Last evening I was involved in a rather heated email flame war with three guys I correspond with. One, like me, is a rock-ribbed Ronald Reagan conservative, one is a libertarian, and the other is a committed socialist. As you can imagine the email conversations can get pretty intense. My friend Jeff Baker coined that quote at the top of the page in one of his responses and I thought it was the perfect example of how a salient argument, stated in few words, can be interpreted by the left to mean something totally different from the original intent. Sort of like of saying “I want Obama to fail” without actually reading (or hearing) what was actually said. (And yes, I do want to Obama to fail in his attempt to socialize America. Let’s get that out of the way.)
Consider this an exercise in interpretation. What does the quote really mean? Jeff and I know precisely, but what do you think it means? Can we throw out cogent arguments, pithy as they may be, and expect the public at large to understand their deeper meaning? Let’s have some liberals have at it, as well. I promise to be nice. Sort of.
The quote your friend came up is paradoxical.
First, an economy cannot prosper unless there are profits.
Profits lead business to expand which in turn creates jobs and capital investment, and invention.
Jobs and capital investment puts money into the hands of the people.
The needs of the people can only be served with jobs, capital creation, and the incentive for ingenuity.
Absent the ability to make a profit, or by having to operate at a loss or at a break even there is no incentive to grow, no incentive to create jobs because everyone simply wants to hold on to what they have, and you end up with a stagnant economy where production standards are mediocre due to lack of incentive.
So in reality, the prefix of the statement is subsumed into the suffix.
Those who understand what the quote means, like Cigar Mike, need no explanation.
For those who do not, no explanation wil help them. They will always be in the dark or they will remain the enemy of freedom.
Anyone who understands the profit motive is already helping people and putting their needs in good shape.
Everyone else is merely using words to win self aggrandizement and cares nothing for the needs of the people. Obama and Castro come to mind.
Hold on, let me switch off my brain so I can see this from a leftist perspective:
Okay, brain off…
What your frend iz triing to say is screw the poor peeple n let da rich get richer!
(Switching brain back on)
Whew… that was scary.
I believe Mike nailed it. If there is no profit, there is no desire, if there is no desire, there is no production, if there is not production, there are no goods, if there are no goods, you have: CUBA.
The role of government is to serve the needs of the people. Liberal democracy and classical liberal economics (no offense intended by calling them their proper names) were both conceived, be they by John Locke, J.S. Mill or Adam Smith, or the American founding fathers, as intellectual/philosophical experiments and later practical ones, to find a more just system of government that lets the average person realize their potential rather than perpetuating inequalities of wealth and power as they had seen in the Old World and all of prior human history.
So yes, it’s true that all of these people found, theoretically and practically, that the best way to ensure that the needs of the people are met, is that the right to private property and the ability to make a profit and keep your earnings is respected and protected by the government. However, your quote puts the emphasis on the wrong part of the equation. The overall goal of a righteous person in designing an economic system or a government is to help the people, not to protect “private profit.” Of course, an economy should protect the right to private profit, but more importantly, an economy and a country is screwed whenever its goal moves away from helping the people to anything else, including singlemindedly protecting private profit. Take the example of monopoly, a legitimate reason for government intervention in the market. The quote mistakes the treatment for the cure.
The role of government was to be minimal by the reckoning of the framers of the constitution. Especially the Federal government. The federalization of every “problem” is THE problem. If the states could compete in certain areas we would see winners and losers just like in business. But Federal government has more power over the states than at any time in out nation’s history.
The problem with your idea of “helping the people” is that somebody has to decide what helps and what doesn’t. And that’s just bullshit because you can disguise any destructive policy with its intent to help the people. The war on poverty was intended to help the people and the empirical evidence shows that despite spending trillions the problem persists and perhaps has been exacerbated by the policies intended to help the people.
The role of government should be to get the hell out of the way. Let people lead their lives as they see fit. Don’t favor one group over another or one behavior over another. It’s this arbitrary idea that owning a home is better than renting that created the massive mortgage problem. Our tax code is rigged to help home owners and screw renters. And then they made the borrowing of the money to get the home inordinately easy. All this to “help the people” own homes. Now it’s all fucked up. They should have left the tax laws neutral to renters/buyers and should allow the banks to set their own lending criteria not be bullied by the government into giving loans to minority groups under the guise of helping people.
In other words, nobody here is buying the BS you’re selling Eddy.
Hey, I’m with you on the Fannie/Freddie debacle and the fact that pro-home ownership, anti-renting policies are ridiculous. I would point out that despite the Democrat-sponsored Community Reinvestment Act being a real problem, this is by no means a Democrat-owned concept. The idea was one of Bush and the Republicans’ favorites, promoting the so-called “ownership society” through low interest rates, bank deregulation and easy credit.