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What is Interventionism? / Artikel mises.org

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http://www.mises.org/fullstory.asp?control=1315
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What is Interventionism?
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By George
Reisman

[Posted
September 10, 2003]

<img alt src="http://www.mises.org/images/reismansmall.jpg" align="right" border="0" width="169" height="211">Interventionism
is any act of government that both represents the initiation of physical force
and, at the same time, stops short of imposing an all-round socialist economic
system, in which production takes place entirely, or at least
characteristically, at the initiative of the government. In contrast to
socialism, interventionism is a system in which production continues to take
place characteristically, at the initiative of private individuals, including
private corporations, and is motivated by the desire to earn private profit.
Interventionism exists in the framework of  a market economy, though, as
von Mises puts it, such a market economy is a hampered market economy.

Many
countries often thought to be socialist, either now or in the past, such as
Sweden, Israel, and Britain under the old Labor Party, should be thought of as
hampered market economies instead. For production in those countries
characteristically takes place, or did take place, at private initiative,
motivated by private profit. The effect of the very extensive interventionism
in those countries was or is to prevent people from doing many, many things
they would have done had they been free to do them and to compel them to do
many, many things they would not have done had they not been compelled to do
them. But within those confines, matters pertaining to production were and are
characteristically still decided by private individuals, motivated by the
prospect of making profits and avoiding losses. Thus, it is still private
initiative, motivated by private profit, that animates and drives the economy
of those countries. The fact that the ruling political party in such countries
may call itself socialist and support the philosophy of socialism is not
sufficient to make them socialist countries in fact.

The
only genuinely socialist countries that have existed have been the Soviet
Union and its East European satellites, Communist China and its satellites,
Cuba, and also, very importantly, Nazi Germany. Mises explains that Nazi
Germany was a socialist state by virtue of the existence of all-round price
controls and the consequent shortages they create. In response to the
existence of shortages and the economic chaos that accompanies them, the
government takes control of all fundamental decisions concerning production,
such as what is produced, in what quantities, by what methods, and who is to
get the resulting product. Mises call such socialism, socialism on the German
or Nazi pattern, to distinguish it from the obvious socialism of the Soviets,
in which all means of production are openly nationalized, and which he calls
socialism on the Russian or Bolshevik pattern.

Socialism
on the German pattern is deceptive and often mistakenly characterized as
capitalism because it maintains the outward form and appearance of private
ownership of the means of production and thus of capitalism. However, under
German-style socialism, private ownership exists in name only. The power to
make all the substantive decisions that constitutes the essence of ownership
is in the hands of the government and is exercised by the government.
Socialism on the German or Nazi pattern is de facto socialism.

Hopefully,
the distinction between interventionism and socialism is now clear.

However,
it is also necessary to distinguish interventionism from proper, legitimate
government action, which does not represent interventionism.

All
government action, good and bad, represents the use of physical force. There
is an expression in Latin, "nulla lege sine poena"—which
means, in translation,"there is no law without punishment." Every
law, edict, ruling, decree, or regulation that a government issues is backed
by the threat of physical force—even to the point of killing whoever does
not obey it. And this applies even to the most minor offenses, such as refusal
to wear a seat belt or to pay a parking ticket. First may come reminder
letters, increasingly less polite, asking for payment of the initial fine. If
they are ignored, then may come greater fines. Beyond the fines comes the
threat of arrest and imprisonment. And if, when the officers come to make the
arrest, one resists, then whatever force is required to overcome one's
resistance will be applied, including the use of firearms and sharpshooters.

Now
by no means is it the case that all such instances are wrong, unreasonable, or
in any way objectionable. There are murderers, muggers, rapists, robbers, and
con men of various types (the activity of  these last is tantamount to
robbery). The deeds of  all these categories of people represent the use
of physical force, in that they constitute physically doing something to or
with the person or property of another against his will. More than that, such
actions represent the initiation of physical force. When the government
uses force against such perpetrators, its actions represent the use of
physical force in defense or retaliation, on behalf of innocent victims.

The
government's use of force in such cases, provided it is not excessive, is
entirely appropriate. In essence, it is the same as the physical force used by
the Sheriffs and United States Marshals, depicted in old Western movies,
against bank robbers, cattle rustlers, and so on. The difference between the
use of physical force in defense or retaliation and the initiation of physical
force is the essential difference between the guys in the white hats and the
guys in the black hats in those Western movies. It's the difference between
the physical force used by a bank robber and the bank guard, the physical
force used by a kidnapper and the physical force used by the rescuers of the
kidnapper's victim.

