[Platt] Seems to me there's a world of difference between wanting something done and wielding a gun to coerce somebody to do it. It's the difference between a trader and a soldier or policeman. If you mean that many politicians and bureaucrats accept bribes, I agree.
[Krimel] First the law makes no real distinction between a hired killer and the person who does the hiring. When "We the People" allow economic interests to influence politics were promote this. We surrender our system of checks and balances to power outside of the public interest. Second, bribery of public officials is rare and it should be regarded as one of the most serious crimes in our code of laws. Public servants should and for the most part are held to high ethical standards. [Platt] Ike saw first hand how easy it is to bribe politicians and bureaucrats whose goal is unearned power. [Krimel] This is not at all what Ike was getting at. He was saying that the close connection of interest between military and industry was the danger. It was the positive feedback loop of military and industrial interests that disturbed Ike. [Platt] Nobody who supports capitalism suggests that it is based on people with motivations like those of Mother Teresa. If somebody has a idea on how to eliminate selfishness from humanity, I'm all ears. Until then, why not take advantage of human nature by letting selfishness motivate the production and consumption of goods and services within a DQ free market. It may not be perfect, but compared to the alternatives . . .? [Krimel] Certainly the chief advantage of free markets is the way they exploit our natural tendency toward self interest. The mistake is the turn greed into a virtue. One of the chief tasks of any society is the allocation of rewards and punishments, in other words, the determination of Value and what is valuable. In our society ALL Value gets reduced to money. As in the famous case of Ford calculating the cost to benefit ratio of reengineering the Pinto versus defending against lawsuits leveled those injured in them. We should be able to make moral and intellectual decisions about what is of Value in society outside of purely economic considerations. Health and education decisions seem to me to be areas that should not be governed by dollars and cents but rather by morals and sense. The fact that our current system is pretty good should not prevent us from considering ways to improve it. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
