20. Author: teelio Date: 01/10/2010 07:55 PM Reply
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Sorry, I’m not clear as to your meaning here; are you saying that all corporate taxes and regulations are bad? And by extension, NAFTA, for example, has been a net win for most Americans and our national best interests? These are the kinds of things I was hoping to see discussed reasonably. Have free trade policies, financial market deregulation, and an economy based on manipulating monetary policy in lieu of having a manufacturing infrastructure --views now espoused in the name of fiscal conservatism-- been good for us? Do these policies define your concept of fiscal conservatism, or do you, like me (as outlined in my OP), find these policies an unwelcome diversion from your own concept of fiscal conservatism?
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Actually, yes, NAFTA has been a “net win” for most Americans. That’s because the one thing that NAFTA guaranteed was a steady stream of oil flowing into this country from Mexico and Canada. Something we all discovered when Idi Amin Jr. went around bragging that he was going to kill NAFTA. Our Canadian friends reminded us how doing that would be rather stupid.
But, moreover, it is pretty clear that NAFTA has NOT been a net-win for Mexico, seeing that we have more illegal aliens in this country (and fleeing to this country) than we did when NAFTA was signed. And, I might add, that it was signed into law by a Democrat liberal (Bill Clinton), and defended on national television by another radical, lefty nut job, namely: Al Gore.
Not to mention that it was ratified into law by a Democrat-controlled legislature, who are historically AGAINST “Free Trade.”
Let’s not forget that Idi Amin Jr. and his cohorts have boasted that they’re going to kill NAFTA as soon as they took office. A year has passed – nada.
I might add, the original intent of NAFTA was not “free trade,” but as a check against the Japanese, and their many agreements with their foreign trading partners. Liberals, in their haste to slam “free trade,” make the misconception that NAFTA was a free trade bill, and it has been these same people who have redefined this whole institution as a mechanism for free trade. In fact, it is not. It was a way to build trading-partners in our hemisphere and to form an economic bloc, much in the same way the Japanese did with the Pacific Rim. This is how they penetrated our market with cheap goods, and how they ascended into an economic superpower. So, we copied their tactics.
As for it being a benefit, I can say that my company has made quite a bit of money providing equipment and services for companies who have transplanted some of their divisions down into Mexico. What’s funny is that a lot of them happen to be European.
None of this really has anything to do with the notion of Free Trade. However, when the converse has been applied – Smoot-Hawley, for example – the results have been disastrous for the US.
My suggestion is that you stop using a bunch of pat-and-pointless propaganda that only someone like Homebrew would believe, and actually do a little research before you go off half-cocked with your mindless drivel. It’s clear you haven’t a clue as to what you’re talking about.
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You are trying to reframe the question by falsifying my opinion. I never said corporations are evil or greedy. I work for corporations, have done quite well by and for them, and have my retirement funds invested in them. Businesses are the engine of the economy. And I also believe that to maintain and increase quality of life, our institutions, including (but not limited to) both government AND corporations, need periodic tweaking by common sense rules. I don’t know how anyone could argue that point, and if so, I’d love to hear it, but it is not to the point of my OP.
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Because the typical rallying cry for most liberals, socialists, and populist know-nothings is to express outrage over deregulation and tax cuts for corporations. So, if you don’t want to be defined as being associated with those groups of idiots, you’d best not try to use their same tactics.
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Also, it’s not clear what your point is in the sentence above. Are you claiming, as proof of some sort of inherent moral superiority of corporations over government, that government will send us "back to subsistence living?" Substantiate and clarify please.
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Big government has a long and distinguished history of subjugating masses of people into subsistence-living, namely: the Soviet Union, Communist China, Communist Cambodia, and so on, and so on.
Corporations do not have that kind of history.
However, I’m not the one hopping up and down over tax breaks for corporations – you are. Or do you have an alternate reason for saying:
“But these days, some people loosely use the term "fiscal conservative" to describe policies with which I disagree, e.g., tax breaks for corporations to ship jobs overseas…”
Mind you, some corporations HAVE to ship jobs overseas if they want to stay competitive in a specific market (China being one example). So, what you’re decrying is the fact that an American corporation like Ford is being competitive in a market that will not allow vehicles to be manufactured outside of that native country’s borders. And your call is to penalize them, because they “shipped jobs” overseas.
Real bright. Maybe we should stop this whole “import / export” thing altogether, just so you’ll be satisfied. Ok?
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This statement accepts as a given that which has not been proven. Government regulations alone have destroyed the US auto industry? Regulations requiring cars be collision-worthy, reasonable with fuel economy, and restricting the amount of petroleum byproducts we breathe? Bad management decisions had nothing to do with it? Please substantiate. Or better yet, answer the question.
