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What it sounds like you're saying... Poster: ER (PID # 229) DATE= &6/5/2008 5:41:40 AM&

"Government is best which governs least" may very well be a true statement, but it is the proposition you are trying to prove, not evidence of anything. And of course, there is nothing in that statement liberals, or I, as a liberal, disagree with, so it is obviously a bad example to use to broad-brush us with. It is applied as an attempt to put words in our mouths, or ascribe to us motives we don't have, in order to discredit our entire agenda.
Contrary to conservative propaganda, liberals have no problem with the idea that government should be minimized, they just feel that the purpose of government is to prevent the abuse of non-governmental power, such as that exercised by tyrants, criminals, natural disasters, foreign enemies, and the business community. There is nothing wrong with the idea that government should be limited, but that does not mean it should be emasculated, especially when that hobbling is designed primarily to allow one faction or class to exercise power over the rest of the commonwealth.
No one is denying that government can be abused, or that honest differences can arise in how a community chooses to implement its admittedly coercive power. But when a political philosophy intimately associated with a powerful economic constituency dismisses all regulation and supervision as simply the work of the devil, my personal alarms all go off at once.

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Unlimited dysfunction? Poster: ER (PID # 229) DATE= &10/26/2007 9:53:41 AM&

Having worked for, and been a victimized consumer, of both private and public enterprises, I find little difference in their effectiveness or their intrinsic virtue. Both have a primary check, the private must contend with the market, the public must satisfy the voter. These mechanisms eventually moderate the worst abuses, but there is a substantial amount of inertia (a direct function of the size of the organization) which allows a lot of damage to occur before the checks and balances finally kick in.
Private and public also interact with each other, and are competitive to a certain extent, which I believe is good because it helps to disperse power (thesis + antithesis = synthesis) but even this mechanism can be overestimated in its effectiveness and often works in precisely the opposite way it should. The public side has regulation, the law and the courts, and the guns. In the short run, it can always get what it wants.
But in the long run, the private has the jobs and the money. It also has lawyers, lobbyists, trade organizations, advertising, public relations, campaign financing and a host of other mechanisms designed primarily to manipulate government. The best we can hope for is a standoff, and so far, in this country, we seem to be doing ok.
What we must never let happen is for either side to succeed in convincing us it is being abused by the other. The two are indistinguishable, guys in suits who want money and power, and who will jump from one side to the other in a moment if it advances their own careers. Lawyers, politicians, bureaucrats and businessmen all share the same pathology. The mom and pop grocery has about as much to do with business as the New England Town Meeting has to do with politics.
The first sign of the con is when one side, convinced of its moral superiority, operational efficiency and effectiveness, tries to tell us how it is being manipulated and abused by the evil, inept, and bumbling minions of the other. It's like the Nazis, who were always complaining how the totally inferior Jews were on the verge of taking over the entire world.

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Well, pith on him. Poster: ER (PID # 229) DATE= &5/30/2008 7:08:53 AM&

Unregulated capitalism has a tendency to instability, wild swings and the occasional catastrophic collapse, which not only punishes the firms involved, but the entire economies they are superimposed on. The bubbles, Panics and Depressions of the 17-20th centuries bear ample historical witness to this. The funny thing about these fluctuations is that they appear to be internally self-generated instabilities, rarely caused by external factors. The periodic recessions we've experienced since the 40s are small change compared to some of the excursions we've experienced in the past.
We're long overdue for another, and whether we've just been lucky so far or whether it is a result of the regulatory structure we've erected is yet to be seen. Although it certainly can be argued that too much regulation, unwise regulation, or regulation for regulation's sake is not a good thing, the current trend to minimum or no regulation is disturbing to me. Didn't we try this before and it didn't work?

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The Entrepreneurial Mystique Poster: ER (PID # 229) DATE= &5/29/2006 11:48:42 AM&

This is why we must create a society which nurtures and rewards the entrepreneur, not one that shackles and obstructs him. Without the effort of the man of enterprise, and without the risk he takes, everyone will suffer. There is already enough ruin decimating the ranks of our businessmen from the ruthless natural selection of the market for us to add to it by regulation and control. We can help him by ensuring that the market is free to do its magic by removing, wherever possible, the oppression by government. We must free business from regulation, unnecessary expense, taxation, and the tyranny of unions. The proper role of government is to provide protection from criminals, defeat foreign enemies, to establish legal and regulatory standards which favor the entrepreneur and protect trade by ensuring property rights. In addition, government can target isolated economic problems by providing business with the financial resources it needs to get the job done, by providing improvements to infrastructure, for example, or cutting red tape in the bidding of contracts. The best way to do this is to consult the business community and incorporate their advice into legislation and court rulings, to guarantee that the market works unfettered. The overall power of government should be contained, and the advice and leadership of the business community incorporated in it as much as possible. Narrow special interests with limited agendas which inhibit or attack entrepreneurial activity must be restricted and not be allowed to influence democratic processes or manipulate political institutions. The ability of these interests to commandeer the media, corrupt popular culture and propagandize among our youth should be curtailed by all legal and moral means.

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I don't think its a silly concept at all. Poster: ER (PID # 229) DATE= &7/13/2008 5:06:50 AM&

I can't speak for Robert, but as for myself, I do not see the government as either hero or victim, I see government as an extension and servant of capital. The control of capital over government is not absolute, we still have elections and a constitution, but capital will do what it can to extend that power and consolidate its control. And in a democracy, it is is the duty of the people to put stop to it.

