The thing I don't get, Troy, is you are an entrepreneur, a small businessman, a hard worker. You know that the wealth of the nation comes from the effort of entrepreneurs, small businessmen, and hard workers.
Yet you still think the solution to our problems (whether health care, the lack of living wage, etc etc) lies with the state. With the people who regulate the interaction between entrepreneurs, small businessmen, and hard workers. With the people who do nothing better than get in the way of those people making mutually beneficial deals for goods and production and effort.
Oh, I understand that you don't like the uberwealthy big businesses. Here's a newsflash: neither do I. Want to know why? Because I know, both from experience as a small business person who has failed and as the son of a small business person who succeeded enough to have life insurance that paid for seven years of my higher education, and from years of reading empirical evidence about how government and big corporates are joined at the hip.
The fact that I turned out to be a USDA Prime fuck-up doesn't change the fact that he was successful by being a small business person who provided goods and service people valued and employing several people at wages that supported families with several children plus summer wages (yes, at the then-minimum) for kids like me.). And I will never forget the year OSHA decided to get involved with "safety" issues. The dozens, if not hundreds of unpaid hours, my workaholic dad who already put 12 hour days in 6+ days a week, had to put in installing extra railings, signage, etc etc, because he couldn't afford to contract out the work.
I also remember discovering, after my dad died and I had increased responsibilities because I had almost a year of college accounting, and my mother didn't, and so had access to all the historical company books that there were far more years where my dad's "take home" from his business was smaller than each of his full-time employees, often 50-75% less. Despite the fact that my dad's skills and productivity dwarfed all of those employees together.
That's when I started to learn about the difference between small business and big business, and how government regulation and taxation, always ended up favoring the large business over the small one; and how, despite the political posturing that took place, there is virtually no regulation in my lifetime or my dad's that has made it harder for the 99+% of businesses in America that are "small" (3-20 employees) to compete with the big businesses that make up less than 1% of the total.
You want to know why the distribution of power is so skewed in this country? You want to know why corporates enjoy such ludicrous profits and corporate CEOs get paid such outrageous salaries? Why these things get worse every year, rather than better? Because for 150+ years, the lawmakers and bureacucratshave been passing laws and promulgating regulations and making administrative decisions, that give them more and more power, more and more influence, and more and more ability to appropriate bigger and bigger slices of the pie.
Hell, if it weren't for legislatures and bureaucracies, a corporate "person" wouldn't be able to exist. Back in the days of kings, the Hudson Bay Company and the Virginia Company and the East India Companies (both the Dutch and English versions) got grants of monopoly power from the state. Then Parliament (in the UK) and the state legislatures (in the States got involved and we got some more. Then they delegated things to the bureaucrats, and we got some more. And each time, the net result was bigger and bigger companies -- who, unlike the partnerships that preceded them, wouldn't die when their owners died. And so they got bigger and bigger, and hired more and more lawyers, and the lawyers helped write more and more rules that privileged them. And they got bigger and bigger and hired still more lawyers who peddled more and more political rules that privileged them and they got richer and richer and bigger and bigger and bigger. And that's where we are today.
Yet you and others keep falling for this Progressive and Populist bullshit that somehow only some of the politicians and bureaucrats are responsible.
Oh, I get why you don't like the younger Bush, why you think he's in the pocket of that 1%. I don't disagree at all.
What I don't get is why you think his successor is any different. I don't get that you somehow think getting rid of one evildoer and his Administration (Bush) is all it takes.
And what I
really don't get is that you somehow think that somehow that this current iteration (or maybe the next one) of politicians and bureaucrats somehow are different, not only in their devotion to someone other than the big corps and the influence-peddlers, but in their ability/knowledge to do productive things. When, save for the national defense and highways systems and a few other things, those politicians and bureaucrats have *NEVER* been the source of wealth and real productivity in this country any more than those 1% of big corps. All they have ever been good at is getting in the way of the 99% of businesses that are small and the people who work for them.
Do you seriously think the people inside the Beltway know one fucking thing about what it takes to make a successful bee-keeping business, or a successful oil-drilling business, or a successful wheat farm, or a successful family medical practice or a successful anything else that is productive and wealth-increasing.
Feel free to demonize Dubya and company all you want. I could care less. I know they were as useful as nipples on a man.
But, for heaven's sake, man, stop believing that "government solutions" are anything other than oxymorons. Stop believing that somehow government and big business are ever going to be in opposition to each other.
That's as dumb as thinking you're going to get high school and college kids to take their studies more seriously than sex.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)