Exactly
the same point applies to a country's armed forces. They are a legitimate use
of force insofar as they are used in defense and retaliation against foreign
aggression.

The
government's use of defensive and retaliatory force does not represent   
interventionism. In such cases, the government is simply doing its entirely
proper, strictly limited job of protecting individual rights from the
initiation of physical force. The concept of interventionism applies only to
instances in which the government uses physical force not in a defensive or
retaliatory capacity, but as an aggressor, that is, uses physical force
against people who have not initiated its use.

This
is what the government does every time it forbids any voluntary, contractual
relationship, such as the offer and acceptance of a price or wage, or products
or working conditions, that the parties judge to be in their respective
self-interest to offer and accept. Likewise, the government initiates the use
of physical force whenever it compels one man to pay any part of  his
wealth or income, against his will, for the benefit or support of another, as
is the case in the financing of public welfare, public housing, and public
education, or for some alleged benefit to himself that he prefers not to pay
for, such as a future Social Security or Medicare benefit.

So
much for the nature of interventionism. The policy of the strict avoidance of
interventionism is the policy of laissez-faire, which, very simply, is
to be understood as: if it—that is, the action or situation or whatever—does
not represent the initiation of physical force, the government must leave it
alone, i.e., not intervene.

Now
we must turn to the question of what precisely is the scope of interventionism.
This is a question that is very closely related to the further question of
what is the cost of interventionism.

One
method of judging the scope of interventionism, at least as a first
approximation, is to consider the number of Federal Cabinet Departments and
the various alphabet agencies that now exist and judge how many of them would
remain, and to what extent, if the guiding principle were enacted that the
government is not to initiate the use of physical force, and thus end all of
its intervention, i.e., if the guiding principle were laissez-faire.

At
present, three are fifteen Cabinet Departments: Agriculture, Commerce, Defense,
Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and
Urban Development, Interior, Justice, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury,
and Veterans' Affairs. The best known of the alphabet agencies are probably
the IRS, the FRB and FDIC, the EPA, FDA, SEC, CFTC, NLRB, FTC, FCC, FERC, NRC,
FAA, CAA, INS, OHSA, CPSC, NHTSA, EEOC, BATF, DEA, NIH, NASA, CIA, and FBI.

If
the government were to be restricted to the use of force only in defense or
retaliation, the only Cabinet Departments that would remain would be Justice—to
prosecute acts of initiation of force across state lines and possible acts of
aggression by State governments—Defense, State, and Treasury. All others
would be eliminated. (This would essentially reduce the number of Cabinet
Departments to the original five that existed under Washington. The Department
of Defense incorporates what were then, and until as recently as 1948, the
separate Departments of War and Navy.)

Of
course, not even these Departments would continue as they are presently
constituted. For example, the Justice Department would lose its Antitrust
Division, which would be closed, and the Treasury Department would lose the
IRS, which would also be closed. The Department of Defense would be scaled
back to defending only the territory of the United States and abandon the
mission of acting as global  policeman. The State Department would cease
to grant foreign aid.

As
for the alphabet agencies, probably only the FBI would survive, and its area
of investigation would be limited exclusively to acts entailing the initiation
of physical force across state lines or against the United States.

The
scope and also the cost of interventionism can be judged by considering the
current budget of the Federal Government and the magnitude and makeup of the
expenditures of the state and local governments. The Federal Budget for the
current fiscal year of 2003 projected total Federal outlays of $2140 billion.
Of  that sum only $364.6 billion appeared under the heading
"National defense," $25.4 billion under the heading"Homeland
Security," and $18.3 billion under the heading"Justice." For
the reasons explained, of course, these sums would be substantially less under
a policy of strict laissez-faire. But even taking them at their stated
levels, it is clear that the overwhelming bulk of government spending, i.e.,
all but the $408.3 billion that comes under these three headings combined, out
of the $2140 billion overall total, is spending that represents government
intervention, spending that would  not exist under laissez faire.
Such spending at the Federal level is clearly in excess of 80%, and may well
be close to 90%, of total Federal spending. The elimination of this spending
would make possible the abolition of  the personal and corporate income
taxes and the inheritance and capital gains taxes, along with the special
taxes to pay for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

The
situation is essentially the same with respect to the spending of state and
local governments. In the first quarter of this year state and local
government spending, according to the statistics published by the government's
own Bureau of Economic Analysis, was running at an annual rate in excess of
$1410 billion. Of this sum, no more than 15-20% is classified under the
heading of"Public Order or Public Safety."

