Government Intervention

Markets are powerful, but left entirely alone they do not always produce outcomes that benefit society. A factory has no built-in incentive to pay for the pollution it pumps into a river, a dominant firm has no built-in incentive to keep prices low once rivals have been squeezed out, and an employer paying the bare minimum a desperate worker will accept has no built-in incentive to pay more. Government steps in at exactly these points.

In this lesson you will examine the toolkit governments use when markets produce outcomes that harm third parties or exploit workers: taxation, subsidies, regulation and pollution permits for externalities; competition rules to keep markets working for consumers; and minimum wage laws in the labour market. For each tool you will weigh genuine advantages against genuine disadvantages, and practise describing precisely what a minimum wage does to a labour market diagram.