Sean Hannity let Juan Williams mostly off the hook on the rent control issue tonight on the Great American Panel.
While Sean and his other guests clearly took the conservative position against government price controls, an opportunity to drive the point home was missed by letting the concept of “exploitation” go unchallenged. Mr. Williams based his argument on the concept that the government must regulate the market to prevent “exploitation.”
This word is just a code word for the socialist agenda. If you just let it pass, you give it legitimacy.
The reality is that the free market by definition already prevents exploitation. No free market transaction is exploitative, as both parties enter into it because they believe it is in their best interest to do so, and that they benefit from the deal.
It is impossible to “exploit” the worker, or the consumer (unless their is government force applied elsewhere) because the worker or consumer has other choices. What the “bleeding heart liberals” typically overlook is the availability of these other choices. For example, in the rent control issue, that people can and do “vote with their feet,” or they migrate elsewhere, as amply demonstrated by the hordes of people migrating under hardship conditions to illegally enter the United States.
Sean touched on my point that exploitation can only occur when government interferes when he asked “what about exploiting the apartment owner?” As you can see from my train of thought, this property owner is truly the exploited one because his right to freely enter into contracts is inhibited.
Price controls are actually just “people controls” as prices cannot be controlled, just “driven underground.” It is only people who can be controlled by so-called price controls.