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| At some point too much capital becomes undemocratic. You can buy the law and
do what you wish. Flood caused by Vanderbilt's comes to mind.
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Quaecomque sunt vera ----
"John Husvar" <jhusvar@sbcglobal.net> wrote in message
news:jhusvar-8C945E.08595129112005@newsclstr01.news.prodigy.com...
> In article <438b886f$1_3@newspeer2.tds.net>,
> KKT <sendme.nospam@hotpop.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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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