Free Market Fairies

In America, we pride ourselves on free enterprise, an open market, where anyone can start a business and has a chance to make it to the top. We are the “Land of Opportunity” after all.

This is probably why there are people who are strongly against what they call “big government,” where businesses are regulated and controlled by the people we elected to run the country. I’ve met a few who’ve gone so far as to say that government needs to stop reglulating business altogether and strongly believe that corporations could do some of the government’s current jobs better (ie healthcare, social security, education, etc.).

I don’t agree with this view for several reasons. First of all, it’s counterintuitive to think that businesses are going to regulate themselves when it’s patently against their bottom line to do so. Those who I’ve talked to that disagree with me say that regulation will be in a corporation’s best interests because if they produce a product that is unhealthy or inferior, the consumer community won’t buy it. However, that implies both a transparent corporation and an informed, interested citizenry, neither of which occur completely and hoping they coincide is just ridiculous.

For example, until books like Slaughterhouse 5 and other articles exposing the unsanitary and unhealthy conditions in processing our meat, no one knew they were eating meat that was potentially harmful to them. What had to happen? The government had to regulate them. No one I know complains about that particular regulation.

We clearly can’t rely on business to regulate itself because it goes against the very nature of business: to make the most profit with the least effort. Regulation of any kind increases the effort required to make a profit so it’s easier to keep the consumers in the dark than to put up with regulation.

Why do you think they don’t let cameras inside slaughterhouse or factory farms? Because they’re regulating themselves in regards to humane animal treatment?

I’m sure my cousin didn’t coin the term “free market fairies,” but that’s where I heard it first and I love the phrase to describe this idea of market-regulation. It invokes the image of Tinkerbell going around and solving all the problems of big business. Low wages, high prices, and unhealthy conditions just go away with a wave of her magical wand. Well, it doesn’t work like that as history has shown with things like child labor and record profits for gas companies coinciding with record highs in gas prices for consumers.

Clearly, what’s good for big business is not necessarily good for the American people and we don’t have to turn into a “socialist” country to regulate business.

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