State intervention

State intervention in man s activities to protect the health of the inhabitants goes back to prehistory. The motivation may not have been altogether altruistic the king acted to protect his subjects because he regarded them as his property. Public health protection began for disease control. With industrialization, came the need for control of even more hazardous forces and substances. This extended protection became technological in accident analysis and response. Present efforts in controlling risk, such as from nuclear power, are a continuation of this development. 

The problem of the choice of environmental policy instruments has been an issue since Pigou [2] analyzed the need for state intervention when private costs diverge from social costs and suggested that the solution would be to internalize the externalities through taxation.1 Coase [4] criticized the proposed state intervention and affirmed that there is no reason to suppose that governmental regulation is called for simply because the problem is not very well handled by the market or the firm. 

Strategies of successful state intervention conld also be as follows ... 

Dingwall, R., Eekelaar, J. and Murray, T. (1983) The Protection of Children State Intervention and Family... 

In 4.1.4 I discussed the confrontations between workers and capitalists at some length. Let me recall here that "the struggle between collective labour and collective capital" is but one of several determinants of the rate of exploitation. In addition we must invoke individual bargaining, monopoly or monopsony power, coalitions with other classes, state intervention and technical progress. The struggle between... 

Hence also, in Ihe conclusions which the Physiocrats themselves draw, the ostensible veneration of landed property becomes transformed into the economic negation of it and the affirmation of capitalist production. On the one hand, all taxes are put on rent, or in other words, landed property is in part confiscated, which is what the legislation of the French Revolution sought to carry through and which is the final conclusion of the fully developed Ricardian modern political economy. By placing the burden of tax entirely on rent, because it alone is surpluS Value - and consequently any taxation of other forms of income ulti mately falls on landed property, but in a roundabout way and therefore in an economically harmful way, that hinders production taxation and along with it all forms of State intervention, are removed from industry itself, and the latter is thus freed from alt intervention by the Slate. This is ostensibly done for the benefit of landed property, not in the interests of industry, but in the interests of landed property. ... 

To date, the Federal Constitutional Court as the highest court in constitutional matters has delivered no decision on the interpretation of the Basic Law in this question. Yet a number of its decisions seem to imply that the right to human dignity in conjunction with the social state principle establishes a positive duty of the state to secure minimum conditions for a life worthy of human beings, thus correlating with a negative duty to prevent state intervention in the subsistence minimum. 

TECHNICAL CHANGE IN THE ITALIAN CHEMICAL INDUSTRY MARKETS, FIRMS AND STATE INTERVENTION... 

Was Italy a case of state-sponsored industrial catching-up The developments in the chemical industry suggest that state intervention was critical at least for the rise of heavy industrial sectors. Forces behind industrialization, however, cannot be limited to Gerschenkron s triad of market, state and banks. " For example, non-state and non-market institutions, such as family relations, associations and informal networks, played essential roles in the recent development of Italy s small and medium-sized industry. What distinguishes a national course of industrialization is not so much the presence and weight of individual components, but the more or less accidental convergence of its phases with (and its dynamic response to) international Cycles of production and technical change. 

Just engineering can provide non-violent means of meeting humanitarian needs and of preventing the build-up of tensions, both of which are presently associated with the temptations of preventive or pre-emptive military action. Such non-violent interventions could be initiated by states, but they could also be initiated by commercial organisations or charitable bodies either internationally or locally. These latter possibilities are free from the restrictions which international law currently places on state interventions. 

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