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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (93424)	11/3/2008 4:57:16 PM
From: Lane3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541402

Old business. I happened upon this piece on PfP. Cracked me up and I couldn't help thinking of our discussion on the topic. "If you believe that "fairness" — a childishly subjective idea that ought to be quarantined to playgrounds and Berkeley city council meetings — should be meted out by the autocrats inhabiting Washington, D.C., your faith will be duly rewarded." denverpost.com Believe it or not, I do usually read actively and I do give thought to substantive arguments. I have thought quit a bit over the last few days about your notion of fairness being key to family relationships. I'm 65 years old. I have had experience with family and family-like relationships. Despite best efforts over several days, I could not think of any occasion where fairness was ever raised as an issue in any of them. So it's clear to me that a fairness frame of reference is a choice, not inherent to interpersonal relationships. What makes some use it and others not, I don't know. Maybe it's temperament or the culture from which one comes. I'm curious about it because it's alien to me. Since you're disinclined to educate me about it, I guess I'll just have to remain curious but uninformed. I remain unable to identify how switching to that frame of reference would be helpful or even neutral. FWIW.

To: cnyndwllr who wrote (93424)	11/5/2008 5:51:18 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 541402

Some of the multinational corporations have become financially larger than most of the national economies in the world. Not really. Their market cap might be bigger than the government revenue or even the GDP of many countries but the two statistics are not comparable. The market cap is the markets estimate of all the discounted future profits from the company, not the production of the company in any one year. You could compare after tax profit to government revenue, or corporate revenue to GDP, but not reasonably market cap to either. Compared that way large corporations are still larger than very small countries, but not than most countries. and is too often narrowly focused on short term profits Corporations often do focus on the short term, but governments are even more likely to do so. Politicians in democracies have to get reelected. Dictators face possible coups or revolts, and often seek to grab for themselves and their friends while they still can. And, as the world's population becomes more skilled and educated and they learn how to better utilize the emerging skills of such people, they can increase the pace with which they move more production out of America. On the whole production hasn't moved out of America. We produce more than before. The increase in production in other countries is more of an increase in total production than a transfer. And as the workforce in other countries becomes more skilled, and has more capital to leverage their efforts, they will tend to get paid more, demand better conditions, and otherwise become more expensive to employ.