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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ThirdEye who wrote (128427)	2/21/2001 6:42:57 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Frankly, your post sounds like special pleading. Are you a farmer? it seems to me that the difference between farming and any other business is that the raw material of production can't be moved elsewhere. That statement also applies to mining and oil production. Should they be government subsidized? And it applies to many tourist areas: they can't be moved either. Whereas in industry what we have seen for 15 years is a gradual relocation of many thousands of jobs, even millions, outside our borders. This has occurred because business has continued to seek lower production costs at the expense of the standard of living of those right here who are the customers. One of the prime functions of business is to lower costs. You and I benefit from that drive on their part. Have you noticed how much more expensive computers are than they used to be? at the expense of the standard of living of those right here who are the customers. Yes, have you noticed how much American standards of living have fallen while this was going on? We enjoy relatively low prices for the stuff we buy ecause more and more of it is being produced overseas, and economic growth is sustained by continuing to find ways of cutting costs. Yeah, but we do need money to buy that stuff produced overseas, regardless of how cheap it is. We must be doing a decent job economically to be able to import so much. One of our key industries is agriculture; the US is a major food exporter. Another is technology; we have an educated, intelligent, hard-working population. And we have other economic specializations and advantages. The fact that low-wage jobs are either being shipped overseas or mechanized doesn't seen to have hurt us. Burying our heads in the sand and trying to protect "family-whatever" will. But this cannot occur in the same way with food production. As corporate interests continue to gain an increasing influence on food production, they do improve efficiency, but they pay poorly, employ more and more people who have no stake in the process They have as much stake as most people in this economy. They have jobs which support themselves and their families. Everybody cannot be an owner/operator/entrepeneur. they are not necessarily environmentally responsible. Left to itself, no business is any more environmentally responsible than it has to be. It is the job of government to see that they do what is needed in this area. Just between you and me, I don't like monopolies, least of all in food production. Monopolies in many other areas would be just as bad as one in food production. And that's why the anti-trust laws are on the books.