23 de fevereiro de 2016

Desigualdade versus Liberdade

É um ponto de vista interessante:

"Inequality doesn’t just reduce freedom for workers. It reduces freedom for business owners too.Will says this is because countries that want to tax and redistribute must have a healthy economy, which requires business freedom. I suspect that there are two other mechanisms at work.


One is that many of the rich have no interest in economic freedom. They want to protect extractive institutions and the monopoly power of incumbents from competition. They thus favour red tape, which tends to bear heavier upon small firms than big ones. This, I suspect, explains why inequality and unfreedom go together in Latin America, for example.


Secondly, people have a strong urge for fairness. If they cannot achieve this through market forces, they’ll demand it via the ballot box in the form of state regulation. As Philippe Aghion and colleagues point out, there is a negative correlation between union density and minimum wages: minimum wage laws are more likely to be found where unions are weak. Regulations, in this sense, are a substitute for strong unions – and, I suspect, a bad substitute because they are more inflexible."

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