In my latest reading of Clear and Present Dangers: A Conservative View of American Government
(copyright 1975), M. Stanton Evans argues essentially that government
intervention makes problems worse. According to Evans, increasing the
minimum wage discourages businesses from hiring African-American
teenagers, thereby depriving them of opportunities to develop job
skills. Government mortgage insurance, super-highways, and zoning have
encouraged the construction of homes in the suburbs rather than the
inner-cities. Government subsidies for part of the mortgages of
lower-income people have inhibited the lower-income from being able to
negotiate a lower price for their home. Urban renewal, an attempt by
the government to refurbish cities, has resulted in the demolition of
poor people's homes, as people with higher incomes move into the area.
Labor and other regulations have resulted in railroads that sit idle, and
regulations have encouraged higher prices for airlines while inhibiting
potential competitors from entering the airline and taxi market.
Is
Evans, therefore, for no government intervention? There are times when
he seems to lean in that direction, as when he says that the
marketplace can handle the housing issue and questions Congress setting
wages. At other times, however, he appears to be open to some
government intervention. For example, he says that the Civil
Aeronautics Board (CAB) should be eliminated and safety functions should
be transmitted to the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), which indicates
that he is for safety regulation, on some level. And Evans also seems
open to the idea of exempting teenagers from the minimum wage, while
still allowing others to receive it. This idea may have its strengths,
but my concern is that such a policy would encourage businesses to hire
teenagers rather than people offering to work a minimum-wage job to
support their families, since teenagers would be cheaper to employ.
I
don't know a great deal about housing and transportation, but I
wouldn't be surprised if there were legitimacy to many of Evans'
arguments, for government becoming involved in the economy can easily
privilege businesses that are able to work the system. I'd be hesitant
to go the laissez-faire route, though, for I doubt that the private
marketplace would solve all problems. In my opinion, even if government
intervention made some problems worse in certain respects, the problems
were around before the government interfered, which was why the government interfered in the first place.
But
I am open to the government reforming how it intervenes. I once had an
economics teacher who was a moderate rather than right-wing, and he
said in class that deregulation of the airline industry worked (and this
particular deregulation occurred during the Presidency of Jimmy
Carter), whereas it did not work in a number of other fields. Actually,
according to this article, under the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act, "The Civil Aeronautics Board's powers of regulation were phased out, eventually allowing passengers to be exposed to market forces in the airline industry", but "The Act...did not remove or diminish the regulatory powers of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) over all aspects of air safety." That's what M. Stanton Evans proposed in 1975!