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To: mark silvers who wrote (17939)	6/23/1998 2:24:00 AM
From: Father Terrence	Respond to of 39621

Hi Mark, You'll note I said in a "free marketplace". What makes you think our marketplace is free? We live in a mixed, socialistic society in which many of the freedoms our great grandfathers took for granted have been stripped from us. You may not be fully aware of this because you were born into it and most people have the tendency to accept what is around them as the normal state of affairs. Add a public school system that rewrites history and you have a fairly strait-jacketed situation. A "free society" would not have income tax, social security, redistribution of wealth programs, or the inclination to create a government-subsided national health care program, or a "justice" department singling out and going after "monopolies" (when the only true monopolies that have existed in this country historically have been government sanctioned). Caveat emptor is the perfect solution in a free society because people must take responsibility for the personal decisions they make leading up to a purchase. I have been in marketing for years and can tell you that the idea the public has that a company can "create" demand is not very accurate. It may be able to identify demand and tailor or "spin" a product to meet the demand. But long term "creating" artificial demand has never worked very well. An extremely litigious society, one where individuals point the finger of blame at others for the irresponsibility of their own actions, is another symptom of a sick society. The infamous McDonalds' coffee spilling episode comes to mind. We have this scenario because of non-objective laws and precedents being created by non-objective politicians, judges, lawyers and juries. In most cases product liability laws should be thrown out. Money is the root of all good in a free society because it is the agreed upon means of trading value for value. To those that criticize it by pointing to criminal activities involving money, those activities are really criminal only if they involve violation of property rights (such as a petty thief breaking into a safe, or the U.S, Government robbing individuals of part of their wealth with taxation). Traditional criminals such as those that ran prostitution rings, loan sharks, drug and alcohol distribution and sales, lotteries etc. are not really criminals because none of those things would be illegal in a free society (and were not illegal earlier in U.S. history). The U. S. has a long record this past century of making illegal and criminalizing things and activities that a free society used to take for granted. In fact, today, the state lotteries have much worse odds than the numbers runners ever gave, the loan sharks of the 20s, 30s, and 40s, were penny-ante compared to the interest rates some banks charge on their credit cards today, and operations that Elliot Ness and his Untouchables used to break up with federal warrants and axes today are State sponsored! You are also confusing my statement that money is the root of all good (and to freedom and liberty in a free society) with happiness. Money can never create happiness. If you are miserable, money will not make you happy. If you are happy already, however, money CAN increase your happiness. I know this to be true. Father Terrence