X-Message-Number: 28089
From: "egg plant" <>
Subject: RE: CryoNet #28070 - #28078
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 20:57:20 +0000

Anthony ." <> Wrote:

>No regulation means no democracy

Yea, but that's OK, I'm not a big fan of democracy anyway because elections 
are dumb. Elections are an idiotic way of communicating your wishes, there 
are much better ways. Every day I send hundreds of exquisitely precise 
messages to the Free Market telling it what I want it to do. I also get to 
compare brands, I can't do that in a democracy because I'm not voting for 
goods or services or even policies, I just get to choose between two grab 
bags of promises every 4 years.

When I "vote" in the economy by making a purchase I am sure to get it, I 
always win. When I vote for the grab bag I may or may not get it.  People 
have figured out that the chance that their vote will influence things is so 
absurdly small that it's just not worth their time to study the issues very 
deeply, the result is that the politician with the best hairdo gets to make 
the decisions.

>People do not spend their money very well.

And government does? Maybe people spend their money foolishly, maybe they 
don't, the point is it's THEIR money NOT yours.

I can only think of 3 ways to get anybody to do anything, force, love, or 
trade; government uses the first, people like me tend to like the last two 
better, if you can think of a fourth I'd love to hear it.

>You think that people should spend and consume wantonly

And you think you have the right to make me spend money that I earned in a 
way that pleases you not me. And I think that is evil.

>Americans may be the only people who widely embrace a > "dog eat dog" 
>mentality

Speaking of dogs, who is the top dog in the world today, Germany, the 
Netherlands or America?

>our insatiable lust for money and consumption leads to massively 
>inequitable distribution of the world's wealth

Another defining characteristic of the common western socialist is his 
conviction that money is evil and that the most evil thing about money is 
that he doesn't have enough of it.

>trust me I'm from an honest-to-god corporation

Oh I don't trust corporations either, but the difference is I can tell a 
corporation to go to hell, if I tell government to go to hell I'll end up in 
jail, or worse.

For some reason people love to dwell on the bad things business has done, 
but if you put all the evil business has committed over the last century 
together in one big lump I can't find a word stronger than "naughty" to 
describe it compared to the horrors committed by government. Perhaps 
Wal-Mart hasn't treated its employees with enough consideration from time to 
time, but at least Wal-Mart doesn't push them into ovens.

I once read a biography of John D Rockefeller by Ron Chernon called "Titan", 
it was a good book but was supposed to document all the dreadful things he 
did to become the riches man in the world. Well, if this is as bad as 
capitalism gets I can only conclude capitalism is not very bad. He was 
astronomically intelligent, extremely aggressive, and had the uncanny 
ability to find any economic weakness in a competitor and exploit it to the 
hilt, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It's true he 
sometimes bribed legislatures, but although clearly illegal I didn't find it 
immoral. At the time there were foolish (and probably unconstitutional) laws 
forbidding corporations from being involved in intra state commerce, if the 
law had been obeyed the industrial revolution would not have happened in 
America; so Rockefeller did the only thing he could, he opened his wallet. I 
could not find any instances where Rockefeller's business decisions were 
clearly immoral and only a few that even entered a gray area.

The odd thing was that just before I read that book I read a biography of 
Stalin, before that a biography of Lenin and before that a biography of 
Hitler, so when Chernon talked about some "evil" thing that Rockefeller did 
I had to laugh. Compared to those demonic government leaders Rockefeller on 
his very worst day was no more than naughty.

Big government has created a sea of blood and butchered hundreds of millions 
of people, often their own citizens. Granted, few companies actively opposed 
those monstrous regimes, but that's not quite the same thing as instigating 
it, and anyway can you really blame them for not playing the hero, it would 
be economic if not actual suicide to do so.

Yes Microsoft can be arrogant and yes, it makes me mad when Windows crashes 
too, but at least Bill Gates doesn't put his customers into concentration 
camps.

   John K Clark    

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