Since
the states and localities currently receive almost $313 billion of the funds
they expend from the Federal Government, and that sum is already included
under Federal spending, the total of government spending going to individuals
and businesses comes to $3237 billion rather than $3550 billion.

To
place this sum in perspective, it should be compared with the total of incomes
earned, i.e., so-called national income, which is reported as currently
running at an annual rate of $8445 billion. This figure, it  should be
noted is substantially inflated by so-called imputations, i.e., monetary
allowances for economic activity that does not earn money. An example is the
imputation for the net rental income allegedly received by homeowners in
renting their homes to themselves. Removing these imputations would reduce
national income substantially—probably by at least 10%,  which would
put it at approximately $7600 billion.

Indeed,
this figure must be further substantially reduced. National income currently
includes approximately $1028 billion of wages and salaries paid to government
employees. To appraise the impact of government spending on the taxpayers who
must pay for it, most of those wages and salaries must be deducted from the
reported national income figure—all of them except the portion which itself
is paid in as taxes, which is probably no more than a third, at the utmost.
Thus, we now have an adjusted national income figure of roughly $6911 billion,
which reflects the subtraction of $689 billion of after-tax wages of
government employees. From this, one should also subtract approximately $218
billion of net interest paid by the Federal Government, which is counted in
National Income. When this is done, the National Income in the hands of the
taxpayers and on which the burden of government falls, comes out as $6693
billion. It is this figure against which the impact  of  $3237
billion of government spending must be judged. As a percentage of this figure,
government spending amounts to approximately 48%! This is an enormous burden,
one that is far higher than usually reported.

But
this is by no means the full story. This is merely a measure of the direct
cost of government spending. What the government does with the money it spends
can impose enormous additional costs. For example, this year's Federal budget
lists an expenditure of $7.6 billion as the budget of the Environmental
Protection Agency, which is charged with enforcing and applying existing
environmental legislation and enacting all manner of new and additional
regulations authorized by the legislation under which it operates. This agency
is the one that decides what air and water quality standards must be met, and
which species are endangered. Its use of whatever billions have been budgeted
for it over the years has undoubtedly served to impose many hundreds of
billions, possibly several  trillions, of dollars of additional costs on
businesses and consumers across the country.

Indeed,
such indirect costs should  be assumed to be the result of all of
the regulatory agencies. As the result of OSHA, the Occupational Health and
Safety Administration, CPSC, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and NTSB,
the National Transportation Safety Board, the prices of many consumers’
goods have been substantially increased in order to comply with
government-mandated safety requirements. In at least one case, that of
stepladders, the price has been more than doubled. The FDA—the Food and Drug
Administration—substantially adds to the costs of new drugs to whatever
extent it unnecessarily delays their introduction. Indeed, it causes people to
suffer and die unnecessarily by preventing the introduction of drugs that have
already proved their value for many years in other countries. The FTC—i.e.,
the Federal Trade Commission—along with the Antitrust Division of the
Department of Justice, routinely prevents business firms from achieving
greater economies by preventing them from carrying out mergers that would
reduce costs and thus prices. The NLRB—the National Labor Relations Board—routinely
drives up business costs and prices by compelling collective bargaining with
labor unions and thus the payment of union scales and acceptance of union work
rules. At the same time, of course, it adds to unemployment, because at the
higher wage rates it causes, the quantity of labor demanded is necessarily
reduced in comparison to what it would be in a free labor market. And, perhaps
worst of all, the Federal Reserve Board systematically inflates the money
supply of the country, thereby causing all of the serious problems that result
from inflation, including periodic recessions and the potential for major
deflation and depression.

Such
extra costs are in the very nature of interventionism. As we have seen, to the
extent that there is interventionism, individuals are prohibited from taking
peaceful actions they judge to be in their interest and/or are compelled to
take actions they judge to be against their interest. A leading category of
actions that individuals judge to be in their interest are those that make it
possible for them to achieve better results and lower costs. The actions they
seek to avoid are those that will cause them to achieve poorer results and
incur higher costs. By preventing individuals from doing what is in their
interest to do and compelling them to do what is against their interest to do,
it is not surprising that interventionism succeeds in holding back improvement
and driving up costs.

I
believe that the growing cost of interventionism is what is responsible for
the fact that apart from the contribution made by women working more, real
income for large numbers of working families in the United States has been
stationary or even declining over the last thirty years or more.

A
major vice of interventionism is that it tends to grow. In the words of Mises,
"Prior Intervention Breeds Later Intervention." For example, the
government imposes rent controls. The result is that private investors don’t
want to build rental housing, because it isn’t profitable. Instead of
repealing the rent controls, the government goes on to build public housing,
claiming that the free market has failed.

