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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alan Whirlwind who wrote (16703)	12/28/2002 5:51:57 PM
From: E. Charters	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 82019

I believe that smoke and mirrors will not and should not keep the importance of the application of citizens' efforts towards maintaining a good level of industry, power (energy) cost conservation, a good trade balance, fiscal prudence, and an individual's capital accumulation from being paramount and capable of being excercised in a free and self sustaining way. Lately it has been the will of western governments through regulation and policy to herd the voting public and educate them perhaps unwisely to expend their efforts in retreating from application of physical industry, resource harvesting of metals, seeking to get investment in these and other areas through informal channels, and it has been the will of these governments to allow large business concerns to operate unfettered where the popular political wisdom supported their group intitiatives as being the vox populi Americana. It is apparent that the chiefest evil in business throughout the land is not the wastage of harvest and spoilage of the environment through small business properly regulated, but the overwhelming will of the large scale concerns, whose sheer size and ability to obfuscate investigations of all manner of practices leads to the gravest violations of law, fairness and environmental concerns. I am not saying that the local donut shop should be allowed to dump sewage at night in the local drinking water, bribe city council to disallow fair competition, or cook their books to cheat on taxes, but only that the stifling of competition and raising of cost by MS, Enron, onerous energy land or airwave auctions, the poisoning of food or denaturing of food by a MacDonalds or the wrongful gov't regulation concerning allowances of pesticide use without adequate tests will kill us literally perhaps, and certainly the future of small business growth and ultimately the competitiveness of the economy more surely and quicker than all manner of allowances and winking at cheatin' and side-steppin' small businesses. What is chiefly wrong with this and other mature so called democracies in the west, is that our governments venially cater to the wealthy powerful businesses with the wrong headed notion that they are more important to the economy than the thousands of small ones. But "It's A Wonderful Life" and F. Kapra are right. It's the collective of the small, not the large that provide the creative ferment and total wealth of the nation, not the large monopolistic concern. Linux and the local privately owned donut shop are examples of the strength of the US, not Microsoft and MacDonalds. The corrupt and pitiful pink sheets are the actual future of the US, not the Fortune 500, (we shudder to point out). But the thing that people most ignore, as an unwashed mass or group of "iggorant investors", (you and I), is that the Fortune 500, that juggernaut of pollution and capital, got their start about 153 years ago, almost to a company, by smallish individual capital raising, allowed by a quirk of the economy that gave people the ability to raise money by starting small and literally making money by digging it. Thus the traditional filter of the banker's or Wall Street's iggorant and corrupt apprisal of the plans of business was neatly side-stepped in that by-gone age and the greatest creativity and intelligence both financial, industrial and scientific was born. And all that became the wealth and power of the nation that we now know as "big business". But as Adam Smith and Thorstein Veblen pointed out, the healthiest economy exists where the process of continual rebirth, or start-up new (small) business is allowed to grow unfettered. A country that caters solely to the large and powerful is likely to lead like Japan has, to a society of dinosaurs where everything can go wrong and will, and the future for the average working man and investor alike will be like a prison of the lowest wage or return and the least freedom possible. There are two routes to business stultification and greatest possible danger to the land we live in, where there exists either a government of absolute power, or a business world of absolute monopoly. We are headed, almost paradoxically in the tragic direction of both it appears. EC<:-}