AND YOU THINK THERE SHOULD NOT BE ANY REGULATIONS OR LAWS TO INTERFERE? - I DISAGREE
Most Americans will agree on the first point: that the free enterprise system is the best economic model. How to implement or how much to regulate it is where most of us part ways.
If you ask anyone if the water and sewer systems in their city should be in private hands they will tell you no. If you ask if a public utility like the phone company or the power company should be in private hands most people will tell you it should not. We agree on the implications of such privatization…thousands of water and sewer lines running underneath our streets or 20 telephone or electric posts with wires running in our alleys that resemble a bowl of spaghetti.
When you speak to a person in favor of pure capitalism he or she will tell you that the government is too big, that the government should not interfere or make laws that regulate or would make it harder to conduct business. What they are not telling you is that there are certain basic needs for government to protect consumers, certain health and safety concerns that government has been entrusted to safeguard. Such is the case with safety inspections of our foodstuff and our medicines.
We have laws that protect the workers from unnecessary risks that would take precautions to assure the safety and good health of those workers…well, we all know that if the rich and the corporations are allowed not to have these, to them human life and the health of their employees is of no significance as long as there is a profit.
But do you think that government has some responsibility for having a say in how a business can conduct itself? Are we such purists about capitalism that we actually would then turn government into a tool to allow such disparities?
A good example of this would be unfair competition; if you have a national chain with thousands of locations and they come into a small town, open a facility in the outskirts, in some shopping mall by the Interstate and this chain then makes it a point to sell everything in the store at 20 or 30% less than they are charging in the other stores across the country with the intention of driving out of business the already existing ma and pa store downtown; then that is unfair competition.
As I well know; Walgreens opened a liquor store less than a mile from the 
liquor business I was involved with; they were selling their products at the same figure than it cost me to buy it. In no time at all sales plummeted and the business had to close.
Wal-Mart is another example of this. While they are the largest of all the U.S. employers, they are also the worst in compensation and benefits. Because they also buy in such large quantities they can realize a great deal of leverage in negotiating purchase price. If you also add into the equation that they will come into a mall and open up a store and will run it at a loss, offering outrageously low prices that will guarantee mom and pop grocery or clothing store downtown that little village to close.
I also think that there are some functions that government offers that will be safer and less risky than if it were in private hands…Social Security, Health Care, retirement accounts and unemployment insurance…these safety nets could not possibly be in the hands of private enterprise. To do so would be to invite disaster. We all know what happened to our 401’s and our pensions just recently during the stock market disaster.
Wake up people, it is not black or white, there are many tonalities of grey. Capitalism is the best system but it has to have regulations or greed will take over.
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