Kevin Arquit Quotes
All regulation can ever do is approximate the results of competition.
Kevin Arquit, General Counsel, Federal Trade Commission (Republican), Testimony, Senate Judiciary Committee Hearings, October 27, 1993
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Collection of Spoken Words of the Prophet. Ironically, despite the reverence with which words of the Hadith are accorded in Islam, from time to time Muslim theologians and authorities have attempted to establish “fair prices” despite this free market view of the Prophet.
Professor Epstein is a libertarian free market economist who advocates patience even if there are clear problems like corruption, unsafe working conditions, and the like. This view holds that the free market will sort itself out more effectively than the government will be able to do. Others, disagree.
To the modern reader utterances such as this from a Conservative Prime Minister seem astounding. However, the Great Depression existed in Canada as well as the United States, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not the only world leader who would reach the conclusion that business and capitalism must be profoundly regulated and the system changed if it was to be saved.
Hoover was the Food Administrator at that time. Although he gave lip service to the free market economy concept, he was proposing government price controls and rationing. When the free market was not functioning, at this time in his career, he was willing to use government controls and regulation. By the end of 1918 over 250,000 food-handling corporations, firms, and individuals were under Food Administration licenses. Meat, fish, poultry, eggs, butter, milk, potatoes, fresh and dried vegetables, and fruits, canned goods, the coarse grains and rice, vegetable oils, coffee, and such various commodities accessory to food-handling, as ice, ammonia (for ice-making), arsenic (for insecticides), jute bags, sisal, etc., were under direct control. Ironically, later when he was President and faced with the Great Depression, he had become much more rigid and would not “interfere” with the free, private market and use government to solve the national problems. It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who did that after Hoover would not. At the time he gave this speech, Hoover was not very political and was more of a technocrat. It may have been that by the time he became President he was intellectually and politically locked in to Republican Party conservative economic ideology.
This rigid view left no room for regulation which is what almost every modern industrial democracy has chosen. To some of his extremist followers, any government regulation of business or the economy whatsoever, regardless of how little, means that the nation has embraced socialism. It is in this sense that many extreme right wingers viewed Presidents like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama as socialists while they saw themselves as opponents of socialism.
