----- Original Message -----
Sent: Thursday, December 11, 2003 8:23
PM
Subject: RE: [Futurework] Are they going
mad?
Ray,
It is likely that everyone across the work rewards
those who contribute to them and punishes those that harm them. Americans can
spend their money anyway they like.
Meantime, you continue to mix chalk and
cheese.
You take various examples of government
intervention and call it a cutthroat world, even though the various classical
people you mention were against such government
intervention.
I have no idea how your mind can somehow link
government intervention with no government intervention, but you keep doing
it. Worse, you seem unaware you are doing it.
"Cutthroat competition", "Law of the Jungle" and
similar phrases have been used for a long time by protectionist capitalists
and the 57 varieties of socialists (you'll remember Heinz
soup).
The capitalists know that market competition cuts
their profits so they are against it. They are joined by the socialists
for more peculiar reasons. Socialists are supposed to represent the
people, yet they don't trust them to make their own decisions. They feel they
have the wise men and women in government who can far better decide what the
housewife wants than she can. (Actually, a British Labor government socialist
- Douglas Jay - said just that before 'Public Relations' was firmly in
place.)
Now, they just think it, but keep their mouths
shut. It certainly seems that
these government PooBahs hold the
general population in some contempt. Otherwise they wouldn't keep trying to
deny them their freedom to choose.
When you think of the free market, free trade,
laissez-faire try to remember Leonard Read's admonition - "Do as you wish, but
harm no-one.".
I rather prefer "Do as you wish, but coerce
no-one."
Whichever you prefer, try to base your thinking on
the individual rather than the State.
Harry
******************************************** Henry George School of Social
Science of Los
Angeles Box 655
Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242
http://haledward.home.comcast.net
********************************************
You know I don't like Bush Keith but, I think you
haven't thought the context of this through. First of all America
is a business nation and Bush has a Masters in Business Administration from
Harvard. In American business you punish those who don't support
you and reward those who do. It is that simple. It may
make lousy government but frankly with our huge tax bill over this war, the
idea of a company bringing in money to another country that isn't sharing
doesn't strike me all that well either. We don't exist for
the rest of the world but for our own people. The justification
for this war was an attack on our own people and for that reason the American
public support Bush on this. What we don't support is corruption
and over charging by American corporations like
Halliburton. Halliburton supported Bush and now they are
sacrificing little and making a killing. That may hurt Bush but
your comments are not resonant over here. They are more anxiety
from a distance and speak to your self interest rather than ours.
Its not morality or even good government, in fact its nothing personal, its
just business.
If you don't like it then argue with the market and stop
preaching free trade and TNC's as the saviour of the future. The
US is just a TNC competeing in the world and it doesn't care about any
competitor's market share other than their own. In that Laissez
Faire world, the only security is power and loyalty and if you want
that world you can't complain when power is asserted. That is
what I meant when I said that government as business is a
nightmare. You said you didn't get it and now you are complaining
about it. I don't understand that. I speak
English, maybe you should learn to speak a little
Cherokee. Then we could get around these
misunderstandings.
Perhaps it would be good for Europe to do the same
since we both are going to be dealing with each other for a long time in
this cutthroat world that Ricardo, Adam Smith, Henry George, J.S. Mill
and their accolytes have finally given us, not to mention the
current varieties like Milton Friedman, etc. etc. I don't
know whether it is evolutionary in the sense of the brain or just inevitable
given the history of the past thousand years of European
systems. But either way it was predictable.
As Harrison Ford said to Julia Ormond in the movie Sabrina after he
had treated her shabbily, "Don't worry, it was nothing personal, it was
just business." He didn't like it and felt like a cad
but felt perfectly at home in the more's of the business
system. Or as Donald Trump says: "Get
Even!" But "getting even" isn't personal, it just
a business strategy to reward those who contibute to your business and punish
those who don't. Personally I prefir the complexity of
Veblin to the whole bunch.
From my standpoint, everything is personal.
That is different.
REH
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