What economic approach would actually work?

[Montmorency]

Monty I sorry but your quote of the General Welfare clause is utter ignorance.

I don’t blame you but your educators. You should demand a refund.

What the General Welfare was referring to was All in common, or all alike. That no act should be for the benefit of a select group or state but for the good of all alike.

You obviously are not familiar with James Madison’s address to congress over the Cod Fisheries Act, else you would know that he berated them for doing what 20th and 21st century government has done.

Another word there that may through you is Regulate. To the founding generation it meant To keep Regular or Well Supplied.

As to the Interstate Commerce clause and Marshal’s decision to give it the broadest interpretation possible, there were absolutely no constitutional grounds to base that upon and it was flatly ignored until the 20th century.

With that out of the way you will note that there is no authority for the federal government to intervene in any way. They are even expressly forbidden to tax anything produced in any of the states.

While you may find the free market strange it was the way of doing business in the US until about 1933. Around the same time but a little later I believe some anonymous court clerk inserted into a finding by the Supreme Court that economic liberty was no longer seen as an individual right and was not for further review. Rather insidious in my opinion.

As I said before it was the industrialists cries of Over Production, and a goodly bit of money, that brought about the first regulatory moves. There was a great deal of admiration of what the Fascist governments in Europe had accomplished and they sought to emulate it, to a degree.

The Regulatory State in the US did not begin until 1946 IIRC. That took several decades to have a serious impact.

There are some moves afoot in some states to push back against some of the regulation, though I don’t have a catalogue of them or what they are about.

If you are in dire fear of competition I suppose you also fear meritocracy, innovation, and anything else out of the box. Sorry if you think freedom is scary.

Er, what? I don't think you understand what the "general welfare" clause is for or why I brought it up. The clause is not an enumeration of a specific power, but a statement of the purpose of government, why the States and the People should submit to the authority of the Republic. That's our foundational ideal. And the Confederates, being proto-fascists, hated this ideal. They considered it in concept to be inimical to their self-interest as a class, and thus proscribed it in their version.

James Madison the President berated James Madison the abstract pettifog.

The meaning of "regulate" is quite the same now, because it just means to order and organize.

The plain language of the Constitution is not obviated by your dislike of this or that derivative power.

Before 1933, the government was very much captured by trusts and monopolies, and there was already an incestuous relationship between the two. Very strange that you would call this, also one of our country's worst eras, a time of "free markets" even under the very capricious definitions adduced to this term.

What was the difference between before and after 1946 that makes it a clean break? Why wasn't it just one more stage in the same trend? As the popular line by Proudhon evokes, the regulatory state was not a spontaneous invention of the Progressive or Liberal Consensus governments.

To be GOVERNED is to be kept in sight, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right, nor the wisdom, nor the virtue to do so.... To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction, noted, registered, enrolled, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under the pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, trained, ransomed, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, mystified, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, despised, harassed, tracked, abused, clubbed, disarmed, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and, to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

We might recall the line from some member's signature quoting Lemur: "Why do you hate [the libertarians'] extremely limited version of freedom?"



Ultimately, it's hard to have any kind of interesting discussion here, because empirical results are beyond your concern. It's not that dogmatic libertarians are critical of state intervention for a lack of effectiveness, or how effectiveness could be improved. For them, intervention is per se illegitimate, so it must be smashed no matter what the outcome.

What that leads us to is the TR threads below this one, where the conflict lies between the skeptical uninitiate and the fundamental faith of the believer.

'Why is scripture reliable?' 'Because the holy spirit.'
'Why shouldn't the state intervene?' 'Because the animal spirits.'

What is there to talk about?