Some people may deem it unreasonable that the government expands its intervention on the free running of market. However, I hold the opposite view that in some situation the regulation of government is necessary.
Recently, a business man called Martin Shkreli has been put into the prison, for his arbitrary conduct that he acquired a pharmaceutical company and increased the price of a life-saving medicine drastically from $13.5 to $750 per tablet. This behavior is detrimental to the public, for the people who are in need of this pharmaceutical would probably lose their lives simply because they couldn`t afford this high price. In this case, the government intervention seems to be appropriated, which means that government regulation will tightly uphold the fundamental welfare and human rights of these patients. From the view of business, I reckon that the related administration should always keep an eye on such things to ensure that they are acting ethically and are not abusing a position of monopoly. Also the legislation way are be strongly needed to forbid the thing like these to happen again.
Another case is about a reputable car manufacture Volkswagen. The car it sold had been installed a device that can secretly change the data it output when it is detected. This behavior is totally unethical because Volkswagen fabricated about its pollution emission tests to the supervisor, seriously polluted the environment and aggravated the Green House effect. In my point of view,the government should set up explicit rules to restrict the cheating behavior; otherwise the world`s environment would suffer from this dishonest behavior and other competitors would be placed at an unfair disadvantage.
Too much regulations and intervention would definitely adversely affect the productivity rate, the market free competition, crack down the producers` enthusiasm and interfere with the free selection of consumers. However, when we turn to the examples like the two listed above, the government intervention seems to be unavoidable. Because we can never imagine how greedy some people could be and even to do the things that harm other people`s benefits. And there is rationality of its existence of the government regulation in this situation that it can enforce market efficiency and fairness as well as reduce asymmetric information. So that government intervention could not only protect the healthy competitions in the market, but also help consumers in increasing their confidence in consumption.
Xiaoyuan Chen
Reference
Top 10 Business Ethics Stories of 2015