[lsbskins1]

You mean the era before Progressive legislation is your ideal? Or is it the 14th Amendment that started all the trouble? I mean, workers had it so good back then and the food was safe and drug companies were never succesful and profitable when they were marketing opiates and cocain as cure-alls, because market forces stepped in and those companies stopped being money makers?Bla, Bla , Bla! Excuse me, but find that point in time when, free of regulation, the markets protected anything except profit. Find the era? Unregulated business in modern economies lead to consolidation and monopoly. The only force that works agaist that trend is regulatory force. That is what history teaches us. I challenge you. Was it from 1789 to 1850 that everyone was so happy and no one was exploited for any extended period of time? How do you impose that model on todays world, even presuming the fallacy that everything was perfect then? I say, your contention is not supported and unsupportable, because it is not true.

I contend that when the ideal of "Free Markets" was developed, what it was fighting was not government regulation per se, but government support of monopoly. This company has the government charter to market tea, this one sugar, etc. Free Markets meant the government could not, by fiat, lock you out of business.The idea behind the ideal was to allow for competition, not to prevent any government involvement at all. The ideal of self government, in and of itself, shows the lie behind this presumption. Government, that represents only the will of a King or Powerful Dictator or an Oligarchy of a Powerful Elite, was the evil, not Government Power itself. That government power was meant to be harnessed to the will and protection of the people, not eradicated. That power is necessary to protect the people and that power is expressed through government action, not through governmental weakness.