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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neeka who wrote (244926)	4/21/2010 1:41:10 PM
From: GST	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 306849

The fundamental issue is who has a claim on income from wealth producing activities. One class is self-evident -- entrepreneurs who innovate and bring us the next great thing to come along. Investors have a claim insofar as they provide resources needed to fund risky ventures -- and all ventures have a degree of risk. But investors are not the only ones with a legitimate claim on income from business -- there are the people doing the work who have a rightful claim to participate as beneficiaries of the value they create. Indeed, wages almost always exceed profit, so in a sense you could say that workers almost always come first in line to get paid -- and that is how it should be. But there is another class where it is not so clear -- those captains of industry where the name of the game is power. And these captains of industry interface far too comfortably with their counterparts in government -- they are two sides of the same coin. In this world where power means more than brains or initiative, unions have a rightful place -- because unions afford some level of power to people who would otherwise have none. The trouble we face now is that initiative and entrepreneurship are being driven to the brink of extinction and power is the central form of enterprise logic. Some will blame the unions - but they are the weakest party in power politics -- weakest by far. In many cases they actually keep the least powerful sectors of society from being totally screwed over -- I use the example of the third grade teacher most often because they are typical of who would get screwed without unions protecting them from powerful corporate and government elements. We are a dying nation experiencing a near total breakdown of our political process -- we are polarized, demoralized, confused, increasingly broke and disgusted by vulgar displays of brazen self-serving power and greed displayed for all to see in living color before our eyes as we watch Wall Street and Washington exchanging lavish gifts with one another at our expense while so much of the country is pushed closer and closer to the brink of ruin -- and so many have already gone over it. Most sad of all, we can't seem to think of anything more effective to do about it than hold truly lame 'tea parties' and go to Strabucks wearing guns -- like these things are going to help. They just make it worse -- much worse as they point to an increasingly deep impasse in our civil society that simply emboldens the most powerful and most corrupt elements in our society -- those who love to see us divided and fractured so as to be sure we are completely impotent and unable to so much as dent their power let alone effectively challenge it.