Or
it imposes rate regulation on the railroads and at the same time inflates the
money supply, compels the railroads to deal with the railway unions, and
subsidizes massive highway construction. The result: lack of profitability in
railroading and declining investment and quality and service in that industry,
all adding up to another alleged failure of the free market and consequent
alleged need to nationalize an industry.

The
same pattern is now being repeated with respect to privately owned electric
utilities, whose rates are controlled, while inflation drives up their costs,
and who are prevented by the environmental movement from building even such
additional facilities as they are able to build to keep pace with growth in
demand, and who are then blamed for the resulting power shortages.

Or,
the government imposes minimum-wage and prounion legislation, thereby
compulsorily pricing workers out of the market and into unemployment. Then the
complaint is made that capitalism suffers from an inherent problem of
unemployment, necessitating a system of public welfare and government
job-creation programs.

Or,
the government imposes medical licensing, which keeps down the supply of
physicians and artificially increases their rates, making their services
unaffordable by people who otherwise could have afforded them. Then, in an
effort to alleviate this problem, it encourages employer-financed medical
"insurance" so-called, which has the effect of making the cost of
medical care seem virtually free to growing numbers of workers. This is a
system which should be understood not as any actual kind of insurance, but as
the collectivization of medical costs. Because of the lack of cost of
medical care to the individual under this arrangement, the demand for medical
services begins to grow without limit.

Physicians
cash in on the system by ordering more and more tests and procedures that may
be of some benefit to their patients, but which they would not have ordered if
they knew the patients themselves would have to pay for them and could not
afford to do so. Soon physicians become exposed to malpractice suits for
failing to order such tests and procedures and even for taking a patient’s
financial circumstances into account at all. They then begin practicing
"defensive medicine," ordering still more tests and procedures in
order to protect themselves from such suits. And malpractice insurance
premiums grow ever higher.

In
this process, the cost of medical care is driven beyond the reach of more and
more people who lack so-called medical"insurance." To deal with
this problem, the government goes on to establish the programs of"Medicare"
and"Medicaid." The effect of these programs is to drive up the
costs of medical care still further and to expose anyone who remains outside
the system of so-called medical"insurance" to financial ruin should
he need any significant medical care.

Finally,
in order to limit the rise in costs, the government more and more seizes
control of what doctors and hospitals are allowed to do and how they are to do
it. This is the point we are at today in medical care.

In
addition to their economic cost, it should be realized that many if not all of
the administrative agencies that carry out the various interventionist
programs routinely violate basic protections of Anglo-Saxon law. This is
because they combine within themselves the role of legislator, executive,
prosecutor, judge, and jury. The regulations they enact take effect upon
publication in The Federal Register, whereupon they are added to the Code
of Federal Regulations, which now contains several tens of
thousands of pages. The regulations have the force of law and are often
unintelligible, vague, arbitrary, or contradictory.

It
would be very valuable for a volume, or, better, a series of volumes, to be
written someday, perhaps titled"Alphabet Soup or the Cost and
Consequences of  Federal Regulations," which would detail the harm
done by each and every government regulatory agency and each and every
improper Cabinet department. Naturally, the same thing would have to be done
at the level of state and local governments.

Such
a project, should, of course, also deal with the intellectual foundations of
interventionism, that is, the ideas and arguments, the doctrines and theories,
that underlie it in each case, and with its intellectual sources in the
writings of such figures as Marx and Keynes and Robinson and Chamberlin.

The
role of Marx is especially noteworthy. His exploitation theory underlies the
assumption that interventionism has no cost to anyone but the capitalist
"exploiters"—that it somehow just comes out of"surplus value"
or profits. This notion, that government intervention is costless to its
alleged beneficiaries is powerfully reinforced by the government’s ability
to create money, which makes its expenditures appear costless to the citizens,
whose taxes do not have to be immediately increased to pay for additional
government spending when that spending can be paid for by the government out
of newly created money.

The
ultimate goal of this project, of course, would be nothing less than the
elimination of all government intervention and thereby the achievement of a
fully free and far more rapidly progressing and prosperous society than we
have today. Its main inspiration would be the works of Ludwig von Mises, the
careful reading and studying of which by large numbers of scholars would be
the most important prerequisite for its undertaking.

Along
these lines, perhaps as a section in the Introduction to such an undertaking,
I’d like to offer what I believe would be a pro-free-market, anti-poverty
program. That is, a program for alleviating poverty not by means of
additional government intervention, which has been the standard formula for so
long that people seem to have lost the ability even to imagine any
alternative, but by means of the repeal of existing government
intervention and corresponding enlargement of the sphere of economic freedom.