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Gentlemen, gentlemen... Poster: ER (PID # 229) DATE= &6/10/2008 11:37:50 AM&

Economic systems are instituted to manage resources in a society to maximize the benefit of all. The free market system has shown itself to be quite effective at doing this by coming up with a means of balancing the interests of all concerned with natural self-regulation and controls, and by taking advantage of the human desire of all to work hard and take risks for their own benefit.

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Wow! Poster: ER (PID # 229) DATE= &7/12/2008 1:24:48 PM&

The circumstances are different, of course, but in general, this is the same schematic I encountered between the electrical utilities, the nuclear power industry, and the Federal Government back in the 70s. Big business and big government working together to move massive market initiatives the private sector was unable or unwilling to pull off on its own. It is, of course, everywhere, the airline industry, public works, big engineering, big agriculture, health care, you name it. Even Big Labor loved it, although I'm afraid they aren't much of a player any more. Now it's moving out of industry into finance. Before long you'll see it in alternative energy, offshore drilling...need I go on?
In the nuke industry, the Government provided the fuel manufacturing infrastructure, the research, the science, the insurance underwriting and (ta-daaa!, the public relations expertise). The only thing the Fed never got around to doing, and the industry was too cheap to provide, was waste reprocessing.
I hesitate to condemn this outright, there may be a place for this kind of partnership, especially in space exploration. But I can see that it also has the further (dis)advantage of being able to be claimed as a public relations coup for the private sector when it succeeds, and a built in scapegoat fall guy for the government in case it doesn't.
The Military-Industrial Complex is now fully geared up for peace as well as war.

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Corporations are not private companies. Poster: ER (PID # 229) DATE= &7/13/2008 5:26:49 AM&

You are right about the dangers of collectivism, but you simply can't bring yourself to see that collectivism is no longer coming from the Left, today it is coming from the Right.

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A brief digression Poster: ER (PID # 229) DATE= &7/29/2006 8:23:42 AM&

Only two professions in our society can hope to escape the supervision of this external coercion: the bureaucrat and the capitalist. Both operate in an environment where there are internal threats but little external regulation--or at least, they would like to keep it that way as much as possible. They accomplish this by creating a work environment where they themselves devise the controls and restrictions, and where they are answerable to no one except those just like themselves. The bureaucrat makes the rules he plays by, or at least others like him do, and the capitalist creates and controls capital, the element in commerce which is comparable to energy in in physics: the ability to make things happen. The former may be involved in his own intrigues with other bureaucrats, the latter must compete against other capitalists in a market, but these are challenges which both have accepted as part of the job. Both are very jealous of attempts by those outside their sphere to insert any regulation or control or oversight into their activities. And of course, each correctly perceives the other as a threat and continuously works to undermine its activities. The bureaucrat uses regulation and government coercion, the capitalist uses money to lobby in the legislature, the courts, and the executive, and propagandizes through the press. He also has the abbility to make campaign contributions, and the cynicism to make them to both sides in a race.
We like to define Liberal and Conservative as the supporters of each side, but this is only true in recent American or Western European experience. In reality, the terms should apply to those who challenge or defend the dominant paradigm. The opponents to Soviet Communism were liberal, and its defenders conservative; and there were times in history when capitalism was a very progressive force, compared to the feudal landowners it was challenging for supremacy. I suspect that if there were ever a socialist revolution in the United States, after everything settled down there would still be liberals and conservatives, and they would probably be the same people.
The irony of this great debate which our society now finds itself in is that there is little difference between the capitalist and the bureaucrat. Even the term "government bureaucrat" is deliberately misleading, anyone who has worked for a large corporation knows that there is always an enormous bureaucracy in place, which operates precisely as any other bureaucracy, with little oversight from market mechanisms. The corporate bureaucrat is primarly vulnerable to bureaucratic threats, and the survival of the corporate bureaucracy rarely has any connection to its profitability. Only when it becomes completely corrupt does it collapse from its own inefficiency. But since the bureaucracy tends to define the criteria for success and effectiveness, it is not likely that it is going to declare itself dissolved simply for not doing its job efficiently. It can only be toppled from outside.
There is a huge grey zone between government and business, inhabited by strange hybrid creatures called institutes, think tanks, associations , federations, commissions, bureaus etc, which are intimately connected to both. And parts of both government and business only exist because of the other. The contractual relationships that exist between the two further cement these ties and relationships. Employees of government and industry hop back and forth across these boundaries effortlessly, and careers are built on the ability to do so. It is becoming harder to advance in either sector without having experience and friends in the other, and this fantasy we have of a great company led by a capitalist visionary is just that. Modern corporations are large bureaucracies, with no owners and led by professional career bureaucrats. I remember I once asked a mathematician at the oil company where I worked (he had emigrated from a similar job in the USSR several years earlier) how different his working conditions were in the US than in Soviet Union. His answer: "There is no essential difference. I came for the freedom and the money."
It goes without saying that there are enormous and fundamental practical and philosophical differences between public and private bureaucracies, but the inhabitants of these two planets, whether leadership or worker bee, are strangely similar.

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re: Vision for Space Exploration: New Opportunities Poster: ER (PID # 229) DATE= &5/18/2006 5:55:34 AM&

As for our difference of opinion regarding government regulation of private enterprise, I don't think we're going to resolve it here. My position is that businesses are inherently selfish organizations (that is not a criticism or an insult, it's how I will run my business when I get one!) whose primary agenda is their own survival and growth. They must be kept under some kind of control to keep them from becoming destructive, not just to their customers, but to their employees and stockholders as well. I believe the free market alone is not sufficient to provide this control. I suspect you do not disagree entirely on this, although we obviously have deep differences as to how, and how much.

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