Economic Rationality Quotes
Prior to Baxter the issues in prosecuting an anti-trust case were whether or not the company met the size or market share criterion for application of the anti-trust law and whether the company had committed any of the prohibited acts. Baxter added another hurdle. Namely, that the prosecution must make economic sense for the company, the consumer and/or the nation. Many illegal, immoral and unfair antitrust practices were not prosecuted if there was no economic benefit to doing so. Critics of the new policy argued that nowhere in the language of the anti-trust legislation that prosecution should not take place in the absence of demonstrable economic benefit.
One advantage to a political system of allowing the free markets to allocate resources is that the politicians do not have to make almost endless decisions about what is right, what is wrong, who should get what, etc. The difficulty is that in some areas like health the market economy breaks down because there is no limit on what humans would pay for the health and welfare of their children and other loved ones. Then there are areas where the market for whatever reasons, produce a set of results that the vast majority of the society believes is unfair or detrimental to society in general, like gender wage discrimination and tweaking the market cannot improve the situation. However, if market reasoning is eliminated from government, there is endless contention and polarization—which some argue we have come to even with market reasoning in most areas. Market reasoning, of course, assumes competition, and a large part of the American economy is controlled by companies that have monopolies (legal and illegal) and duopolies or oligopolies like oil refining, airlines, internet ISP provisioning.
She was commenting on the incident when in 2013, Congress awarded its highest honor to the 4 young Black girls who were murdered in Birmingham, Alabama at the height of the Civil Rights Movement by the KKK who set off a bomb in the 16th Street Baptist Church. The sister of Addie Mae Collins, one of the murdered girls, who herself was wounded in the bombing, refused the medal on behalf of her dead sister. She resented the fact that it had taken all these years for Congress to make this gesture and then would not do anything that might cost money such as monetary restitution. When the Muslim terrorists murdered people in the 9-11 World Trade Center attacks, Congress swiftly arranged for restitution payments to go to the relatives of the murdered victims and to those wounded. However to many people, when white terrorists murder black victims no restitution many comes forth—only a medal. See {634035} for the sister’s statement.
