Because you can find some valid function of government doesn’t mean that everything government does is valid. And the problem today is not that we have too little government, but much too much government.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Awesomeness
The below video is the first of five Youtube videos of Milton Friedman being interviewed on the Phil Donahue show in 1979. All five of these videos are totally awesome. Friedman concludes the fifth video with this very wise statement, which is just as true today as it was then:
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3 comments:
Look, history repeats and none of this is rocket science. Many lay people saw the current situation coming. What we didn’t see coming was bailing out and too big to fail, but even that was predictable when considering campaign contributions coming from corporate America.
It’s all about power. People with power usually abuse it to run personal agendas. If we had real public servants in office, they’d never gather enough campaign money to win a second time.
I really disliked Phil Donohue until he went away. We need another like him, now.
In college I totally subscribed to Friedman’s ideology. But after years of witnessing repetitive unscrupulous and dangerous behavior on the part of greedy businesses and finding an appreciation for Nader’s work, I think we need enforceable regulations and that translates into less regulation in some areas and more in others. Friedman’s argument that we should allow cars to be unsafe is really over the top. Madoff, Enron, these are the types of people we’d entrust our safety to?
But on the other hand, I want government gutted. We need to start over. Get rid of all regulation and get rid of incumbents. All the unemployed should be hired for the newly vacated positions in the very agencies with which they had to ineffectively interact. And for goodness sake, for our future next year and next decade, let the economic correction happen. Just freakin let it happen. Promote the internet and a handful of websites with objective data about candidates, and remove the campaign money component and the skewed media component from elections. And then give everyone the day off each year for elections, not just the education industry.
I watched 60 minutes where they showed that we're vulnerable to cyber attacks on our economy, on our energy sources and entire cities have been shut down in other countries.
We're bailing out Goldman, GM and we can't even be sure we're safe from a technological attack that would shut down our cities?
The problem is that these politicians DONT FOLLOW THE LAWS WE ALREADY HAVE! Then they turn around and pass more laws to show us how they are supposedly "helping" us citiznes. Look at the financial sector corruption. There are so many existing laws that were not being enforced, often times because these same politicians step in and intervene on behalf of some company (usually a big contributor to their campaigns) to get the regulators/inspectors/overseers to back down.
TERM LIMITS and BANNING CORPORATE CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS would be a huge help to stopping these politicians from becoming entrenched in the pockets of certain special interest groups.
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