Recently, an article was published titled “Anti-regulation is just a narrative” wherein the thesis was essentially: “while regulations can harm certain industries” they are still necessary because they do not harm the economy overall and “they are most often written with the goal of alleviating human health problems.” In this article, I intend to refute the facts and philosophy used by that author to support such regulations.
Campbell acknowledged the frustration that workers of heavily and increasingly regulated industries face as they lose their jobs and livelihood because of these laws. His defense? “[N]ational economies learn to adapt.” This is wrong on multiple levels. On the practical side, national economies do not reach some “new equilibrium” after the forceful collapse of an industry. Because the collapse of industry A was not natural, the consumer, having lost its freedom of choice in product purchasing, is forced to support industry B. Industry B now has an unnatural monopoly and an unsustainable rise in demand, resulting in increased prices and simultaneous decrease in product quality.
The consumer loses because it now pays more money for a worse product. Industry A loses because it is destroyed. The workers of industry A lose because they are unemployed. Industries C, D, and E lose because they were supported by the workers of industry A, and thus take significant damage from their unemployment. Industry B may have a chance of coming out in shambles, but often it will find itself bankrupt and dissolved after not very long. It is a lose-lose-lose-lose-lose-lose-(maybe-win-but-usually-lose) situation. There is no equilibrium because the change in economy was unnatural.
But Nathan’s dismissal of the workers’ suffering is wrong on more than a practical level. Nathan’s moral defense for regulations from which “some Americans are negatively affected” is simply that “others benefit.” Now, it is true that when one industry out-performs another there are winners and losers – this is not an unjust situation. But no event is immoral in-and-of itself; rather, injustice is determined by a moral agent’s role in causing the event to occur by initiating the use of force. It is unfortunate but not unjust for the employees of Blockbuster to lose their jobs when Netflix dominates the movie rental industry, because the event occurred naturally in a free market. When the workers of an industry lose their jobs due to government regulation, they have a right to be utterly enraged; they have not lost their jobs to fair competition, they have lost them at the point of a gun. It is an incredible injustice.
For the government to have a right to get involved in the functions of a company, really only one criterion must be met: the government must have an ethical responsibility to defend some individual’s rights. If it can be demonstrated that business X did action Y that caused citizen Z objective damages to his or her life or property, then the government is ethically permitted to hold business X financially responsible for Z’s compensation and force X to cease and desist action Y. There have been many cases in legal history where some entity has polluted or damaged the water or air and was rightfully punished by law. If such a punishment causes the workers of company X to lose their jobs, indeed no injustice has actually been committed.
This should not be assumed to justify wide-scale regulations on an industry as a whole on behalf of some hypothetical group of individuals. However, since I cannot debate the idea of preemptive justice or “public interest” in this article, I will grant my opponent the benefit of the doubt: let us assume that everything I’ve thus written is invalid; we will pretend that regulating one industry to death will not have drastic negative effects on the economy and we will wrongly adopt a theory of ethics that grants the government the right to act on behalf of so-called “public interest.” The question then becomes: is it in the public interest to prefer clean air to efficient industry? The answer, still, is no.
In third world countries, millions of people die every year from air pollution. Because they are not industrialized, they must burn open fires often fueled by biomass in their homes. This releases toxic pollutants into their homes which can kill them. In first world countries – thanks to fossil fuels – we turn up the thermostat and no-one dies. Many other similar examples can be provided, all demonstrating the same point: the improvement on the quality of life far exceeds the damages caused by burning fossil fuels. Cleaner forms of energy production are ideal and should be worked towards, but many places do not have the sunny days of Las Vegas to support solar energy or the open lands of Texas for building windmills; for them, fossil fuels are their only answer. Nathan warns against treating “a sprained ankle by amputating the leg,” yet that itself is the best analogy for describing these heavy regulations.
Carter Yancey is a sophomore majoring in computer science and mathematics. His column runs biweekly.
