Published: November 05, 2009 03:37 pm         

Flashpoint: Reality a bitter pill for free-marketers to swallow

The Indianapolis Colts could reach the goal of winning all their football games if it were not for the annoying interference of referees, rules and regulations, unnecessary markers and arbitrary boundaries, those unfair and confounding limits on the number of players the Colts may put on the field at any given time, etc.

In recent columns for the Tribune-Star, Arthur Foulkes, (Oct. 16), and Craig Ladwig, (Oct. 11), again make their case for free-market-and-nothing-but-free-market capitalism.

While I agree with many of the tenets of free-market capitalism, I grow leery at the idea of clinging to an intractorible economic principle once it becomes antithetical to pragmatism or to the reality of a situation. (Writer’s Note: intractorible — Hoosier dialectic, means you can’t hook it up with a chain and drag it through the fields where you need to go; also known as “Old Goat Syndrome.”)

I should certify that I concur with some of Mr. Foulkes’ previously published assessments, for instance, his disdain for the counterproductive use of licensing to stifle competition, e.g., limiting the number of doctors or medical students to create a false shortage of health care providers thus driving up prices or of forestalling approval of safe and effective drugs for the purpose of protecting established brands.

However, according to the mantra of the “free markets forever” crowd, anyone should be able to practice medicine, right? Forget peer review. Eliminate licensing. And educational requirements? Poppycock. Training? Hogwash. Experienced supervision? Fiddlesticks. Government oversight? Not on my watch. In the vision of free-market proponents, all such regulation is simply government meddling in the lives of entrepreneurs and victims alike.

Furthermore, why not just let the market determine what may be sold for use as pharmaceuticals? If a substance proves to be ineffective or unsafe, even lethal, normal market forces will eventually drive it from the marketplace, consumers of such unregulated products will soon be dead or broke or both. Case closed, as it were, by a simple open-casket ceremony. A free market cures all.

There is a word that describes completely free markets. That word is anarchy.

I’m not keen on the notion of “soda pop taxes,” (or cap-and-trade proposals either for that matter). And no one really wants the government micromanaging the daily affairs of our economic or personal lives. But I believe that we in the U.S. will find, as other countries have found, that the overcrowding effects of a burgeoning population call for many allowances.

As for Mr. Ladwig, who hints that our economic woes today are the result of “lockstep work rules and salary schedules of a teachers union” coupled with “inheritance taxes,” “minimum wage and prevailing wage,” may I remind him that our current difficulties are the result not of decent union wages and worker’s protections but rather of fiduciary irresponsibility (unchecked excessive greed) and reckless speculation at the upper tiers of corporate management and the damaging effects of a deregulated financial industry. It wasn’t too much government oversight that got us into trouble. It was too little. I suspect mundane realities may be a bitter pill for any free-marketer to swallow.

The free-market faithful lean toward the view that unbridled aggression should be the only path to success. The rest of us would prefer to see a level playing field.

Go Colts!

In closing, I would like to share with the mountebanks of free-market capitalism a recently penned poem.

A Squirrels-eye View of the Effect of the Death Tax on Free-Market Capitalism (by me). It is up to the oak tree to grow where it is planted.

— Clay Wilkinson

Terre Haute