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Strategies & Market Trends : The Art of Investing
PICK 49.91+1.0%4:00 PM EST
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To: Kirk © who wrote (10628)11/24/2025 3:43:37 PM
From: Sun Tzu1 Recommendation

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rdkflorida2

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The key problem that I see all my conservative leaning friends hung up on is "government waste".
You are not wrong to "believe big government is in collusion with big business." This is true

But what you are missing is that the excessive salaries or extra workers are a small drop in a huge bucket of how you are being ripped off. Even if you could create the perfectly efficient government, which is an impossible task, you would still only squeeze maybe 1% out of the overall slack compared to the double digits that go to big business.

I am going to illustrate with a simple example. Why do we have a big military? The answer is to protect America and America's interests. But if you dig a little deeper into what those interests are and who should pay for them, the picture gets a lot more interesting.

Personally, I don't have any interest in Japan or the Philippines or in the Middle East or... My interests are all local. So why should I be paying for the military to protect the interests of ExxonMobil or some other big business? And even if you argue that I have an indirect interest (Exxon gets sweetheart deals abroad then sells me the gas cheaper), I don't agree with it but even if I did I should pay relative to the proportion of my benefits.

I can make the same argument for just about everything from waste management to roads and transportation to policing, etc. What is the purpose of the police? To provide safety and security. Then why aren't the people who own a third of the wealth pay a third of the police budget?

This math is never presented to you. Instead what they tell is that universities should be private and public should not waste money on them or that government is wasteful and so on. All of the regular arguments are are self serving and distractions.
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