If you believe that the government?s decision to force taxpayers into bailing out banks and car companies and other businesses gives the government a right to dictate how those businesses operate, Thomas Sowell offers a valuable corrective.
Near the end of his latest book, The Housing Boom and Bust, Sowell writes:
The argument that government officials have a right to protect the taxpayers? money through intervention into the decisions made by companies that spend bailout money is politically effective, however logically deficient. Rights are not the issue. Anyone who owns a home has a right to take a hammer and smash every window in that house. But no one believes that the right to do so says anything about the wisdom of doing so. All of us have rights to do all sorts of things that would be counterproductive and even disastrous. The purpose of government is not to exercise every conceivable right it has but to exercise whatever wisdom it has for the benefit of the country.
The current economic crisis itself grew out of politicians intervening in businesses and markets, making decisions for which they have neither experience nor expertise, much less a stake. To extend the same principle to other sectors of the economy is to invite a wider disaster, rather than an end to the current crisis. Asserting a right to do is completely beside the point ? which is whether the country will be better off or worse off if politicians continue the pattern of interventions that brought on the current economic problems in the first place.
