You raise a lot of good issues, many of which I agree with in whole or in part. Some want to throw a really great baby out with the bathwater. I don’t.

Markets, businesses and people need government to protect against force and fraud, at least in my limited government world. The last thirty years of big business didn’t see a lot of “force” in the traditional sense, but huge amounts of fraud. It also saw, I think, the rise in the coopting of government by big business, with Republicans leading the charge and Democrats close behind. To me, it’s “force” of a different kind, with government using it’s coercive powers to force taxpayers to subsize business deals with tax benefits, grants and other legislation. Deals that benefitted the business and the politician, but not the public.

Perhaps the topic will come up again. Enjoy your day.

Very cool. I’ll never look at the race the same way again, but I can’t say that it would be a very enjoyable event on a very hot day. Lot’s of concrete and sun exposure coupled with a crowd of 300k would probably get old quick.

http://www.kentucky.com/latest_news/story/935131.html

daron

Nowadays, this seems to have gone in reverse. Bigger businesses buy up perfectly profitable smaller businesses..but they are somehow not quite profitable enough. And there are threats of moving to the south. Or to Asia. And workers are re-negotiating for their jobs. Or the union is broken entirely, and the workers are replaced with nonunion, or even alien workers, who will work a lot cheaper (read Methland for more detail). And it’s not because there was no profit. It’s just that businesses now have the idea that if you only nick someone once, you are a chump. Nick them at least twice.

That’s the philosophy behind endless bank charges, and rises in credit card rates with the flimsiest pretextes. People want to love capitalism in America, but capitalists keep making it hard.

Poppycock.

As one poster at Coozledad’s link cleverly said about the demonstrators -

“They are clearly for a principled shrinking of government. That, and no cuts to Medicare ever.”

I heard Karl Rove go on, with great unciousness, about how “hard-left” Obama “really” is — how he associates with hard leftists and how he doesn’t bat an eye at doubling the national debt!!

But the disingenuous old turd blossom glossed right past the fact that in 2001, when the Great, Patriotic and All American Republican party took control of the White House, they inherited a budget SURPLUS of $128,000,000,000. The previous (and God-less) Democratic leftist draft-dodging perjurer had reduced the deficit every year he was in office, up to and including turning surpluses and reducing the public debt.

And what did that get him, from the All American, Right Thinking, God-Fearing, Smaller, Less INtrusive Government Republicans in Congress?

Impeached, that’s what!!!

Our Great Patriotic and Godly Leader, President George Bush, ran a deficit every single year he was in office — doubling and then redoubling the deficit numbers ’til it hit $413 billion dollars in 2005.

His brilliant, smaller, less intrusive government initiative was to CUT TAXES while fighting two wars on the other side of the world!!

Where were these shit-for-brains callers “for smaller, less intrusive government” when the white republican was potentially tapping any phone in America without warrant, grabbing people anywhere in the world and then whisking them to our own archipeligo of secret prisons, and asserting that the president and vice president were beyond the reach or restrictions of any mere law, whenever they decided that they needed to do anything in the name of national defense?

If they were angrily protesting for “a smaller, less intrusive government” back then, I surely missed it.