It’s sad that we tend to see economic growth as the direct result of government intervention rather than as the natural development of people voluntarily interacting and exchanging goods and services with government at best waiting on the sidelines to intervene only where rights are clearly being violated or disputes have become intractable (“Can a Democrat take on Larry Hogan on economic development?” June 8).
In 1850, the great French classical liberal Frederic Bastiat noted in his pamphlet “The Law” the unthinking tendency of the intellectuals of his day to attribute all social and economic goods to the benevolence and wisdom of wise rulers and legislators, even though their influence is minuscule and generally only detrimental where they do have an effect. Unfortunately, our understanding of political science and economics often seems to have made no progress since his day.
It shouldn’t take an economic genius to realize that public spending cannot possibly create a net economic benefit, since all the money spend on improving one area must be taken from somewhere else in taxation, thereby canceling out whatever benefit there may arise from the spending. The same goes for the supposed benefits of wage and price controls. If I benefit some workers by raising the statutory minimum wage, for instance, it can only come at the expense of other workers priced out of the job market. Or, if I benefit other workers by mandating paid family leave, that likewise only comes at the expense of other workers whose productive value cannot justify that expense.
Sadly, as Mr. Bastiat noted in another essay, many of these costs are “unseen.” For example, the jobs lost through minimum wage or benefits laws include not only those who get fired but those who never get hired in the first place but would have been hired had they been allowed to work for a lower wage or fewer benefits. Likewise, the unseen costs of taxation include not just the taxpayers’ foregone consumption but also all the taxpayers’ foregone investments that might have gone to benefit consumers but instead have been siphoned off to fund the government’s projects.
I hope readers will apply some skepticism to the claims of any candidate that he or she can just tax, spend and regulate us into prosperity. The best thing a politician can do is to leave people alone.
Jonathan Gress-Wright, Baltimore