I
want to explain what sorts of things might be done, based on the principle of
abolishing government intervention and enlarging economic freedom, to make it
possible for low-paid workers to earn more money than they now do and to keep
more of what they earn, and also what kinds of things might be done, again
based on the principle of abolishing government intervention and enlarging
economic freedom, that would serve to make housing, medical care, and goods in
general more affordable by poor people. Based on a combination of higher
incomes and lower prices, poverty can certainly be greatly reduced, if not
eliminated altogether.

To
increase the incomes of poor people, the first thing that must be done is to
abolish laws that prevent them from working and thus from earning income. The
leading example of this type of law is the minimum-wage law, which forces
people into unemployment and thereby deprives them both of the income they
might earn by working and of the opportunity of  gaining work experience
and quite possibly of developing work skills that would later on enable them
to perform more valuable work and thus earn more than they could presently
earn.

Abolition
of the minimum-wage law and the resulting employment of more workers at lower
wage rates would serve both to reduce costs of production and to increase the
supply of goods and services produced in the economic system, both of which in
turn would serve to reduce prices. Previously unemployed poor people would
thus both earn more money and be able to buy goods and services at lower
prices than were possible before.

Of
course, those poor people who were lucky enough to have jobs at the minimum
wage would now be earning lower wages. To some extent, those lower wages would
be offset by lower prices, which would come about on the foundation of 
the repeal of the minimum-wage law, as we have just seen. To the extent that
the lower wages would not be offset by lower prices, there is a free-market
remedy—in the form of the repeal of prounion and licensing legislation.

Such
legislation is essentially similar to minimum-wage legislation. It is
minimum-wage legislation for semi-skilled and skilled labor. Like minimum-wage
legislation, its purpose is to forcibly impose wage rates above the level that
a free labor market would establish. And just like minimum-wage legislation,
it reduces the quantity of labor demanded below the supply available and thus
causes unemployment.

The
only difference is that the unemployed workers in these cases are not totally
deprived of employment. They have alternative employment opportunities.
Displaced from the occupations in which they would have worked in a free labor
market, they can still turn to other, less desirable jobs. Thus, for example,
unemployed carpenters, electricians, and plumbers can seek work in factories,
restaurants, or other establishments. Their influx into such other lines of
work, however, serves to enlarge the supply of labor in those other lines.
This larger supply of labor is employable only at lower wage rates than would
have prevailed in the absence of the influx of labor.

To
this extent, the effect of prounion and licensing legislation, it should be
observed, is to raise the wage rates of some workers only by correspondingly
reducing the wages rates of other workers, and, at the same time, of course,
reducing the supply of more valued goods and services and increasing the
supply of less valued goods and services in the economic system. The effect is
tantamount to the wiping out of a portion of human skills and abilities.

If
wage rates in the lines of work to which the displaced workers turn are
prohibited from falling, because they too are unionized, the displaced workers
may still find work, insofar as their relatively superior abilities enable
them to outcompete other, less qualified workers in those lines. In such cases,
there is a further displacement of labor into less desirable jobs. The process
of displacement may go through several stages. A minimum-wage law serves to
make it end in unemployment plain and simple, with the least-skilled, least
educated bearing the brunt of it.

Repealing
prounion and licensing legislation at the same time as minimum-wage
legislation were repealed would reverse this process. At the same time that
previously unemployed workers entered the labor market at the bottom of the
economic ladder, other workers previously employed at the bottom would be
leaving, to move up to the higher-level jobs which their skills and abilities
qualified them for and from which prounion and licensing legislation had
previously barred them. The result would be that wage rates at the lower
levels would not have to fall as much as they would if only minimum-wage
legislation had been repealed.

In
such circumstances, there would be an increase in the supply of labor at all
levels of skill and ability in the economic system, a resulting general fall
in money wage rates, and in costs of production, and a general increase in the
supply of goods and services, accompanied by a general fall in prices.

The
greatest gainers from this process would be the poor, especially those of them 
who previously had been unemployed. They would now be employed at the least
possible fall in wage rates, and the fall in wage rates would be accompanied
by a fall in prices almost certainly greater than the fall in the wage rates
of those members of the poor lucky enough to already have had jobs.

The
fall in prices would be greater than the fall not only in their wage rates but
also in the overall average of wage rates. This is implied in the fact that
the supply of labor employed is not only larger but is also now employed in
ways that better take advantage of the skills and abilities of the workers,
that is, in ways in which their overall productivity is higher.

