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Politics : The Castle -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MSI who wrote (1007)	1/19/2003 5:59:00 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

However, it goes too far when the profits and monopoly benefits are privatized and the risks nationalized. The answer to that doesn't have to be a lot of regulation. It can be just refusing to nationalize the risks. Tim

To: MSI who wrote (1007)	1/19/2003 9:55:40 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 7936

Teddy Roosevelt fought against such abuses in the 1900's. Roosevelt's response to the "trusts" was measured and oriented toward avoiding the problem of a single family, for example, owning ALL the railroads. It certainly was not a wholesale condemnation of the trust as an entity. And it wasn't all about political power as you suggest, rather, it was grown predominantly out of a desire to protect the public from price abuse. Further, Roosevelt's actions came well before the enactment of the heavy anti-trust legislation of the 30s. That legislation, as well as subsequently enacted law, has served well to protect against corporate abuse. The real criminals are the political parties, who continue to walk around Washington DC with their hands out. You don't even have to go into the realm of Bush-Lay Enron and 800 offshore slush funds to see gross evidence of that The reference to Bush is totally inappropriate in this context and clearly reflects a lack of understanding of the matter on your part, distorted by an obvious political bias. There has been no connection whatsoever between the Bush administration and the Enron collapse, and in fact, the Bush administration has pretty much been shown to have acted in a totally professional and above-board matter (the only administration official who has been truly implicated in the Enron fiasco was a former Clinton administration official, Bob Rubin, who attempted to use his political clout to get the Bush administration to interfere -- which as people of integrity, they flatly refused to do). Given a public-minded Executive Branch and it's SEC, FCC etc., and public-minded Congress and GAO, there would be regulation demanded by common sense and the people. THERE IS REGULATION -- EXTENSIVE REGULATION. And it largely works. You can't solve all problems with it, and you can regulate integrity. Unfortunately, integrity cannot be regulated, and fraud is difficult to prove and even more difficult to eliminate. That we have had only a couple of Enron-like failures ought to cause you to say, "Hell, we must be doing something right!".