A recent letter to the editor by Kyle Morgan made outrageous claims about economic regulation. Mr. Morgan obviously has a very tenuous hold on reality if he thinks that more deregulation is the answer to our economic woes when in fact, the opposite is true.
Deregulation, privatization and the growing regressive nature of our tax system are three of the most damaging trends to the overall economic stability and health of the U.S.
The perfect example of this is when economists of Milton Friedman's "Chicago School" were allowed by the Chilean government to bring their utopian ideas into real practice on a nationwide scale - when elements of the U.S. government overthrew the democratically elected President Salvador Allende in 1973.
At the time, unemployment was a modest 4.3 percent, and the poverty rate was about 20 percent. They rewrote Chilean law to abolish the minimum wage, outlaw trade unions, slash public employment, privatize pensions and abolish taxes on wealth and business profits. Any of this starting to sound familiar?
Within a decade, the unemployment rate had risen to 22 percent, the poverty rate had doubled to about 40 percent, and real wages for workers had declined by 40 percent. These are the real effects of laissez-faire economic policy. Instead of supporting political democracy as the Friedmans of the world claim, it undermines the very foundation of democracy itself - the power of the people to determine their own future.
Scott Erker
8LS