The
rise in the productivity of labor is manifested in part in the expansion of
the production of more valued goods and services at the expense of the
production of less valued goods and services. This in itself implies an
increase in the supply of products greater than the increase in the supply of
labor employed and thus, in the face of unchanged monetary demands for labor
and products, a fall in prices greater than the fall in wages.

The
rise in the productivity of labor and consequent increase in the supply of
products in greater proportion than the increase in the supply of labor, and
thus a fall in product prices in greater proportion than the fall in wage
rates, results especially from the abolition of prounion legislation. Such
legislation enables the unions to prevent or delay the introduction of
labor-saving machinery, to prevent or minimize competition among workers, and
to impose arbitrary and costly work rules and outrageous featherbedding
practices, all of which signify a lower productivity of labor and thus a lower
supply of products relative to the supply of labor, and thus higher product
prices relative to wage rates. Take away this interference, and prices fall
relative to wage rates, i.e., real wages rise.

In
addition, and very important, the end of large-scale unemployment that would
be achieved by a free labor market would further serve to raise real wage
rates by eliminating the burden that wage earners must bear in supporting the
unemployed, either through voluntary contributions to help unemployed friends
or relatives or through the payment of taxes to support unemployment
compensation and public welfare.

A
further source of a rise in real wage rates would be the abolition of the
government’s Social Security and Medicare programs. This would have the
potential of directly increasing workers’ take-home wages in excess of 15
percent, inasmuch as so-called employer contributions for these programs are
already part of the employers’ labor costs and could be passed on to the
workers in the form of higher take-home wages.

Yet
a further rise in real take-home wages would be achieved if workers were given
the option of withdrawing from employer-financed health insurance programs and
having the employer contributions paid to them directly, as tax-free wages
instead of, as at present, being a tax-free fringe benefit. This change, as I
will later show, would also be an important step in bringing about a radical
reduction in the cost of medical care.

If
interventionism is not eliminated in the ways I have described, and in other
ways that I have not yet described, or at least very substantially reduced,
then it will be necessary to place special focus on its elimination in other
aspects of the restraints it places on people working. While a free economy
makes it possible for real wages to rise to ever higher levels and thus to
progressively reduce the amount of work required to achieve any given level of
living standard, i.e., to both reduce the hours of work and increase the age
at which work begins, an economic system characterized by growing government
intervention requires the opposite outcome, if people are not to be utterly
impoverished. That is, it requires that people work longer hours and start
work at a younger age, in order to produce enough to meet both the voracious
demands of the government and their own vital needs. In other words, to
prevent interventionism from driving growing numbers of people into abject
poverty, it becomes necessary at some point that maximum-hours and child-labor
legislation become a major target of efforts at repeal.

Maximum-hours
and child-labor legislation are especially sacred cows of interventionism,
because of the widely held belief that the amount of work that workers perform
affects employers’ profits rather than workers’ wages. The basis of this
idea is the Marxian exploitation theory, which holds that wages in a free
market are determined by the number of hours of labor required to produce the
average worker’s minimum subsistence, and that hours of labor performed in
excess of that number serve merely to enlarge employers’ profits. Based on
this utterly fallacious idea, people believe that the compulsory shortening of
the working day serves merely to reduce profits, not wages, and that the
prohibition of child labor has the same effect.

The
truth, of course, is that wages are not determined by minimum subsistence but
by the demand for and supply of labor. And while a larger supply of labor
serves to reduce hourly wage rates, its performance also correspondingly
increases the supply of consumers’ goods and thus serves to reduce the
prices of consumers’ goods. Assuming unchanged demands for labor and
consumers’ goods and an unchanged output per unit of labor, the fall in
average hourly wage rates resulting from any given percentage increase in the
supply of labor hours must be accompanied by a corresponding fall in the
prices of consumers’ goods. And because the workers who work the extra hours
are able to offset the fall in hourly wage rates by means of their extra hours,
they benefit from their extra work in the form of lower prices of the things
they buy.

In
other words, a longer working day and starting work at a younger age do serve
to raise real wages, and, by the same token, a shorter working day and
starting work at a later age do serve to reduce real wages. In a free market,
the progressive rise in the output per unit of labor—the productivity of
labor—which occurs because of  the work of scientists and inventors and
the work and saving of businessmen and capitalists, brings about a progressive
fall in prices relative to wage rates and thus a progressive rise in real wage
rates. It is this which permits the progressive shortening of hours and
elimination of child labor that characterizes a free market. Growing
government intervention in contrast, throws this process into reverse. And
then, because of the prevailing ignorance of economics, just as the
interventionists claimed undeserved credit for the shortening of hours and
elimination of child labor achieved by the free market, the advocates of
economic freedom will be subjected to undeserved criticism for urging the
repeal of such legislation in order to mitigate the consequences of growing
interventionism.

