KEEPING INDUSTRY COMPETING

A popular claim by the business wing of the Republican Party is that free enterprise has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.  This is only partially true because free enterprise does not have the goal of lifting people out of poverty but of making money.  It is only through government regulation on top of free enterprise that lifts people out of poverty.  Regulation is needed also to keep companies competing with each other and not conspiring together to control an industry to increase profits on less than favorable terms for the public.  Keeping companies competing is a major problem in free enterprise.*  In U.S. history there was an age of "all the traffic can bear" on railroad pricing.  And Teddy Roosevelt became famous for breaking up the monopolies.

I guess you can say that in some limited way, free enterprise without government regulation does lift people marginally better.  How else to explain the migration of minorities from the South to the sweat shops of the North?  Or groups in countries like Bangladesh to work in the hazardous garment  buildings and those in  SE Asia who migrate to the sweat shops of the sport-shoe industry? But this just seems to lift people from being very, very poor to very poor.

But to get rid of things like child labor, the 60 hour or longer work week, and increase workplace safety takes government regulation for a major increase in the well being of the public.  Even today, issues like forced overtime, often without pay, much less time and a half, is an issue as companies jockey to resist increasing their labor force.

And this is not to say that labor demands can be unreasonable.  The best known cases of unreasonable labor demands are perhaps Roosevelt and the Coal Miners Strike of 1943** Truman and the Railroad Strike*** plus Reagan and the Traffic Controllers Strike.****  The Air Traffic Controllers action by Reagan was probably his most important action (or at least one of his most important) as it seems to me this hastened the decline of unions and the wages of workers.

* Today investors look for companies "with a mote"  and "barriers to entry" to give the companies :pricing power."  These are just more pleasant words to say companies that have limited competition
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Lewis
*** http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5137/
****  (ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_Air_Traffic_Controllers_Organization_(1968)