The involvement of government in free market economy

In a free market, consumers and sellers communicate by price to approach a equilibrium price. In the real world, government also plays a roll. Government often sets up a price floor or a price ceiling to prevent price from going above the equilibrium price or to increase people’s incentive of producing.

For example, government sets up minimum wage of income to increase incentives of workers, which is like a price floor from my perspective. A research reports that the minimum wage has increased in 18 states in 2018, which is good for workers. Why would government set up a minimum wage? From my perspective, a minimum wage is to protect workers from being taken advantages to those managers. Therefore even a poor people can at least earn enough money to live his life. The research says that “the institute estimates that the raises will impact 4.5 million workers,” also increase workers’ incentive to get a job. Therefore the GDP of US would grow higher. However, I don’t think this is a good new to the CEO of the company because as the price to hire employees grow higher, they might want to hire less workers.

Fed President Neel Kashkari says that there might be a wage growth. He talks about “everyone’s been declaring we are at maximum employment. More Americans have been coming in, which is a really good thing. This is one of the first signs that we seeing wage growth finally starting to pick up.”

There might be an affect as I thinking about the increasing of minimum wage. As more people want to get a job, the demand of job is higher than the job people could apply in the world. In this way, this situation leads to a shortage of jobs. How would government play a roll in this part? Government gives out subsidies. According to this article, most subsidies went to farmers of grains such as corn, wheat, and rice mostly because grains provide 80% of the world’s caloric needs. By giving out subsidies, government encourages farmers to produce more grains. At this point, government absolutely plays an important roll in real world economic. Not only to balance the market economic but also prevent market from crashing.

image source-https://www.brookings.edu/research/thirteen-facts-about-wage-growth/

Gun control = Safety? You might be wrong!

Gun control has become a popular topics nowadays since the gun shooting event happened in Las Vegas. Some citizens blamed governments for not being responsible to keep Americans safe. Therefore the new gun control law is published. However, the new gun control law caused a huge wave of discussion because people split into two groups: does new gun control law make Americans safer?

 

 

My opinion is that new gun control law does not make Americans safer. First of all, guns are not the only tools victims use to kill people. If someone wants to kill somebody, they can use anything as a tool to kill. It is only the guns have more dangerous than the other because it can kill a lot of people in a short amount of time. One of the bad influence I can think about is that victims start using tools that are more daily used such as truck. Recently, a truck hitting event has happened in New York, 8 people died in the attack. In my opinion, the government can prohibit guns but not trucks, because people use them everyday. Although guns have more threats, the gun shooting attack does not happen very often in the past few years. If there are more restrictions of buying guns, the victims will find out more ways that we cannot think about to begin the attack. More importantly, most victims do not buy guns through legal method. Most victims buy guns from the black market, which American government has absolutely no way to make it disappear because it is such a big organization, larger than we can imagine.

In addition, the new gun control law takes away citizens’ ability to defense for themselves  in some ways because some of them do not have guns to fight back. In the shooting attack in San Antonio, Texas. The victim might be killed by someone in the church who has gun with them. They are saved because they have guns to defense for themselves so that they can save themselves. Therefore the new gun control law actually reduces the safety because it does not influence the victims at all, the only thing the law does is taking people’s safety away.

I am not saying that guns are doing no good to Americans, but rather the laws are causing opposite effects in United States as what we want to. In another word, I think the new gun control law does not give citizens safety. It makes the victims more dangerous. Therefore the gun control does not make Americans safe. We should focus more on the person who puts citizens in danger but not the tools they use to do bad things.

 

 

Image source: https://www.gamespot.com/forums/offtopic-discussion-314159273/gun-control-for-it-or-against-it-33375644/

https://www.usnews.com/cartoons/gun-control-and-gun-rights-cartoons

 

Should people remove the “old fashion” electoral college?

Electoral College is a voting system for nowadays’s election. However, there are a lot of argument about whether the system should be abolished or preserved.

