Jerry Miskulin – 1/8/07

This page was last updated on January 8, 2007.

Paying the consequences; Jerry Miskulin; Beaver County Times; January 8, 2007.

At the time I wrote this critique, Mr. Miskulin’s letter was in the print edition of the Times but not on the website.

In his letter of October 10, 2006, Mr. Miskulin told us the Chicago Eight were “patriotic.”

Because I’m too lazy to transcribe the entire letter, I’ll stick to a few comments.

The letter leads off with Mr. Miskulin telling us how bad deeds are normally punished. Mr. Miskulin then wrote, “Only in business or economics do we have laissez-faire outlooks on life where there is no answering to anyone but one’s self. Laissez-faire economics was created by businessmen or economists specifically to absolve them of all their wrongs. It has often been referred to as the ‘law of the jungle’ only because there are no laws in the jungle.” Mr. Miskulin also believes a laissez-faire doctrine favors squashing “any form of unionism or trust busting” and that “[l]aissez-faire economics has one weakness in that it treats people as merchandise (much like the Dred Scott case) and money as something that is living.”

As a reminder, the Dred Scott case had to do with the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 affirming the legality of slavery. How Mr. Miskulin manages to get slavery and laissez-faire economic policy into the same sentence is beyond me.

If Mr. Miskulin’s letter illustrates his understanding of a laissez-faire economic policy, he’s displaying quite a bit of ignorance. A laissez-faire policy is one in which the government doesn’t interfere in economic policy beyond what’s necessary to provide law and order. For example, the government doesn’t set prices or wages or get into central economic planning. You can almost look at laissez-faire as a synonym for “free market.”

While today’s U.S. economy may be the freest in the world, it’s not without government interference by a long shot. For example, we have a minimum wage and in Pennsylvania there’s a minimum price for milk. In other states there are minimum prices for gasoline. We routinely apply import tariffs and give farmers subsidies to raise (or not) certain crops. In Pennsylvania, the government runs the retail liquor and wine industry.

Regarding “unionism,” a laissez-faire policy has nothing to do with it.

Regarding “trust busting,” a pure laissez-faire policy would have no problem with non-government monopolies. That’s not the case in the U.S. Almost every merger of major competing businesses requires government OK.