Have I Gone Too Far?

I have asserted in at least one previous post that capitalism facilitated the evaluation of legislation in ways that other economic systems did not.  For instance, it would be much more difficult to show that legislation violated socialistic principles.  This is because you would have to show that the law had the effect of hurting the majority, workers or the poor.  It would not be sufficient to show that a single provision of the law had this effect, since there could be other provisions that compensated for it.  In contrast, if any provision in a law were anti-capitalist then the whole thing would be so.  The compensating provision would be irrelevant, since compensating someone for a loss that was inflicted against the victim's will would not have the effect of turning it into a voluntary exchange.

Perhaps there are some people who will acknowledge my argument, but still support intervention.  Perhaps they will consider that the benefits of intervention will outweigh the difficulty I have pointed out.  Perhaps there is some other principle that will be less restrictive that they could use as an alternative to help them.

I don't think they can do without a principle.  It is too difficult for people to be able to examine legislation in sufficient detail to directly evaluate it on the basis of any principles they would likely support.  For this reason I suggest that they add a moral requirement that any piece of legislation that violates capitalistic principles must satisfy.

The moral requirement should be that any piece of legislation should contain sufficient criteria for determining that the legislation is a success, that it has accomplished the goals for which it was created.  It should contain these in a part that is easy to spot.  If those conditions are not met, the legislation should automatically become invalid.

I believe that all forms of interventionism are counterproductive, so this moral requirement will have the effect of making all such legislation temporary.  However, many people are unlikely to accept arguments against intervention and, I suspect, will be unlikely to accept similar arguments in the future.  My modification of existing procedure has the advantage that if I am wrong about the effect of the change that I propose, it is still likely to do more good than harm.  My proposal will simply have the effect of limiting the harm that intervention can do, which is something that interventionists should want to do in any case.