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You have NO frickin’ clue as to what you are talking about, and it really shows.
I deal with the stuff that is directly related to fuel efficiency (CAFE) every frickin’ day. You want to know the basics, basic difference between the car that sells today, and the car that sold in the 1970s? Computers. Your average car today has a minimum of 4 computers in it, many of which control the power train. Your engine, has a computer, your transmission has a computer, as does the electronics module and the instrument cluster (your dash). All of these exist for one of two different reasons: emissions and fuel efficiency control. Both emissions and fuel efficiency are regulated by the federal government, and specific mandates are placed on the automotive companies. Every time the federal government jacks these up, it costs the auto companies a lot of money to meet these criteria.
A perfect example is the Ford Festiva (or is it the Fiesta, I don’t remember the exact name). When the auto companies were getting beat up by the Democrats and liberals over in Washington DC, Ford already had high efficiency vehicles in its fleet that could be transferred to the US market, and at the top of that list was the Festiva. Unfortunately, the Festiva was made for the European market, which has lax emissions standards, and they primarily use diesel fuel. Diesel fuel in this country is taxed (that’s what a government does, you know) at a much higher rate (as much as a dollar a gallon), no doubt to cover the “environmental fallout” usually associated with burning diesel fuel. The Festiva used a turbo-charged diesel to get something like 50 miles per gallon.
So, when the Democrats kicked up the CAFE standards this year, in order to maintain its fleet requirement, Ford brought over the Festiva so that it didn’t have to invest the millions and millions of dollars into developing a different uber-fuel efficient car that virtually no one in this country will but. But, in order to make the vehicle cost-effective, and to meet federal emissions standards, Ford has to sink a buttload of money into changing over the engine so that people can actually buy that car in this country.
Every computer requires software, an extensive set of configurations, and an unbelievable amount of quality control checks. I have the group that does just patch installation and delivery (for simply updating the software on these computers) in a row over from me at Ford. The group consists of a dozen-or-so individuals, and their cost well into the millions. And that’s just the group that DELIVERS the software – they don’t write it, nor do they compile the configurations. This didn’t even exist in the 1970s. Consequently, cars were much more affordable. Leasing, back then, was virtually non-existent because most people could afford to buy a car. The fact that leasing is so popular these days is a big, big indicator that the cost of a car is out of the grasp of many individuals.
Given what I’ve seen of your arguments thus far, I’m sure you haven’t a frickin’ clue (as do most people in the US) what is involved in getting a car certified for the US market.
As far as “collision-worthy,” your average car today isn’t half as “collision-worthy” as a car from the 1970s. That’s because in order to get better fuel mileage, they have to lighten the vehicle. When they lighten the vehicle, they make frame components lighter, body panels thinner, and remove a lot of metal that can add structural stability to the frame.
To replace the metal lost in cars, they’ve installed airbags, which can kill the elderly and small-children when they go off. So, you were arguing collision-worthy for…?
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It looks to me that you look to corporations as if THEY have the best interests of the citizenry in mind. You distrust government, but trust corporations? I think most of us have a healthy suspicion of both. And are you advocating that corporations should be excluded from following any rules at all? If so, please clarify; that’s why I opened this thread.
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Hello? A corporation’s only real interest is profit and growth. They do this by providing a product to sell. Period. If the product sucks, people won’t buy it. They have a vested interest in not screwing their customers with this model.
However, if they see they have a wealthy benefactor like the US government who will provide them with customer revenue without having to sell to Joe Six-pack (namely taxpayer bailouts), then all the better. In the end, to a corporation, money is money. A corporation doesn’t have human emotions or motivations.
Government, however, does. The pure motivation of any government it to subjugate its citizenry, the degree of which is determined by the motivations and intent of those who run the enterprise.
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Everything in life has rules. Football, traffic, accounting--everything. Without a framework within which to function, society collapses into anarchy-- a free society, but at the cost of stability, productivity, and safety. Without speed limits, for example, anyone can drive 180 mph through a school zone all day every day, and will eventually kill someone. Are our rights being limited by being required to slow down? Absolutely. And we do so to prevent harming ourselves and others, for both moral and fiscal reasons. It’s only common sense, and does not offend most Americans’ love of a free society.
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Whatever. This is irrelevant to the subject at hand. Secondly – and this is a huge tell as to your real motivations – rules exist not only for the citizens, but also for government. This is why we have a Constitution and a Bill of Rights.
However, you continently overlooked that little tidbit in the heady rush you felt when you thought you had a point (which you didn’t).
