Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for November 27, 2014
November 21, 2014
November 28, 2014
Transcript:
Enjoy this Classic Tom the Dancing Bug Every Thursday Vintage 1999 Panels from the annals of the Tom the Dancing Bug archive Check back every Friday for a fresh, brand new Tom the Dancing Bug! Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling Everyone Agrees: The Free Market Works!! Michael Davies, C.E.O., Apex Steel The economy works perfectly when left alone! Except the government has to help U.S. industries against foreign competitors. That's needed to correct for outside forces. Stanley Buhl, owner, the Cincinnati Large Mammals Basketball Team Sure, the market sets the price for everything. That's fair AND efficient. Except obviously we need salary caps to correct for systemic flaws in our industry. Sheila Reiter, labor economist When the government gets involved in the economy, it only creates inefficiencies. Except that what I call the "Labor-Gap Internalities" creates the need for extensive worker protection laws. Tony Shore, manager, Sweet-Um Sourballs Absolutely. The government's got to stay out of private business. It's the American way. Except markets fail in the Sourball Industry, so we need the state to support economic development. Erik Walden, Practitioner of the Ancient Art of Puppet Mimery. The government's role in the economy's got to be limited to the essentials. Providing infrastructure, enforcing contracts and property rights and, of course, subsidizing dead and dying art forms. Peter Szpak, professor of Communist history Yes, as long as basic assumptions hold, the free market does yield optimal results. Except that those assumptions are never true, so the state should own everything. Man: Right! Wait a minute...
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ehtaniguchi over 9 years ago
Sorry, the free market died in 1929.
Randy B Premium Member over 9 years ago
Bah. Free market fundamentalists.They probably think that everyone acts rationally in their own best interest, too.
DarkHorseSki over 9 years ago
There are some totally false takes. When foreign governments interfere with the market, that is also a problem (see the steel image). However, the government should not be propping up the local steel industry, it should tariff goods from outside nations that manipulate their prices. The Federal government already interferes with baseball and prevents some free market activities, if they were not involved, the owners would happily go to a full free market.
Carl Maniscalco over 9 years ago
Jon L-ski: I’m not sure how you came to that conclusion. Major League Baseball is actually exempt from anti-trust laws.
ickymungmung over 9 years ago
Our free market is free with everything, including rationalizations.
hmofo813 Premium Member over 9 years ago
There is no such thing as a free market. There can certainly be no such thing as a free market as long as corporations exist.
androgenoide over 9 years ago
Good approximations to a free market can exist. Smith used the invisible hand to describe the behavior of corner stores before the advent of chain stores… works fine, highly efficient and needs no regulation. In markets where the entry cost is high, though, you have just a few big players and the market is not only not free but will tend toward a monopoly if left unregulated. Roads and utilities that have to cross property lines can never really be free and, in fact, require a certain amount of coercion to exist.Yeah, we all like the idea of free markets but there’s more to it than simply eliminating government regulation.
Ushindi over 9 years ago
Makes me think of Walmart, and how small business owners complained that WM was selling things for less then the SBO could buy them for and forcing many SBOs to close … WM said, “Tough, that’s the new business model”. However, when Amazon was not being forced to collect sales taxes, WM howled about how unfair that was, and that governments should “DO SOMETHING!”Fair and unfair seem to depend a lot on your point of view.
androgenoide over 9 years ago
It takes some remarkable filtering to be able to ignore the actions of one party and cast all the blame on the other.