In the last 30 or 40 years there has been a sea change in the nature of society that has put social values and the welfare of citizens second to the economy. Where corporations once served society, society now serves corporations. This change began with Thatcher and Reagan and was supported by the work of Milton Friedman and an enormous network of supposed think tanks funded by the businesses that benefited from the refocusing of priorities. It has over the decades spread widely and is now broadly represented in national and regional governments. It is best captured by Thatchers comment that there is no such thing as society; there are just individual men and women and families.
Because of that, government now caters to the needs of business rather than the needs of citizens and because business is by nature well organized, well funded and well connected, it has the ear of government where society, being less organized and less funded, doesn`t except through the protests that arise against particularly egregious actions. The system isn`t a conspiracy, it`s the natural offshoot of the evolution of the capitalist system. You may not be personally aware of the change but there is an enormous body of research and literature that documents it.
To call it nothing more than an opinion and a political statement and ignore it for that reason belies every principle of critical thinking.
To attempt to obfuscate the discussion with a dissertation on Reagan's and Thatcher's economic policy is not really commenting on my post. Or, in fact, relevant to the thread. I stated that your comment was not a fact but a political statement and you came back with some diatribe meant to show how incredibly well versed you are in economics and, conversely, how sadly deficient I am and then to completely discredit my post you attacked my claim that I like the concept of critical thinking.
I didn't have to go search very hard to find that HBC and the CN or CP didn't very often put social values or the welfare of citizens ahead of the "economy" 150 years ago so I am not really sure where this "sea change" you speak of came from but I am willing to concede your point. Hey, wait a minute, didn't big corporations hunt whales to near extinction? How was this societally beneficial? Was that a "sea change"?
Maybe I gave in too easily?
I would suggest that governments have always catered "to the needs of business" or nothing would
ever have been done. Of course there would be a lot more beavers. And empty land. "Hey lets build a railway to the Pacific Ocean so that our citizens can vacation in Vancouver" isn't a rallying cry that resonates through history. They built the railway to make money.
And I stand by my analysis of your statement that "Though you may disagree with the people you say are against everything, without them, the corporate world would run roughshod over governments beyond what they currently do and we as citizens would end up bearing all the risk and and all the consequences while subsidizing corporate profit taking." is political.
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Topic: Directly Affected (Read 17806 times)