送交者: slashdot 于 2005-4-24, 17:04:02:
回答: I beg to differ. 由 Enlighten 于 2005-4-24, 15:44:35:
1. Pollution: if you sell your goods for $5, yet it costs $3 for other to cleanup the pollution you produced, you really should only pocket $2, not $5. So regulation on pollution is really a way of fair pricing. (Keyoto Accord indeed shows pollution is like any other product can be bought and sold). So it's okay for government to play a role in it because it has enough resource to _price_ it on behalf of citizens. But it's legimate only because it is demanded by the free market, not the other way around.
2. Monopoly: most likely a bologna. If there is money to be made in a particular market, there will always be someone willing to come in with tons of cash to overtake the current market leader. As in the DOJ vs. Microsoft case, what microsoft has done wrong is that it uses unfair marketing practice on PC vendors, not that it squashs Netscape like a bug (It turns out you CAN make money by producing a browser - Opera comes to mind, so don't blame microsoft.). So illegal marketing practice should be banned (as demanded by the free market principle) but monopoly is a non-sense. Actually, government often _creates_ monopoly (take Petro China, I was in one of its gas station and a worker there told me the gas price has been unchanged for six month, during which the crude oil price has changed significantly. Talking about price manipulation)
3. Central bank. I don't know what to say. It didn't play an important role (or didn't exist) before 1920s. So how was the health of economy in 18th century? And if gold standard is still in place, do we really need a Fed to tell us what the interest rate should be? And how much inflationary risk has been caused by fed because it keeps printing paper money? Given the billions of (potentially worthless) U.S. bills Chinese central bank is holding and US dollor's evaluation going down like a free dive, how much of that is caused by Fed's irresponsible monetery policy? (should I call it rubbery again?) By the way, the same policy has caused the housing bubble we are sitting on now, due to artificially low interest rate.
4. taxation. I'm not against taxation - that's the only way to feed your military forces for instance. But i'm against the idea of over-taxing so that government can have a surplus(what an absurt idea) and hire a bunch of bureaucrates to dictate what its people should do and should not. I've seen again and again incompetent public workers waste taxpayer's money on unnecessary social programs only to demonstrate they are doing something and therefore should be kept in place. Time to pull off the life support.
All in all, government should only enforce the free market, not interfere with it.