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Strategies & Market Trends : Mu Gamma Lambda -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Augustus Gloop who wrote (1954)	7/11/2001 2:24:26 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10077

Hi Agusutus, Re: THE GOVERNMENT IS THE LAST GROUP OF PEOPLE I WANT TO CONTROL MY MONEY. They rank right up there with unions for me. I'm afraid I don't share your antipathy for either. Without government we wouldn't have major traffic jams on freeways across the nation. We'd have monumentally frustrating local jams. Think about how private industry made progress toward the Interstate freeway system. It was a non-starter. How about sewerage and water supplies? The private sector has a very spotty record there as well (no pun intended). Or how about public health? Did private industry eradicate small pox? I don't think so. How about an effort to create a vaccine for AIDS? Private industry is deleriously happy to create after-the-fact "cocktails" to keep sick individuals on a ruinous fee schedule, but isn't lifting a finger to create a vaccine which would ruin the market. I see a clear role for government to step up to the plate on this one. I was a member of Carpenter's Local #2245, Juneau, AK and I have some mixed feelings about how unions work. But I would have to say that without their ascendency in the 30's through the 70's, we'd be living in a far different and vastly less equitable society. I don' even want to countenance the kind of unfair, lopsided oligopoly that the US could have turned into if we'd gone down that road. Today, I'm absolutely disgusted that corporate CEOs get on average about 475 times the compensation of the lowest paid members of their staff. This is way up from about 40:1 in 1980. And it is horribly out of touch with what is going on in the rest of the world. The net result of the elites of this country deciding that THE GOVERNMENT IS THE LAST GROUP OF PEOPLE I WANT TO CONTROL MY MONEY is that they want to wreck the common institutions of this country that have made us the greatest success the world has ever known. And for what? So that fewer than 10,000 individuals can control 98% of the wealth of this nation. I resent their idea that we need this return to a cruel feudalism. Of course, YMMV :) -Ray