Some people think we need less government

Good article,. I watched Nader on C span yesterday. He talks about things that make a lot of sense. When people have so little they are afraid to do or say anything that might jeopardize what little they have. Looking around I see the middle class being decimated. Chicago, Miami, New York you have two classes the rich and the poor with not many in between.

Reason TV did a good interview with John Mackey Whole foods founder on his new book "Conscious Capitalism". "Businesses are at their best when reaching for a higher purpose that ranges far beyond any simplistic notions of the profit motive or self-interest." In the interview he talks a lot about bad government and the ill effects it has had on whole foods business and the free market as a whole.

A few examples given, how whole foods lets employees set work schedules but cannot in California because you have to pay overtime at more than 8 hours per day. In other parts of the country workers want to do 4-10 hours work days or 3-12 hour work days they cannot in California and stay competitive.

Whole foods employees decided on the healthcare plan they wanted. The employees in Wisconsin wanted the plan also but could not precipitate because they were under contract with the union.

He also talked about the effects Obamacare will have on the market. Not good

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CXrrwOktmQ

 

I traded it for some food, insurance, housing, entertainment; thanks for asking!

 

The problem with Nader is he often champions the kinds of government controls that inevitability lead to these situations.

 

And what about corporations? The private sector?

See this is the problem with all this less government talk, it's not based on reality but rather an emotional connection to propaganda.

What is government? Is it a thing is it a machine?

The government is people and yes people are easily corrupted but guess what corporations are made up of people to and the only difference between the government and the private sector is that we have no voice in the private sector. We don't vote for corporations or ceos or chairmen or any of it.

This is why this argument of less government is nothing short of a con considering the private sector is the very reason for the corruption in the first place. The people calling for less government on the basis of its corruption are the ones who will gain more power from it and the people taken by the con follow rank and file behind it

It’s like rewarding the disease and blaming the body.

 

It is how large governing entities always work. They either try to micromanage everything on their own a la the former Soviet union or they do it through their corporate surrogates as in the US and Europe. The latter has the advantage of having some on to blame other than the government when things go to hell as they inevitably will.

 

Corporations and private people cannot force you to do a thing without the government's help. They can only invest in their own products, pay their people, and encourage you to shop with them and not their competitor. Government takes your money by force and gives it to Solyndra or Halliburton as it pleases. It does not ask your approval, and if you resist they lock you in jail until you learn not to do that any more.

The Government is people working to tell other people how to live and what to do. Corporations do not have that power, and I challenge you to name any that comes close to that much power that do not have government protection either by mandate, or high regulatory costs that make entrants to competition nearly impossible. Those regulations by the way, always favor the largest corporations because they have the economy of scale to absorb the hit, small firms do not. Every regulatory costs must come out of the pocket of the value producing worker.

 

Poor people make the same argument whether under a democracy, socialism, communism, etc..... blame everyone else but themselves for their situation, and then sling (*)(*)(*)(*) at people around them who are rising above poverty and making a future for themselves.

 

There is a difference corporations are trying to sell you something. Governments are trying to compel you by judicious use of both the carrot and the stick to behave in certain ways.

 

Every time you say government in this post you are talking about a government that is and has been controlled by the private sector for decades.

The solution isn't to reduce government and hope those with the money and power all of a sudden grow a conscious.

You don't blame the body and reward the disease.

 

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More like the other way around.

 

Some cases they TRY to sell you something. Other times they FORCE you to use their garbage product without choice. Take GMO's for example. When does the consumer have a "choice" to consume or not consume GMO's? There are plenty of other examples as well. It's not about choice. It's about PROFIT.
Blaming the government is kinda like blaming the bank for leaving the vault door open that the bank robber just robbed. Somehow it's the banks fault that the robber made the choice to steal all the money.

 

I just read a whole book by him in which he cites example after example of corporations where most of the management inherited their jobs and either bankrupted the business or "succeeded" by crooked practices. Yet Nader, in his summary, didn't mention abolishing birth privileges as a solution. He attacks the symptoms and not the root cause.

This is the pseudo-intellectual outcome of our class-biased higher education. These critics believe in abstract, impersonal systems that function independently of the quality of the people who run them. It's like having a perfect blueprint for building something, but then making it out of poor-quality materials at its most important structural points. It inevitably collapses, just like our Preppy Republic will do soon.

Sixty years ago, unions made a sweetheart deal with management, getting wage increases in return for the right of management to pass on its positions to its sons. In our time, that includes its daughters too--which is the real reason behind Women's Liberation. The former American Way was to start at the bottom and work your way up, not start in the middle as white collar after a class-monopolized college education. When we lost that American Way, we lost our way and became a medieval aristocracy. This postmodern capitalism should go back to the crumbling castles of Europe where it belongs and choke in the dust surrounding those historical relics of a stagnant and hopeless way of life for all but the privileged few. We are dying because we are a country run not by worth, but by birth.

 

How is the small time food producer going to compete in the heavily regulated food industry without going to the giants? The FDA approves pink slime and all your GMOs and a diet that literally kills more Americans then cigarettes. Consumer demand for other foods is the only thing that will change that, and deregulation so new participants can get into the market without too many restraints. If you wanted to sell your homemade tomato sauce to people, wouldnt you call an attorney first? Of course, and that is a problem.

 

And excessive profits are the same as excessive taxes. The degenerate luxury the capitalists live in on money extracted from their employees is the same as the expensive vacations that the hypocrites whine about when they criticize Obama.

