I don't much like saying "but that's what the people want" either. However, I think it's diffrent when it comes to buissness regulation. Here, people come together through government to decide how they want buissness regulated. It isn't dealing with fundamental rights (except to privacy, but that's tangential, I think). It's similar to most people saying that they don't like fecal matter in their meat, so they call on the government to make sure meat is safe (and the free market, as praticed in America, means that it's hard to get safe meat, beacuse of the small number of meat producers in the market, who, in essence, control what people can buy - in terms of health, this is one major failure of the free market. But regulation of this would be wanted by the liberals, like Smith, as I read them). And if the Economist, a very libeal (in the economic sense, not the missunderstanding of the word that Americans misuse) newspaper supports it from a liberal point of view, then it must not be too horrible.
I'm also bothered by the notion that libertarians have that government is full of bureacracy. Yes, it is, but so are corporations. And we have more control over the government (or at least we should), which to me makes its actions preferable.
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Date: 2003-08-24 02:14 pm (UTC)I'm also bothered by the notion that libertarians have that government is full of bureacracy. Yes, it is, but so are corporations. And we have more control over the government (or at least we should), which to me makes its actions preferable.