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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (186445)	5/11/2006 2:22:23 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 281500

Nadine, having had a LOT of experience with both corporate and government efforts, I can tell you that big business is very capable of being and acting fat, dumb and happy. But never as successfully as governments. Before businesses get even close to the standard of governmental fatness, dumbness and happiness, competitors are chewing them up, taking their business and sending them to the liquidators. I can attest to Globalstar LP's failure, which was pure uselessness on the part of management. They destroyed $10 bn in market capitalisation and $4 bn in actual expenditure. If they had been a government, they'd have put another $2 bn in and continued to waste that too. Creditors didn't allow that to happen with Globalstar LP. They took it over and are in the process of putting it on a more commercially successful footing, unfortunately a few years too late. Governments can end up at the liquidators too, but not before they take a LOT with them. Even then, they might refuse to go and fight to the death, literally, to hold onto power. It takes very little brainpower to set a tolerable pollution level. It takes a LOT of brainpower and business acumen to successfully supply equipment which meets the pollution standards as well as commercial requirements. Fortunately, governments have very little brainpower so are able to set pollution levels. More or less. But now I think about it a bit more, they can't even do that well. They can't even do it badly. I'm thinking of lead, CO2, particulates, sulphur, CO and other limits which were badly done. CO2 control is a vast waste and if they could return the world to CO2 levels of last century, they could even flip us into the next glaciation. Thank goodness they are so incompetent that they are unable to achieve their aim. <Government can give a necessary push in the right direction, through regulation and tax law. The danger of course is that they too will do something stupid. > That's not really a danger. That's a certainty. Mqurice