that markets provide incentives for cheating. Why should a business bust its nut in cutthroat competition for customers, employees, raw materials, credit etc when its so much easier to collude, form a monopoly, or a cartel. An honest businessman who refuses to do this can't afford to compete in a market where his competitors are crooked, and going crooked is so easy. If it means the difference between just barely hanging on, scrabbling for customers, credit, a workforce, raw materials, its so much easier to just corner the market by a monopoly or cartel, or just buying some politician to smooth the road for you and drive your competitors out of business.

Without a democratic government setting up regulatory agencies and the rule of law, you inevitably slide into an oligarchy, like we had in this country during the Gilded Age. Add unions and a free press and the big business machine has some sort of control on it. Without this, the people who control the means of production and the ability to communicate with the public will simply follow the path of least resistance.

When someone makes everything you need, sells it to you at whatever price he wants, and you can only buy it with the money he pays you in your paycheck, HE OWNS YOU! And if you don't have a job you will be begging to be a slave.

Teddy Roosevelt, certainly not a lefty lib by any stretch of the imagination,, realized this. He understood capitalism could not survive unless the Trusts were Busted. Franklin Roosevelt, with the New Deal, broke the back of the Depression with the welfare state. Europe followed suit with democratic socialism.

Now the forces of reaction want to take us back to the Gay Nineties, La Belle Epoque, The Gilded Age. Read your Sinclair Lewis. They want to take us back to that time. They are positively nostalgicc for it. They've been trying to turn the clock back since the Reagan Administration.

And its all based on the lie that they know what's best, that they know what they're doing, and that anyone who disagrees with them must be a Communist. After all, the LAWS OF ECONOMICS justify everything they want to do.

Of course, the middle class loves this. They have political power, prosperity, freedom, toys. What they don't notice is that they are fewer in number. And one day they wake up to find out they are threatened, that they are vanishing, that their kids are NOT going to be as wealthy as they were, and they start looking for someone to blame it on.

Get government off our backs! Dismantle the regulators, the agencies, put the blacks and the immigrants in their place. Exterminate the gays and abortionists. Let us take charge again, we know what we're doing, we're the creators of all wealth, we know how the system should work, we follow the God-given Laws of Economics. Get your MBA and you can be one of us too..

Read your history. We've seen this movie before. Those who own slaves will always recruit those who wish to own slaves to fight their rebellions for them.