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Living in a Dickens cesspool without government

Editor, Index-Tribune:

 

For those who think we do not need government, visualize how things would be without smog devices on our vehicles; without child labor laws; without the FDA (Food and Drug Administration); without the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), and so on. We would be living in a cesspool with people being grossly exploited, choking on the air we would be forced to breathe and dying on the poisoned and hazardous water that we would be forced to drink.

Sounds great doesn’t it? If left to our greedy tendencies (capitalism unconstrained), most of us would be much worse off than we are. So there is a need for checks and balances to confine greed so that it does not get the best of us.

For the most part, when left to their devices, humans tend to be greedy (of course there are the exceptions, such as Mother Theresa). This is not the best characteristic of our race, but we need to accept that it is there. For those of you who are totally free-market, do you really think that the marketplace would have done what, in the end, it took the government to do?

Honestly! It just was not happening. It took people being fed up with polluted waterways and air to say they have had enough. Private enterprise did not step up to the plate until it was forced to.

As long as it is more profitable to not clean up after oneself or to exploit people for our gain, this will continue unless someone tells us we must not.

Joe Lieber
Sonoma