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It isn’t supposed to (produce anything). That’s like criticizing a credit union for not being profitable--CUs are meant to provide, via pooling of resources and removal of the profit motive, improved and lower cost services for its members. Government is intended to do the same. We pay taxes so that we can have public roads, for example. Private industry could do that for us, but would it be cheaper, more efficient, better? Maybe, but it might mean paying $5 tolls every couple of miles for every road in the country, including the street on which you live. Do we want that? It’s a worthy topic of discussion. But to claim that government is bad because it doesn’t fulfill a role, for which it is not intended, is sophistry, and therefore subverts the credibility of your claim.
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Could corporations do things cheaper than government? Ummm..yeah?
That’s why most governments are privatizing things these days, because of the unrealistic costs to run them from within the government structure. This includes prisons, waste disposal, water treatment, energy production, and so on, and so on. In fact, over in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were using contractors for various security needs (mainly for cost reasons, from what I’ve been told).
Do you think you bill stuff like Medicare and Medicaid directly to the government? No. In many, many states things like government-paid insurance is all handled by private clearinghouses. They do this because private industry does it faster, and better.
Government does not lay cable for cable television. In fact, nowadays, cable TV companies are making it cheaper (and more reliable) to have your telephone service though your cable system than through standard phone lines. Government does not put up nor maintain the VAST wireless network in this country, nor the Internet. They don’t actually lay roads either. They don’t maintain most forms of transportation. In fact, the only real “product / service” they provide directly is the Post Office, and a lot of that is contracted out as well.
So, thinking you had some sort of point with this, you basically shot yourself in the foot.
"And, as we’ve seen - aside from maintaining a top-rate military - the federal government can’t police the borders, remove illegal aliens, stop terrorists from blowing up planes, or even move quickly in the event of a natural disaster. Hell, they even suck at delivering the mail."
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Actually, the government does a hell of a lot of things much better than the private sector, including delivering the mail. None of the USPS’s competitors even come close to handling the volume of the USPS, even at many times the cost--and that includes the USPS’s budget overages. Is the USPS perfect? Is UPS? Personally, I like having meat inspectors, national parks, highways, and food labels. Sure, bureaucracy is tedious, inefficient, imperfect, at times corrupt, and in need of modification. Hence, my starting this thread.
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Ummm…I think it entities like FedEx and UPS are prohibited by law from delivering mail. So, not a valid argument.
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The meme that all government is incompetent cannot be considered proof of itself; it is a circular argument. If your boss assigned you to write a plug-in for a certain software "X," but prohibited your access to and any & all knowledge of software X, you would not be able to do your job. But that doesn’t define you as incompetent.
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Actually, most of the software I write I turn over to the people using it. And, as with many things, you can buy the source code for software “X” for a price. Companies do this all of the time, especially if the component in question may have a long-term legacy attached to it.
What any of this you think bolsters your argument, I’m not quite sure. But I am pretty sure that if I designed a widget that no one could access or use – including the person using it – I’d be fired, and my company would go out of business.
So, in short: you’re wrong.
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Just as unrestrained government is problematic, so are unrestrained corporations. It is simply not reasonable to expect self-policing when profit is at stake. That should be obvious to any adult. But again, you’re responding to an imaginary, anti-corporate claim, which I did not make, and do not support.
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Wrong, wrong, wrong.
When corporations go out of control and produce stuff that people don’t want to buy, they’ll go under. This is especially true when you have an economy based on free trade. A prime example of this goes right back to the US automakers. They produced crap, and the Japanese stepped in, made better cars, and literally forced these auto companies to produce better products. The government had NO role in any of this. It wasn’t CAFE, or emissions standards, or safety regulations that got US automakers making better, more reliable cars, it was naked, unregulated competition. That’s because, in a capitalist society where government is scaled way back, competition keeps things in line.
Even up until recently, it wasn’t government that changed the focus of the types of cars that the auto companies made – it was the marketplace. Even now, after $4.00 / gallon gas prices, people are STILL buying big SUVs and fuel-inefficient pickup trucks. It took ten years for the Toyota Prius to sell a million cars. The Ford F-150 or the Chevy Silverado sells around 500,000 models each, every year. That’s because the car-buying public wants these vehicles with greater frequency than they do a Prius.
And don’t even try the “monopoly” line with me. Someone already did, and I showed them where they were wrong on that one as well.
However, there is no “natural” check on government, whatsoever. This is the reason why we had to have a Constitution drawn up, a Bill of Rights detailed, and a pledge given to every elected official that takes office (not that this matters anymore because all of these things are roundly ignored). The only check on government per se is violent revolution, and this is dicey at best. Because, as we’ve seen in Russia, Cuba, China, and numerous other places these revolutions often time put in government more tyrannical than those that were ousted.
So, you’re wrong…again.
