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

To: Wayners who wrote (462533)	9/22/2003 12:46:53 AM
From: Selectric II	Respond to of 769670

Clinton's antitrust case against Microsoft, carefully timed by the Nero er, uh, Clinton administration to come to fruition when the fallout wouldn't hurt the economy during his reign, is an interesting case study. Ayn Rand also had these folks figured out long ago. We are moving toward something close to Marxism, and have been doing so incrementally at varying rates since the 1930's. Hmm. Maybe in another 50 years, when everybody works for the government, nothing gets done, and nobody is accountable, FDR will be seen as a bigger villain than Herbert Hoover. Your measure of efficient markets and efficient businesses is enlightening in light of this past week's hurricane on the East Coast and resulting power outages. What incentives does, e.g., PEPCO (D.C.'s power company) have to upgrade and modernize when rate increases have been denied for the next several years by a commission made up of people who don't have to answer to market forces or investors? And, when PEPCO tried to merge with Baltimore's BGE a few years ago to increase efficiency and improve shareholder return (and hence, investment), the commission said, "no." Yet, today's Washington Postal condemns PEPCO, and carries local politicians' condemnation of PEPCO for not preventing, and then slowly responding to the hurricane outages. One local pol even blamed deregulation for the outages. Some still believe that business is best run by commissions who will allegedly look out for the public interest. Ha. Just wait until a dem administration decides to tag Microsoft as a public utility and pins it with all the accoutrements. Good thing for the liberals that Gates named his latest version, "Windows XP" -- it would be unseemly to be using "Windows 2003" in 2015.