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To: Andy Thomas who wrote (16764)	7/7/2000 3:59:44 PM
From: Andy Thomas	Respond to of 17770

i don't think that these critics of capitalism understand the concept of 'rational self interest' very well either. perhaps though it is i who needs to 'hit the books.' my understanding is that 'rational self interest' involves 'not screwing over your neighbor.' for if you screw over your neighbor, he's bound to retaliate, and that - acting in ways which invite retaliation - is not usually in a person's 'rational self interest' is it? andy

To: Andy Thomas who wrote (16764)	7/10/2000 5:14:20 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 17770

Re: ... this guy doesn't have the answer... On the contrary: V. Anelauskas has actually answered the issue --with his feet. He's still living in America, after all.... I think Anelauskas' anger comes mainly out the (huge) gap between his expectations (about America) and the rather flat, dim reality. Hence his vehement disappointment. Note that he candidly acknowledged his own naiveté: when he was still living in Lithuania, he thought of the US as heaven on earth --a wholesale American Dream! That's why, he says, his duty is to warn would-be American Dreamers against the harsh facts awaiting them. And that's, I believe, where Anelauskas is overstretching his own worries: he mistakenly assumes that people around the world who scramble to migrate to the US got deluded by American agitprop. But he should know better: the US is such a powerful magnet to millions of people not as much because of one's certainty to succeed as because of the very opportunity one'll have to succeed. It's one thing to live in a country/society where wherever you look for a go-ahead, you always come up against a brick wall (be it class/tribe bias, color line, gender bias, interdicts, etc.), quite another to start off in a level playing society. Anelauskas should have thought of the American Dream as of Europe's rural exodus in the XIXth century: peasants were leaving their barren boonies en masse and moving to the cities because they perfectly knew how stunted their prospects in their native villages were. I think there's a French witticism that sums it up pretty well: Mieux vaut etre le dernier a Rome que le premier au village..., that is, Better bottom of Rome than top of cowtown... Gus.