Public Policy

For Austrians, economic regulation is always destructive of prosperity because it misallocates resources and is extremely destructive of small business and entrepreneurship.

Environmental regulation has been among the worst offenders in recent years. Nobody can calculate the extraordinary losses associated with the Clean Air Act or the absurdities associated with wetlands or endangered species policies.

However, environmental policy can do what it is explicitly intended to do: lower standards of living. But antitrust policy, in contrast to its stated policy, does not generate competitiveness. Such bogeymen as predatory pricing still scare the bureaucrats at Justice, whereas simple economic analysis can refute the idea that a competitor can sell below his cost of production to take over the market and then sell at monopoly prices later. Any firm that attempts to sell below the costs of production will indefinitely suffer loses. The moment it attempts to raise prices, it invites competitors back into the market.

Civil rights legislation represents one of the most intrusive regulatory interventions in labor markets. When employers are not able to hire, fire, and promote based on their own criteria of merit, dislocations occur within the firm and in labor markets at large. Moreover, civil rights legislation, by creating legal preferences for some groups, undermines the public sense of fairness that is the market’s hallmark.

There is another cost of economic regulation: it impedes the entrepreneurial discovery process. This process is based on having a wide array of alternatives open to the use of capital. Yet government regulation limits the options of entrepreneurs, and erects barriers to the exercise of entrepreneurial talent. Safety, health, and labor regulations, for example, not only inhibit existing production, they impede the development of better production methods.

Austrians have also developed impressive critiques of redistributionism. Conventional welfare theory argues that if the law of diminishing marginal utility is true, then total utility can be easily increased. If you take a dollar from a rich man, his welfare is slightly diminished, but that dollar is worth less to him than to a poor man. Thus redistributing a dollar from a rich man to a poor man increases the total utility between the two. The implication is that welfare can be maximized through perfect income equality. The problem with this, say Austrians, is that utilities cannot be added and subtracted, since they are subjective.

Redistributionism takes from property-owners and producers and gives, by definition, to non-owners and non-producers. This diminishes the value of the property that has been redistributed. Far from increasing total welfare, redistributionism diminishes it. By making property and its value less secure, income transfers lessen the benefits of ownership and production, and thus lower the incentives to both.

Austrians reject the use of redistribution to stimulate the economy or otherwise manipulate the structure of economic activity. Increasing taxes, for example, can do nothing but harm. A shorthand for taxes is wealth destruction. They forcibly confiscate property that could otherwise be saved or invested, thus lowering the number of consumer options available. Moreover, there is no such thing as a strict consumer tax. All taxes decrease production.

Austrians do not go along with the view that deficits don’t matter. In fact, the requirement that deficits be financed by the public or foreign bond holders drives up interest rates and thus crowds out potential private investment. Deficits also create the danger that they will be financed through central-bank inflation. Yet the answer to deficits is not to increase taxation, which is more destructive than deficits, but rather to balance the budget through necessary spending cuts. Where to cut? Anywhere and everywhere.

The ideal situation is not simply a balanced budget. Government spending itself, regardless of deficit or surplus, should be as small as possible. Why? Because such spending diverts resources from better uses in private markets.

We hear talk of this or that “government investment.” Austrians reject this term as an oxymoron. Real investment is taken on by capitalists risking their own money in hopes of satisfying future consumer demands. Government limits the satisfaction of consumer demands by hampering production in the private sector. Besides, government investments are notorious wastes of money, and are in fact consumption spending by politicians and bureaucrats.