I wish I had the answer to that. I have a couple of observations that I hope might help. I am trained as an economist, and we economist types do believe in the power and relevance of market-based solutions.
But I think it's equally important to recognize that markets are imperfect—that's number one—and that there are market failures. That's why I keep emphasizing trying to understand what the market failure is. What is it that the market is not doing? That is usually the impetus or argument for a government intervention by virtue of a policy.
The other thing is that there's no such thing as free markets. We might like to see free markets, but we don't have free markets. We have in some cases what are close to free markets if you go down to the market square and buy your vegetables and you haggle, but generally we have a playing field within which markets function.
We have a legal context, a very important legal context, or a legal infrastructure, if you will, and then we have a government legislative infrastructure. I say all this because there's no such thing as a market without a playing field. It's government that largely sets that playing field. That's important because employers respond to incentives.
So if there is a failure out there in the following sense, which is that the employers are not doing x, that they're not employing older workers and they're not training them, that they're not making that investment, it may be well in the interests of the individual employer not to do that, but it may not be in the social interest, and there may be huge social costs associated with that. It may be perfectly rational and reasonable for the individual employer not to engage in that behaviour, but if enough employers do that, you get some very, very negative social outcomes.
That would be an example of a market failure that would I think call for some kind of a government intervention. In that case, my own sense would be that the best approach is to have a policy that creates incentives: incentives for employers to behave differently.