Night Strike wrote:So in your "Patriotic market", the government dictates which businesses are forced to stay in the country, what the executives of those companies make, and the prices they sell their products for? And if they don't have enough profit to continue operations, the government will infuse them with cash to keep them open? Sounds more like socialism than anything "patriotic". And do you know WHY companies are "un-patriotic"? Because the government piles on taxes and regulations without stopping, so they go to countries that do not punish them simply for being open or making a profit.
And the only reason Bush "caused the economy to collapse" is because the government is too involved in the economy in the first place. Economies will always cycle through booms and busts on its own. It's not the government's job to promote the booms and inflate the money to cover up busts. And it's definitely not the role of the government to bailout companies that the marketplace has deemed to be inefficient or unnecessary.
Night Strike, you really, really, ought to read history about how the big companies got to be big.. all those government dictates that you are scorning now, are how most of our manufacturing got to be so big in the first place, and that was at a time when taxes were more than triple what they are now, and at a time when government regulations included prohibitions on imports without massive fees, not just, "clean up your mess if you want to do business."
Those regulations you're scorning now, include prohibitions against use of DDT, which damaged wildlife and was later shown to damage human life. Other agricultural products have proved to be harmful, as well; but if you eat imported foods, you may be eating those poisons - although goverment regulations are starting to catch onto that.
Other areas where the government stepped in include prohibitions against child labor; prohibitions against keeping a meatpacking assembly line going grinding the burger when a guy just lost his hand from the saw (read Upton Sinclair's the Jungle to get an idea what those terrible regulations stopped.)
Your attitude, though, really illuminates the problem with Neocon thinking: business, business, all about business, and screw the animals or humans who may be harmed by some of those business practices.
Bush caused the economy to collapse by removing the watchdogs, letting business do whatever the hell it wanted to do, full steam ahead, damn the torpedoes and OH NO ICEBERG *crash* *boom* suddenly our country is the Titanic, and in your mind who cares that those CEOs had almost all the lifeboats, the new skipper shouldn't reserve some of them for "we the people."
It IS the government's job to protect us from "all enemies, foreign and domestic..." and when unethical, unpatriotic businessmen are given free reign, they (many, anyway) do become domestic enemies. I'd much rather have some safeguards to keep them a bit more honest, a bit more patriotic, and a bit more like allies.
In your capitalism-rules-all world, it shouldn't matter if an "American" business made money supplying the Nazis in WWII, or the Viet Cong during 'Nam, or before that, supplying British troops with food that was grown to support Colonial troops.
For that matter, in your book, any American company who sells nukes to Al Qaeda for better profit than the US Gov't or its allies would pay, are business heroes, right? "Anything goes" if it means more money to the business, right? The government "piles on taxes and regulations without stopping, so they go to countries that do not punish them simply for being open or making a profit," so it's okay if they decide to go to Pakistan or wherever the hell, and take their US-developed products with them and sell them, and the Fed shouldn't have any say-so over it, because they shouldn't punish those companies for "being open or making a profit." Right?
If your answer is no to that, then you, too, support a form of "socialism" over "capitalism." If your answer is yes to that, then you, too, are unpatriotic.
I've mentioned I'd worked for Pratt & Whitney, on jet and rocket engines. Sometimes we couldn't get parts we needed at a reasonable price, because so much of US manufacturing moved overseas. Now, the Fed had this "regulation" embedded in its contracts, that parts for engines that went into vehicles like the F22 Raptor be totally made in the USA. As a businessperson, one might have a problem with that, given what I just said about having a hard time getting parts made at reasonable cost because the production lines are gone; but as an American, I kind of like knowing that the products made for defense of my country are made IN MY COUNTRY.
But because some shrew Night-Strike-thinking all-for-business-frig-the-patriotism folks let our manufacturing base depart for greener pastures within the past few decades, it drove up the cost, which ultimately cost "we the people" a lot more dollars.
Business operating at a profit is just fine by me, but NOT when letting them operate however they want undermines our nation's safety or its economy (and some would argue that undermining our economy does undermine our safety.)
So would it be "okay" for the government to subsidize a manufacture to give that manufacturer some incentive to produce the parts needed to hold jet engines together, within the United States to ensure that the Air Force continues to get the quality products it needs?
Is it "okay" for the government to subsidize wheat or corn growers to ensure they continue the crop in years when they can't expect that much profit?
Is it "okay" for the government to subsidize the oil industry in an effort to keep up production and keep costs a little more balanced?
Is it "okay" for a government to agree to use taxpayer dollars to fund new electrical plants to keep the electric grid stable so that there is energy available when businesses and people need it?
I say, yes. And under the same reasoning, it was "okay" to bail out some companies, and I prefer that when taxpayer money is used to give a bailout, the taxpayers get to keep some form of say-so in what that company does with the money (which Obama did, in the case of GM, with a form of stock ownership.)
I'm a Patriot, and that used to be what Republicans were, too. If that made them a little Socialist, so be it. Reagan was a grand Socialist, then, because he, too, could recognize when company taxes and taxes on the wealthy got to be a little too low for the health of our nation, so he tweaked them back up.
AND he kept up some regulations to keep honest businessmen honest, and would-be not-so-honest businessmen in line, including keeping our US manufacturing base within the United States instead of letting it go, losing us jobs, and driving up our costs on products that MUST rely on US manufacturing.
