No. I'm pretty sure that greed is a negative aspect of one's personality.
What I'm asking is why it even matters if the only way to satisfy your greed is to HELP OTHERS?
Yes, but not entirely, as the free market and the corporation necessitate. They do have ideologies to further and they presumably do actually care a little about the state of the country.
Yes, and those lead them to make more bad decisions ...
Treated in an unfair manner. This could take the form of being swindled or underpaid, working in dangerous conditions etc.
Ok, now define unfair, define underpaid, define dangerous conditions, etc. Are NFL players exploited? They work in VERY dangerous conditions. It seems like this is all going to come down to your opinion of what "fair" is.
I have a non-arbitrary criterion for determining whether something is fair, and that's whether it was voluntary. Sometimes one might change one's mind later, but the vast, vast majority of the time when you voluntarily agree to something you're better off.
Firstly, I don't believe that when one purchases a cigarette, the Tobacco company would voluntarily tell you that they cause adverse health effects and are addictive, yet cigarettes are addictive and dangerous to one's health. Without regulations such as false-advertising laws or mandatory health-warnings consumers would not have the right information to make the correct decision when it comes to buying products. I don't think that is a good thing.
C'mon. No one reads those labels, and everyone knows that cigarettes are harmful anyway.
My only point is that it's perfectly fine for people to choose to do things that are harmful to their health like cigarettes, fast food, driving, etc.
Fraud is a form of breach of contract. I agree to buy something from you, but you actually deliver something else - that's fraud/breach of contract.
They take these jobs voluntarily because they cannot find work elsewhere, so, if all working conditions were raised to a reasonable standard as mandated by the government, working conditions would have to improve or nothing would be produced. And businesses need production if they wish to make profit.
"Reasonable standard" is decided by whom? It looks like the workers themselves decided that wherever they chose was already a reasonable standard.
And if you raise the wages/etc of all the workers, then perhaps the business won't be able to make a profit at all and will go out of business. It's pretty simple economics - if you put in a price floor on wages, then there will be excess supply of workers, i.e. unemployment.
And one of the beauties of the market is that IF the workers are really getting underpaid, another company will have an incentive to set up a factory there, pay the workers a little bit more, and steal away all the cheap labor from the old company. That's competition. That's why the market leads to workers getting paid the marginal product of their labor (i.e. they are paid exactly how much their labor produces for the firm).
True, but it's far cheaper in other areas.
Is it? I don't think that they were paying sharecroppers much even after slavery was done...
Okay, even if slaves would have become unprofitable, it is far quicker to enact legislation to make the practice illegal and note the use of the word "slowly".
Yes, and I 100% agree that slavery should never have happened. My only point was that slavery was STRONGLY supported by the government of the time.
That is an assumption however. The free market exists in the absence of regulation, without regulation there would be little to prevent this sort of practice.
Lack of violence IS an assumption of the free market. If there isn't lack of violence, then it is not a free market. It's a whole other topic what the government needs to do (or not do) to ensure that a free market exists at all (one that we could debate, but I'd like to stick to this topic while it's still going). I'm assuming that the free market already exists and comparing market solutions and government solutions - i.e. government regulation in excess of whatever is required to ensure the existence of the free market.
Okay, that's fine then but I would argue that those countries have less economic freedom than the USA and more government intervention than the USA.
They were actually above the US in some areas of economic freedom IIRC. There are also demographic issues to consider - the US is larger and more diverse, etc. And I think those countries have plenty of problems too (using only some UN index doesn't really tell you anything about the health of their economy). Anyway, the US has strayed far away from the free market so I don't really think it's a worthwhile comparison.
True, however, the US would be considered freer than those countries would it not?
I don't know. The US is pretty messed up. I guess it depends on what you mean by freer. The free market exists to some extent in some areas of the US markets (technology?), but many of them are dominated by government (financials). So I guess it depends on the product? I don't know enough details to make a good comparison.
No, it measures average life expectancy, educational attainment and GDP per capita. It's not entirely arbitrary, although I would agree that it is rough.
I'm not saying it's totally useless, but it's not like it's the perfect thing to capture economic health either. Certain things in there might have little to do with the economy.
Okay, what about the internet? Or the computer?
It's a real stretch to say those are products of the government. The roots of the internet can be traced back to a project to create a network that would function in the even of nuclear strike, but the internet as we know it has had little government involvement in its propagation. There's a big debate going on now about how much the government should get involved in the internet, implying that the government has had little to do with the internet up to today. Anyway, I really don't think it's the case that the internet only exists because of government.
Computers obviously would have been produced whether the government were involved in research or not. Is the government involved in all the current advances in computers that we have? (like the massive increases in memory/CPU speed/etc?). I'd say that was driven by the computer companies.
Though academic research will become useful down the track. I'm sure when Quantum mechanics was first being theorised it had little practical application, but it now is what allows for the construction of computers.
Wait, what? What does quantum mechanics have to do with computers?
Also there is a large amount of scientific research that hasn't had any practical application as well.
Though, government increases this growth though, you must admit.
No way. Maybe if the only thing the government did was fund research and it somehow knew all the right things to invest in. All the other stuff the government does slows economic growth by a ridiculous amount.
Also, if the government weren't investing in research and instead left that money in the hands of private citizens, maybe it would have gone towards other research that is more applicable to the wants of consumers. That's one of the things about counterfactuals: all we see is what actually happened, so we can't even imagine what might have happened otherwise.
Yes, but I assure you that compulsory charity would be able to raise more money than private charity.
Obviously. But it's likely to raise too much charity.
Although they often have poor governments, I'm pretty sure that not all of them do, and that at least some have relatively free markets, especially because they have fewer regulations.
I really doubt it, but even if they did, they are going to be worse off just because they are so far behind developed nations already. If centuries of horrible government give way to a totally free market, it's not going to instantly make them equal to a developed nation. They don't have the accumulated capital and technology that developed nations do.
I disagree. China is a communist country. Public ownership of assets is common and the government plans the economy.
China is communist in name only. Government is involved in some aspects of the economy but there is a lot of room for entrepreneurship and very few regulations on businesses.
Lots. Environmental pollution is extremely common and adverse health effects from produce are common as well.
I'd still argue that MOST businesses don't have either of these. Also health effects from produce aren't an externality - that's just an example of a bad product.
Environmental pollution should be treated as vandalism IMO, and the people whose property is getting polluted should come to some agreement with the company about what to do.
Yeah and who would implement them? The government?
Well, most see the government as the enforcement mechanism for the free market, so I suppose yes. The key difference between general government environmental policies and what I propose is the focus on the victims - the people whose property is getting polluted. These are the people that should come to some agreement with the company about what to do, and the government should just enforce that agreement.
Well, neither are greed fuelled share holders.
As I said, greed is good if the only way to satisfy greed is to help others. Also the market doesn't have centralized decision makers, so the greed fueled share holders can only really affect the market for their own product, rather than messing things up for everyone the way the government can.