Should Electoral College be preserved or removed? This question is not easy to solve. There are lots of problems caused by the Electoral College system. For example, candidates will only go to New York because bigger states have more electors. And also, it is possible that the reflect of the popular votes of the citizens is not accurate enough, and also the minority candidate can be selected in this condition. Actually, the nearest president election, which trump wins, represents the small possibility of the not accurate reflection. In this election, we can clearly see that Trump has less votes than Hillary Clinton in citizens votes. However, Trump got more electors’ votes than Hillary Clinton, which in this case the electoral college system does not represent popular votes at all.

The other negative effect of the Electoral College is that those electors do not vote for their candidate will be called “faithless electors”. Sometimes electors will not vote because they already know the result and they do not think their decision matters a lot. Therefore they might want to give others information by not voting. From my perspective, it is not fair to call someone “faithless elector” although they did not vote for their candidates. People cannot give them extra press through their whole lives.

There’s also positive effect about the electoral college. Thinking about collecting all the votes from every citizen and count the result, I would say that electoral college is easier because they only have 538 votes in total. My personal thinking is that electoral college should be taken out so that the candidates will no longer focus on the bigger states, instead citizens can get more information about the election and each candidates. I also know that candidates can choose states that have bigger population to go to, in this way they can get more votes and win the election. “The Electoral College was necessary when communications were poor, literacy was low, and voters lacked information about out-of-state figures, which is clearly no longer the case,” a quote said by Gene Green. I totally agree with him because technology is developed in USA, people can see and hear what candidates are doing on the television. Therefore everyone should have the right to vote, by voting I mean everyone should have the vote to decide with president they are voting for, not which president they want their elector to vote for. Citizens might get upset if the elector is not voting for their candidate. At least people should be responsible for their own vote.

 

Life in the Bubble- How the Filter Bubble influences thinking

Throughout history, man has sought to find others with likemindedness. With the growth of technology and powerful companies such as Google and Amazon, this search for likemindedness has evolved into what is known as the “Filter Bubble”. The filter bubble is coined by internet activist Eli Pariser in his book “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding  from You”.

The structure of business on the Internet is free of charge, and a person gives his personal information to an Internet company in exchange for its service. By knowing people’s interests, the filter bubble begins its influence on people. As a result of a personalized web account on the internet, the Filter Bubble creates an absolute disadvantage to human technology and a world view. First of all, I don’t think peoplewould like others knowing about their personal information, especially strangers. In this way, putting your personal information while you register for an account is actually disclosing your privacy. Most recently, Experian suffered a security breach when millions of people had their private information exposed, which to me is one of the results of the Filter Bubble.

A second disadvantage of the Filter Bubble is that it creates a limitation of view. By separating people from the news they are not interested in, people will not gain enough information about the world. For example, if a Republican can only see people with the same viewpoint, he cannot have enough information about a Democrat way of thinking on the other side. Therefore, most people may not know the issues in an election and they will not be able to carry out their responsibilities as a citizen of the United States. Technology has provided many benefits, but has also created the potential for people to isolate their thinking, with sometimes surprising results, such as the election of Donald Trump. Furthermore, the Filter Bubble actually reduces people’s creativities because they are not able to see all sorts of views and technology when they are imprisoned by their interests. 

From my perspective, China itself is a Filter Bubble. If I would have any chance to put atag about China, it would be “isolation”. The most recent new I heard about China in the US is  that missiles have been launched from North Korea. However, I did not read any news about it when I logged into my Chinese social media. I found an article about China blocking the news of missile launching written by Neil Conner, which perfectly represents the Filter Bubble. The political cartoon by Paresh Nath shown above portrays China as sleeping and not being aware of the danger of the North Korea Nuclear Program, this supports my view that China isolates itself from troubles in other parts of the world, even a country as near as North Korea.

In general, I don’t think we can completely avoid Filter Bubble in our daily life, but we can reduce Filter Bubble as much as possible such as searching for informations not from social media but on the newspaper. In this way, we can take advantage to improve our country as an american citizen.