Free market system the best

As a fellow European citizen living in the United States, I
think it is high time that Matthew Kennard explain why he is in
this country when he obviously cannot stand its policies and
politics (“Don’t cross UCLA workers’ picket
lines,” April 14). Notwithstanding his tendency to disguise
an otherwise vacuous argument in hyperbole and left-wing hysterics,
Kennard chooses to ignore providing any substance of verbal
persuasion beyond demagoguery and emotional fodder. The thesis of
his article, as I gathered, is that UC workers are paid low wages,
and all schools of economic thought are reprehensible in their lack
of “common sense.”

I came to the United States as a Dutch citizen living in South
Africa, and, like Kennard, I was highly critical of America’s
politics, “greed” and lifestyle. I considered myself a
socialist, and I took to heart European concerns about American
capitalism, “greed” and “consumerism.”

It took only a few lessons in economics, history and logical
structures to understand that if the American spirit has its origin
in the individual’s right to life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness, my ideals that said “what is good for society is
good for the individual” were highly antithetical to what
makes America the hope and envy of the world.

How can I seek a better life in America while simultaneously
distrusting the very institutions that give rise to my reason for
being here? Kennard seems to loathe American “greed”
and capitalism, but fails to recognize that his objections are a
relic of a system that has failed to offer many an incentive to
stay in Europe.

This brings me to wages, economics and “common
sense.” I find it ironic that Kennard attacks schools of
economic thought as “indoctrination” while
simultaneously drawing on a school of Harvardian philosophy to
support his own indoctrinated thinking. Economics cannot be
dismissed as “callous” and its predictions a mere
“graph and pie chart.” Whether Kennard likes it or not,
humans are highly predictable in their interactions. We may all
wish for living wages, social justice and free breakfast on
Tuesdays, but no amount of kicking and screaming will transcend the
parameters that nature has set for human self-interest. Programs
that meddle in human affairs by legislating altruism will never
succeed because people will always be governed by some of the most
primitive instincts. Economics and mathematics are the only
subjects with the guts and “common sense” to
acknowledge this and empirically say we should be left to our own
devices.

While I will digress from providing Kennard a brief lesson in
economics, I will offer him some advice. America is a success
because the free market it has always embraced is by far the most
compatible system with human nature’s primitive, survivalist
instincts. Yet the “greed” that America supposedly
subscribes to is also coupled with an unparalleled private
generosity that extends from local community service to a tsunami
in Asia. How uncanny.

We are mostly all here because, at some point in the past or
present, our family decided “home” was a dead end.
Meddling in the free market will always have unintended
consequences that make people worse off in the long run, and you
need look no further that the past 30 years to see that as the
United States has continued to depart from a free economy, the gap
between rich and poor has increased. Artificially inflating the
wages of UC workers is just one step that will continue to turn the
American prospect into nothing better than what is offered abroad.
A “dusty beginners economics book” is all we need to
fix the problem.

Louw is a fourth-year mathematics and applied sciences
student.