 

What would abolishing birth privileges look like. If I work my butt off to build a company then should I not have the right to pass it on to whom ever I want?

I am not to quick to bash Nader, he always has good things to say that get me thinking. What he was saying about power leaders and greedy leaders vs servant leaders makes great sense. Nader talks about an engaged, active, well informed society as the solution.

 

So why do you keep trusting yours, and other people's money with that bank?

 

Bootlicking Brown-nosing Boytoy Buttboys for the Bosses are all independent and defiant when criticizing the government, but shake like the lily-livered lackeys they really are every time the Boss says, "Boo!"

 

Constant Capitaliban bombardment with advertising does take away our free will. If it didn't slant our choices like some narcotic, why would they spend so much money on it? And the fact that the economic elite all think the same way about how much money we owe them for their products proves that the consumer doesn't determine prices. They only compete on who can cheat us the most. The public is almost completely left out of the game. But the plutocratic parasites have the money to make you think that is not true at all.

Their command economy on employment, just like their mirror-image under Communism, puts inferior people in superior positions and superior people in inferior positions. Again, their expensive propaganda prevents us from realizing that. From childhood on, we are brainwashed to look up to the "successful." We never look inside the "successful." If we did we would find hollow Greedhead zombies hopelessly addicted to making as much money as they can, any way they can. If such a vampire ever looks in the mirror, he sees nothing.

 

The big government we have is the reason that corporations are so powerful. Regulations aren't hurting corporations, they are hurting the small businesses.

 

Let your brat work his butt off to get what you got by doing that. You have nothing to be proud of if you want to protect your son from facing challenges you met. You prove you don't care about that requirement of working for it when you don't impose the same justification on him. You are over-reaching with such a demand, which calls for punitive damage. Besides, the fact you think you have a right to let him get something without working for it proves that you must have gotten your own money through luck and cheating. It should disgust you to subsidize any freeloaders. Your hypocrisy shows a severe logical disconnect.

If the rest of us have to do it on our own, so should the children of the rich. Or else they should suffer the consequences of stealing our opportunities for themselves. Rule by birth deserves death.

You have no more right to infere with fair competition in the next generation than a star athlete has the right to pass on his position to his son, I don't care how hard the athlete worked to get that position. Your obsolete aristocratic way of achievement puts the company, the employees, and the consumers in jeopardy. They deserve the right to have the best people in the most responsible positions, not people mooching off connections.

Should Jay Leno and David Letterman pass on their jobs to their sons too? I know the dogmatic Capitaliban answer on that. They don't own the job, their employers do. But the next generation owns the competitive struggle in the next generation. People are so brainwashed to accept their slavery to unearned privilege that only violent revolution will settle this. Your last will and testament to buy the love of your neglected children may become their death warrant.

 

Sounds like your employer doesn't respect you. You should walk out and work for a competitor and encourage others to do the same until he understands his behavior will cost him money. They he will treat you like an adult. But don't go get your union friend to make government force him to pay you. Then you will have a union master that you can never disrespect if you want to work in that field.

 

How do you make "excessive profits" without an invention, or barriers to competition placed there artificially by government?

If you are one of those people who are mad that we have lots of rich people then you should remember wealth is not a zero sum game. Bill Gates made himself, your life, and the lives of the consumers who bought his product better and the country richer on his path to excessive wealth.

 

Someday, maybe someone will explain to you the laws of relativity. The republican party caucus has been fed so much propaganda about big government, and how that it is governments fault for such a thing to happen. What it appears to be is not what it actually is. A big government as you call it, comes about from a sheer need to control more, by virtue of an exploding population. It has nothing to do with the government itself. Population growth is your controlling factor. As a matter of fact, overpopulation is the root cause of all of our problems. You are barking up the wrong tree labeling big government as the real problem. You are still locked in those Reagan years where he tried to label government as the problem. Where the problem gets even more dicier, is how corporations have seized the opportunity by busing government to it's advantage. They pay for propaganda labels through political lobbyists, blaming big government as the problem while they run out the back door reaping all the "real" benefits. The other name for those benefits is "POWER". So, in the real world, unless you decide to keep looking at it from the propaganda point of view, versus what it actually is, you will see the Law of Relativity in this case is actually opposite of what you think it is .

 

huh? The bigger and more diverse an economy the worse central planning will be. Population and modernization should have the opposite effect. Imagine the government fixing software bugs and the like, or regulating new email companies. All competitive areas in the economy have the least amount of regulation. It is no coincidence.

The phenomena you are describing is that politicians have figured out that if you tell people you will do things in principle they like, and it will only cost someone else they will support you. Then you can take that money and invest in people who give you campaign cash. That is why 75% of the stimulis money went to companies that hundreds of thousands to spend on politicians. Because they manage their money well, buying up some of that big government. Firms like Solyandra, who had CEOs that were personal friends of the President. That is why we need limited government. A government with no power to buy things outside of basic infrastructure from corporations is a government that will have little to offer corrupt "capitalists".

If you don't like corporation buying your government, limit the size of government so it cannot offer any incentives to people with cash. When you regulate and give power to the corporations, who do you think writes the regulations? Established people in the industry. Who is able to pay an attorney to keep up with compliance? Large firms only.

Name an evil business that didnt have government's blessing and collusion. I would love to hear about one.