My
discussion of ways to increase the money incomes of poor people has been
inextricably intertwined with discussions of the prices they must pay and what
would serve to reduce those prices. This has been unavoidable, because real
wages are determined by prices as much as they are by money wages, and thus
there is simply no way intelligently to discuss wages without discussing
prices.

I
now want to indicate some major specific ways in which the prices or costs
that poor people pay could be reduced by means of reducing or abolishing
government intervention. Of course, these same price and cost reductions will
be of benefit to everyone who buys the goods or services concerned.

Let’s
start with medical care. I’ve already said that a major step in bringing
about a radical reduction in the cost of medical care would be to have
employer contributions to employee medical insurance paid to workers directly,
as tax-free income. Making individuals financially responsible for their own
medical care would reintroduce powerful buyer resistance to further increases
in the cost of medical care and equally powerful pressure for actual decreases
in the cost of medical care.

To
bring down the absurdly bloated costs of the present system, it would be
necessary to enlarge the sphere of economic freedom in some important
additional ways as well. One essential way would be to establish freedom of
competition among hospitals. Even without totally doing away with the present
restrictive system of licensing, if it were made possible for, say, any three
already licensed physicians to establish their own hospital, specializing in
whatever procedures they cared to specialize in, from relatively simple
appendectomies and tonsillectomies to quadruple bypass operations and the
removal of brain tumors, hospital rates would soon be dramatically reduced.

This
is because the present rates of $2000 per day or more far exceed the necessary
costs of providing their services. Free competition in hospitals would drive
their rates down toward their necessary costs plus only as much profit as
required to yield a competitive rate of profit. And it would also operate
progressively to reduce those costs, while improving the quality of the
services provided, just as it does throughout the rest of the economic system.
All the costs of unnecessary paperwork and of compliance with endless
arbitrary government regulations could be eliminated, as well as requirements
to subsidize nonpaying patients.

An
essential requirement of bringing down costs would be respecting the freedom
of contract of hospitals and patients to opt out of the standards of
malpractice that have developed in recent decades and to choose to be guided
by earlier and more reasonable standards. The same freedom of contract
concerning malpractice standards should, of course, be applied to the
relationship between patient and physician, and any and all laws or government
regulations preventing physicians from offering discounted rates to uninsured
patients should be abolished. Allowing physicians not to report fees from
uninsured patients on their income tax returns would likely be extremely
helpful.

These
measures would go a long way toward making medical care affordable by
individuals choosing to receive as take home wages the premiums presently paid
by employers to medical insurers.

Let
us turn now to how the cost of housing could be reduced for poor people. Laws
and regulations imposing minimum housing standards, such as those concerning
minimum size of apartments and minimum window areas have the effect of
imposing standards that are often too high for poor people to afford. They are
comparable to a law that in the name of safety or reducing air pollution would
prohibit automobiles over a certain age from using the public streets or
highways. Since the older cars are less expensive, they are precisely the kind
of cars that poor people tend to own. And the effect of such a law would
therefore be largely to prohibit poor people from driving. In exactly the same
way, laws prohibiting poorer quality housing, which is precisely the kind of
housing that poor people can afford, serves to deprive poor people of housing.
Laws and regulations prohibiting unrelated adults from sharing living quarters
have the same effect. I’m convinced that all such laws and regulations bear
responsibility for the phenomenon of homelessness.

The
withdrawal of land from development by environmental regulations makes land
scarcer and more expensive and thus serves to raise the cost of providing
housing. Zoning laws, which arbitrarily increase minimum lot sizes and limit
the height of buildings have the same effect. Government-imposed
building-safety codes, delays in granting permits, and laws and regulations
supporting the higher wage rates and restrictive work practices of the
construction unions, also serve to raise the cost of housing, as do property
taxes and anything that holds back saving. (Saving is the foundation of
housing construction and mortgage credit. The greater is the supply of savings
relative to the demand for consumers’ goods, the lower are interest rates,
including mortgage rates, and thus the lower is the cost of housing, including
rental housing. I will say more in a little while about how government
interference undermines saving and capital accumulation throughout the
economic system.)

Protective
tariffs and farm subsidies must be mentioned as important causes of prices
being higher and thus real wages being lower than they need to be. And since
poor people can least afford such reductions in real wages, they are their
worst victims. Poor people are the worst victims of government intervention in
general, because they can least afford the resulting inefficiencies and rise
in costs and prices.

