of nonsense?
SDJ: In two ways, what follows in theory? What follows in practice?
RR: It is that government regulations and waste are holding back American business and entrepreneurship. If those roadblocks were removed, America, which is a nation of businesspeople – Calvin Coolidge famously said, “The business of America is business,” it turns out it was taken out of context because he said it is not just about business, and that you have to take into account human values.
But the idea is unfettered capitalism leads to happy outcomes for the most people, or at least the most deserving people.
SDJ: Unfettered capitalism, to be clear, is laissez faire capitalism that you can find in the Cato Institute or form Ayn Rand.
RR: Yea! That the market sorts everything out. That if people start effing stuff up environmentally and people don’t like it, then people will find ways to make money out of it, or the people will become unpopular for business reasons and will clean up their acts. A lot of similar thinking, which has been disproven via economic statistics for the past 100 or 150 years by the idea that business works in the short-run.
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