My friend Mark Sumner brings up an excellent point for anti-government lunatics in this great essay at Daily Kos. Without rules baseball wouldn’t be baseball, it would be a gang fight:
The rules aren’t just a part of baseball, they are baseball. Executing those rules under those supervision of the umpires is what it means to play the game. Functional capitalism has always required the same thing: rules and people to enforce those rules.
Mark’s a way better writer than I am and he goes on to explain beautifully what this means in the context of government regulation. I probably would have cut straight to the crude point and say that unlimited and unconstrained capitalism without oversight and government enforcement of that oversight isn’t called capitalism for long, it’s called war.
Thanks for linking to this. A friend of mine has long argued that people who say that businesses shouldn’t be regulated are essentially arguing that businesses should be exempt from the law. The baseball analogy works even better.
Capitalism without an umpire is “mercantilism”. Adam Smith warned us about this in his book The Wealth of Nations in 1776.
One of the first economists, he argued cogently against many of the very things the Tea Party is for. Ironic, that.