On 15 December 2014 at 23:52, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 5:40 AM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On 15 December 2014 at 13:57, spudboy100 via Everything List < >> [email protected]> wrote: >>> >>> >>> Sent from AOL Mobile Mail >>> But the market is sorting it out. >> >> >> Excuse me while I ROFL >> > > Similar hilarity may ensue from the idea that governments can tackle > complex problems in the absence of war. It's even worse than this: there is > no empirical reason to assume that governments can even focus on solving > the right problems. Consider the war on drugs, the TSA, the food pyramid, > the total surveillance apparatus and the incredible civilisational step > back of reintroducing torture in the western world as a condoned way for > states to operate. >
Consider putting people in space or landing on the Moon or arranging to build motorways, hospitals, and similar infrastructure. Or stopping the advertising of cigarettes. Or regulating whether food is correctly labelled. It's not rocket science - or rather it is. Governments can do things on a scale that corporations can't - or more to the point, it would seem, won't. And since they have been doing so for a century, why the hilarity? There is mountains of hard evidence that governments CAN do useful stuff on a national scale - consider the NHS, consider social security. The fact that they also do bad stuff doesn't somehow magic away all the other stuff they've done. None of which was done by markets or corporations or philanthropists. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
