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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (90339)	4/5/2003 4:13:27 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

> Unbridled capitalism as a force of nature red in tooth and claw. At last we seem to be getting somewhere. In the Western world, people eventually managed to find ways of controlling this to some extent. But outside of the Western world, who looks out for those little people from the same big corporations? It is so easy to say it is the job of their corrupt governments to do so. But if they do, they are not friendly dictators anymore. Not that they are putting their people under their boots on orders from us. They are doing it because they are greedy and power hungry people. But so long as it helps us sell goods, we have no interest in not respecting their sovreignty. On the other hand movements to the contrary are labeled as threatening to the stability of the region and must be stopped...<vbg> right!

To: Ilaine who wrote (90339)	4/5/2003 4:21:49 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Your example of the early industrial revolution is a good one. Children working in mines, workers being crushed by poorly designed machines, smokestacks belching black soot, piles of slag being poured into rivers. Brown lung caused by cotton dust, black lung caused by coal dust, lung cancer from asbestos. What we often don't remember is that the majority of the workers voluntarily entered into the industrial work force, because conditions were an improvement over life on the farm. In industry, at least you got paid. There's a big tendency to romanticize pre-industrial conditions. It's a mistake.

To: Ilaine who wrote (90339)	4/5/2003 5:42:30 PM
From: paul_philp	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Unbridled capitalism as a force of nature red in tooth and claw. Even in your scenario, the earlier industrial age was a huge improvement over the pre-industrial age and those that could choose, chose the industrial lifestyle. A refresher course on the late middle ages is needed. Did y'all have Robber Barons in Canada? We did. J.P. Morgan's father got his fortune started during the Civil War, buying defective rifles cheap and selling them back as new. The real Robber Barron's are creatures of bubbles and we just had a whole new set of them in the the late '90's. I think that bubbles are a healthy and necessary feature of capitalism, for more good gets done than harm and the Robber Barron's take advantage of people's greed not their productivity. Capitalism is a function of nature not man, nature is cruely indifferent to individuals or species. Paul