| John Husvar 2005-11-29, 10:58 am |
| In article <438b886f$1_3@newspeer2.tds.net>,
KKT <sendme.nospam@hotpop.com> wrote:
> Herb wrote:
>
>
> That's a great policy ... don't work to make something better. Just cut
> and run.
>
> KKT
Just some random thoughts --
Well, I'm about the last person anybody would call a "Liberal," but
that's just plain shortsighted. "Love it or leave it" is often the last
refuge of the frustrated and it's the same BS it always was.
We're a nation of competing special interests: Each of us has one, if
only improving our own condition. I'd not leave the country of my birth
and which I do love. However, I choose thus precisely because I can
criticize, even excoriate, certain individuals governing it and I can
work to change what I don't like. It is not treasonous to call a spade a
spade, even if it's not a spade but a rake. We have the right to be
wrong and it's not wrong to be right.
Which means, of course, we get to enjoy the "robust debate" that the
First Amendment protects.
I do find it difficult to fathom how some (Big "L" and small"l")
libertarians have such faith in unrestricted capitalism considering its
track record. The early capitalists eventually became very rich, true,
but their wealth was much dependent on low wages, company stores, goon
squads, and Pinkerton's.
Assuredly they were the ones who took the risks to build their wealth
and so they deserved the greater reward. I wouldn't begin to argue
that's wrong. What I see as wrong is: Some created a subclass of
employees totally beholden to them. They mutated from venture
capitalists into the "Robber Barons" of industry.
The richer they became, the better able they were to influence
legislation and socialization protective of their wealth. Strangely,
several of them became philanthropists in later life. Conscience money,
perhaps. Did they desire people to think kindly of them after their
deaths? I don't know their minds, but that theory makes sense.
Eventually they desired social approval more than their wealth. (Hershey
and Henry Ford are glaring exceptions, though Hershey _did_ build a
company town. 
The union movement grew out of the abuses of unrestricted capitalism:
Employees wanted a bigger piece of the pie. As the unions grew stronger
and richer, though, they became capitalists in their own right and their
membership ended being abused nearly as badly as they were under
unrestricted capitalism.
The unions became corrupt and in many instances outright criminal.
Eventually, they engendered their own cold revolution: They priced their
members' labor out of the market and instituted restrictive membership
and work rules that artificially created labor shortages in their
respective trades. They became what they fought and eventually lost own
hold on labor with the passage of "right to work" legislation enabling
non-union companies to compete with them.
So the pendulum swings. It's not conspiracy as much as simple human
nature. Dominance is valued. Wealth enables dominance. Greater wealth
enables greater dominance until a breaking point is reached and hot or
cold revolution occurs and the pendulum swings back the other way.
It seems there is no thought of or desire for a balanced economic
condition where the risk takers are rewarded commensurate with their
risk and the people who help create the risk taker's wealth are paid
commensurate with their actual value. That an employer makes a profit on
the labor of his employees is not evil per se. That an employer makes a
profit on exploitation and, in some cases, virtual de facto enslavement
_is_ evil. (The above mentioned company towns, stores, etc.)
It's called fairness: "Thou shalt not bind the mouths of the oxen that
tread out the corn."
That entrepreneurship is good for an economy is open to little debate.
Ambition, hard work, and courage will out, assuming there is no pressure
from the already rich to suppress them or rob them of the rewards of
their inventiveness and courage. (See the Tucker automobile company and
the guy who invented the intermittent windshield wiper circuitry.)
The market _would_ sort itself out in short order were it ever actually
a truly free market, with fairness valued and encouraged. But such a
thing does not exist and will not so long as those in dominant positions
are allowed to unfairly exploit their position against the aspirants
they themselves have inspired.
Those who won't be fair plant the seeds of their own destruction. That
applies equally to owners and employees.
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