I have lived my life as an economic conservative, believing in free markets, small government and personal freedom from the time I was a teenager. I'm not about to change now.
Some noted conservatives like ABC's 20/20 anchor John Stossel started out as liberals before seeing the light. My conservatism was the result of my parents, staunch conservatives who believed in these things and passed their views on to my brother and myself.
They could pass on their beliefs but they could not pass on the knowledge, experience and observations that laid behind them. Therefore, when I ran into committed liberals I did not have the knowledge to refute many of their arguments and assertions. Some nettlesome questions that arose were: Who is going to protect the worker from starvation wages? Who is going to prevent industry from exploiting child labor? How will children be educated without public schools. Do the rich get richer while the poor get poorer? Without government regulation what keeps business from taking advantage of the public? What keeps businesses from forming monopolies?
At the age of 30, I had no good answers to these questions and many others. I thought they were nonsense, but lacked the tools to argue effectively against them.
This is when Milton and Rose Friedman came out with their classic book ”Free to Choose,” published to complement their 10-week TV serial on economics, which I followed religiously. I was also invited by my good friend Dr Ted Grabiak to attend lectures by economist Hans Sennholz sponsored by the local dentist association.I also discovered the Foundation for Economic Education, which published the oldest free market journal in the country. This education was supplemented by books and articles by Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell and many other free market thinkers not to mention the Wall Street Journal and text books.
Some of the things I learned:
# The real protection a worker has is the existence of multiple employers.
# Child labor went away when productivity got so high it was no longer needed .
# Everyone is getting richer.
# We did just fine before public education and we could do better now without it.
# Government regulation of businesses in no way serves the public.
I also learned the hard way that monopolies are impossible without government backing. Some copper companies that I owned shares in announced they were forming a copper cartel. They were going to raise the price of copper and make outrageous profits. For several weeks the stocks rose in spectacular fashion. Needless to say I was ecstatic. Then all of a sudden, all of the copper stocks crashed back to or below their original levels. The crash was so fast I didn’t have time to get out. The prime mover in the crash was the announcement that aluminum was going to be used for wiring and power lines.
So much for the copper cartel.
In contrast the wicked Standard oil company had grown to a huge size by giving the customer better products at ever lower prices. For this the evil, John D. Rockefeller is blasted in virtually all of our government high school history books for doing so much to improve the standard of living for most Americans.
I have learned that whenever and wherever it can be utilized, the free market does virtually everything better than government. The best government policy to promote economic well being is low taxes, few regulations, stable money, free flowing foreign trade and a legal system that is good at protecting property rights.
Outside of national defense and law enforcement, there is hardly any area where the free market doesn’t outperform government. There are many reasons why this is true. Furthermore, if you look around you will see that there are few government economic programs that could exist without coercion.
In view of all this, it is a very straightforward way for a liberal to shake the confidence of an economic conservative.
All the liberal has to do is present a list of government programs outside of defense and law enforcement that work in an efficient economical and coercion free manner to achieve their purpose. All they have to do is find a country where the shift from a market economy to a centrally planned economy has brought increased prosperity while the shift in the opposite direction has brought increased poverty. They could also present ways in which governments can improve on such things as profit and loss, competition, and market action to achieve improved economic efficiency. Of course, such examples are difficult to demonstrate.