I wrote:
> [California's] Their laissez faire approach ended spectacularly with > the Enron "burn baby burn" episodes, with billions of dollars vanishing > into thin air. > By the way, I would not say that was the fault of capitalism. What Enron and the legislators in California was not capitalism! It was a kleptocracy, like Saddam Hussien's government. The state of California issued Enron a license to steal. You cannot have free market competition when one company is given carte blanche access to write the legislation, the tax laws, and the regulations in a way that benefits them and excludes the competition. Or, when there are no rules, and you can burn down the competition's warehouses and undersell them at a loss, the way the great Robber Barons of the 19th century did. Capitalism only works when there is a strong government to enforce things like anti-trust laws, and fair advertising laws. Capitalism is a great way to develop existing technology but as I said, it has never worked to develop radically new big ticket disruptive technology. I do not know of any examples, and I have read a lot of books about the history of technology. Capitalism does a wonderful job inventing and perfecting incremental improvements to existing technology, such as the hard disk (invented by IBM pretty much without Uncle Sam's help as I recall). Most technology is an incremental improvement on what exists already. That is not an insult. Engineers generally prefer the tried and true technology, rather than the radical new one. They have good reasons. - Jed
