They showed this in SCHOOLS????

The 'free market' of pollution is something I'm fascinated so few environmentalists have caught onto.

 

The army has been voluntary at times, not at others. I am surprised you included fraud as an infringement of upon rights. In a truly free market shouldn't it be buyer beware?

Who wants to keep corps inline? They just need to meet standards and avoid unfair business practices. If they can't do that then they can be found to be in violation of federal regulation, which has pretty weak penalties. Most of the flim flam about regulations is a joke, your congressmen know better than to put businesses that employ their voters out of business. Or they lose the next election.

A lot of the federal funding to corps is for research. If the federal government had to organize, hire the techs and set up all the labs used by major corps to research all the new science out there the bill would be bigger than it is. And all those labs would be vulnerable to all the political dickishness we see today. Money down an even more useless toilet.

What was your point again?

 

Absolutely not. If you were lied to and cheated out of your money then you made a transaction based on a non-existent expected return that only the other party could have known didn't exist. Fraud should most definitely be illegal, otherwise you could literally do whatever you wanted with other people's money.

Uh, in that case you're kind of agreeing with me except for the "unfair practices" thing; government regulation is not the way to enforce that, the way to enforce that is to make it as easy to sue a corp as it is to sue anyone else. The government shouldn't decide what is and isn't "fair" business; if we're frauded we sue them, but remember that "unfair" does not mean it should not be allowed. If you want to make a business deal with a bazillion pages of fineprint detailing all the ways they're allowed not to honor the agreement, it's YOUR choice to accept it.

 

The system is broken now. I think that is evident to everyone now. The only ones it seems to be working well for is the banks.

I know what you mean about regulations not working, but de-regulators don't seem to know where to start or how to do it. So I have no support for them.

Personally I think businesses need to start rethinking their organizations and think more about the endgame. Immediate profit may make your stock go up but is no guarantee of sustainability. I think wall street has a lot to do with this, investors think too far ahead based on projections which are completely unrealistic.

Its a crazy world where banks are making money on failing businesses.

The blame game and its intricacies are no help to anyone.

 

And what do the birds and bees and rabbits and such do while they wait 20 years for their trees to grow back. Everytime you log old growth forests you destroy ecological niches. Nothing recovers, and virtually none of the original flora can reestablish itself because of the way regrowth forests are planted

 

The businesses who don't think about sustainability will fail. The ones that do, will, and they will thus serve us better.

I don't see a problem with it working that way.

De-regulation is indeed difficult because we have the government infused in so many things. It would require almost as many bills as you currently have, because you would need one declaration to repeal each regulation. Or, you could pass one (veeeery carefully worded) law that prevents government meddling in the private economy; now you do have to be careful here, because technically any action the government takes will have some kind of market impact, so a blanket statement like I made in the line above would actually outlaw the government itself; I'm not going to come up with the wording here because I don't feel like it as it would take quite a while, but it is certainly possible.

 

We typically don't obliterate the whole place or we have nothing left to log from. We DO have to cut at a sustainable rate or you'll destroy the whole forest and have no wood until the trees grow back, which is a catastrophe. There will always be more forest for them to move to; a logging company that clear cuts all the forest it can find with no limits and no pacing will soon find itself out of trees and thus out of business. However, it is true that we will slowly destroy most of the forests, because there are more and more people in need of wood all the time.

That's the evolutionary argument to be made, as I make with every resource "problem": we will consume too much, be unable to sustain our population, die off significantly, then rebound. This will continue to occur until we find our natural balance with the planet, as every other species (that exists long enough) eventually does. Have faith in natural selection, it works wonders. Ask the cockroaches.

 

My problem I guess is that to me it seems like businesses that are conservative and realistic about earnings are the first to fail. The ones who go for the quick buck seem to do well until they fail, often catastrophically as the early success leads to over expansion due to unrealistic projections. This leaves a lot of destruction in its wake.

De-regulation is pursued like a religion. All regulations are sins and equally guilty for all economic problems. So de-regulators talk a good game but when it comes to implementation they screw everything up, because they get rid of any regulation they have the opportunity to kill. Purging the system of good and reasonable regulation while leaving the most harmful. This actually works well for them because once the useful regulations are gone they can easily claim that regulation does not work, because after what they have done it doesn't anymore.

I am certainly not saying that we need more regulation. Or that big business is evil. Or even that banks are evil. All I am saying is that we need to look more at what is left that does work, and try to preserve it.

 

I agree, you must purge all of it. "Less" harmful regs should be of lower priority than those that are "more" harmful if that can be determined, though it's very subjective.

Conservative businesses often remain in business. Their good practices means that people trust their company, and they don't do anything stupid that would risk losing their money. Explains why companies from several hundred years ago are still in operation.

 

I think you completely missed my point, but hey dude if it makes you feel better go for it.

Truth is nothing we say here matters a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Rock on....

 

You take a very "whatever" stance to things don't you?

 

Well we will just win some elections and then interpret it different way later, and we can get over this charade of a document that is supposed to mean something.

 

it's for kids, like this

[video=youtube;tyeJ55o3El0]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyeJ55o3El0[/video]

it's supposed to get young minds thinking