And
this brings me to a wider point. Namely, it needs to be understood that the
main way, the only significant way, in which poverty is eliminated is by means
of the rise in the productivity of labor. This is what raises real wages, by
increasing the supply of consumers goods relative to the supply of labor and
correspondingly reducing prices relative to wage rates.

The
rise in the productivity of labor in turn is  based on capital
accumulation. Capital accumulation is what places in the hands of the average
worker the tools, machines, materials, and previously produced products of all
kinds that make possible the rise in his productivity. Capital accumulation is
itself based on the combination of a sufficiently high degree of saving and
provision for the future relative to current consumption, and scientific and
technological progress. It both makes possible the progressive adoption of
more advanced technologies and is itself sustained by their adoption, which
makes possible a growing production of more and better goods, including
further capital goods.

A
major aspect of saving and provision for the future relative to current
consumption is that it determines the demand for labor relative to the demand
for consumers’ goods and thus the height of wages relative to profits. The
greater is  saving and provision for the future relative to current
consumption, the higher are wages relative to profits.

Deeper
even than saving and capital accumulation and scientific and technological
progress is economic freedom and respect for private property rights. The
security of property is essential for people to be motivated to save and
invest. To save and invest, they must know that what they save and invest will
be theirs and not be seized by the government or by other private individuals.
Economic freedom is further essential to capital accumulation and economic
progress because it is the precondition of businessmen and capitalists not
only saving and investing but also making the most efficient use of all
existing means of production. The larger is the output obtained from existing
means of production, the larger is not only the production of consumers’
goods but also of further capital goods. The results of any given degree of
saving and provision for the future are correspondingly greater and the
accumulation of capital is made correspondingly easier and greater.

 
Such taxes as the progressive income  tax, the corporate income tax, and
the inheritance and capital gains taxes greatly impair the ability to save and
accumulate capital. They are paid largely with funds that otherwise would have
been saved and productively expended, i.e., expended for capital goods or
labor by business firms. Instead, those funds are expended by the government,
or by those to whom the government gives the money, for consumers’ goods.
The effect is to reduce the demand for capital goods relative to the demand
for consumers’ goods and thus the production of capital goods relative to
the production of consumers’ goods. This is a sure formula for reducing or
preventing capital accumulation or causing capital decumulation.

Government
budget deficits, the Social Security system, and inflation of the money supply
produce similar negative effects on capital accumulation. Budget deficits draw
savings away from business investment and into financing the consumption
expenditure of the government. The Social Security system leads private
individuals to save less, both by depriving them of the income needed for
saving and by leading them to believe that their and their employers’ taxes
paid into the system are savings for the future. Meanwhile, the government
consumes those taxes.

Inflation
of the money supply undermines capital accumulation by leading to a systematic
overstatement of profit and interest incomes and corresponding increases in
the taxation of such incomes, while simultaneously raising the replacement
prices of capital goods. The result is that business firms lack adequate funds
for replacement. At the same time, the overstatement of profit and interest
incomes and the paper capital gains caused by inflation promotes consumption
by private individuals, who are led to believe that they are richer merely
because inflation has raised their money incomes and the prices of their
assets. Inflation of the money supply undermines capital accumulation in
further ways as well, which I will discuss in my session on"The
Economics of Inflation."

Interventionism
in all of its forms serves to undermine capital accumulation and thus the
productivity of labor and real wages. It does so insofar as it serves to
reduce the output of the economic system, because a major portion of that
output is capital goods, and thus what reduces output reduces the production
of capital goods no less than the production of consumers’ goods, and
thereby makes capital accumulation correspondingly more difficult or
impossible.

In
conclusion, interventionism reduces the standard of living of everyone, but
its impact on the poor, who can least afford any reduction in their standard
of living, is necessarily greatest. If one wants to overcome poverty, there is
only one essential means of doing so. And that is the establishment of
economic freedom to the fullest possible extent, i.e., the establishment of
laissez-faire capitalism.

The
wider and more fundamental principle is that the foundation of economic
prosperity is economic freedom.

-------

George Reisman is professor of
economics at Pepperdine University’s Graziadio School of Business &
Management in Los Angeles, and is the author of Capitalism:
A Treatise on Economics (Ottawa, Illinois: Jameson Books, 1996). His book
is available through Mises.org or
Amazon.com.
His web site is www.capitalism.net.
You may contact Dr. Reisman by MAIL.
See his Mises.org Daily
Articles Archive, and read his interview in the Austrian
Economics Newsletter. This speech was presented at the Mises University
2003. This article is copyrighted by George Reisman.