Dadgummit, it does sometime seems that guvmints—ours and everybody else’s—seem to punish businesses for making a profit. Just in the last week we have learned that…
The attorney general of Ohio plans to look into the SWA-Airtran merger to see if it is fair to the people of Ohio. Congressperson James Oberstar is pushing the same idea.
Would that Congress understood one absolute fact—it is impossible to interfere with the free market without adding costs to the market (costs that will be—must be) paid by taxpayers, customers, or (usually) both. Congress, unfortunately, pays more attention to votes than to efficiency.
When laws are passed to protect one interested group from competition, somebody pays for it. A tariff protecting our automobile industry from foreign competition means the rest of us pay more for autos. The value of a job saved in Detroit is but a fraction of the cost to save that job.
Before WW II, lobbyists convinced Congress that we needed to impose a tariff on imported sugar lest some foreign country drive us out of the sugar business, leaving us with no source of sugar during the already expected world war. Today, some 65 years after the end of WW II, that tariff still stands; and because of it, all of us pay twice the world market price for sugar. That’s a big reason why so many candy makers have left the states to move to other countries. What price those jobs?
To paraphrase an old song, “When will we ever learn?â€
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