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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (33956)	3/11/2004 7:06:49 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793804

IMO, there are two things you absolutely cannot privatize. There is a tipping point where government ceases to be the problem and becomes nearly pure solution. If we privatized national defense, how would we deal with al Qaida? <g>

To: LindyBill who wrote (33956)	3/14/2004 7:19:43 PM
From: Michelino	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793804

"Long term, the state will wither away. We will end up with total private property, IMO. But that is a couple of hundred years out, and not worth arguing about <...> In the meantime, watch as item after item is privatized. And works better when it is. " Wrong direction....that WAS a couple of hundred years in the past...give or take a century or so when referring to either serfs or slaves. Civilization has already rejected your vision of feudalism aka destiny. Your dream, that the rights of property will eventually trump all others belongs in the 18th century not the 21st. Only the naive or the greedy think that privatization always makes things "work better". If the "better" means only short term personal profit...well certainly a few pockets may jingle. But, increasingly, real visionaries perceive a truly macro view of economics…one which reveals the truisms of today to be as substantial as the tenets of alchemy. When we consider who ends up paying for the environmental damage and all the other garbage and after effects of unregulated industry...in addition to the same "who" paying to dismantle the abandoned factories and support the decaying infrastructure "left behind" by the rapture to suburbia (in the US)...well the scientific approach is to open up the books of yore and amend what WAS consider profitable in terms of the total outlay of both public and private society. The most pristine example of "free" enterprise is the guy who sells bottled water for $50 a gallon after a natural disaster. And libertarians express their ideal by yearning to sell our off national treasures to benefit the purse of only one generation. This is why the solutions proposed by their most ponderous proponents will be so easily forgotten. Capitalism, like any religion, will adopt the best of the opposing philosophies that it conquers to the extent that it will be unrecognizable to its founders. As civilization matures, we will tend to get more tolerant of rights of cultures, individuals. We may even relegate Mammon to the same outdated pantheon as Jupiter and Beelzebub. I will have my descendents catch up to yours two centuries hence for the “I told you so”.