I hate when ppl bitterly complain over "greedy corporat

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Neither does Rand which you would find out if you bothered to read and understand what she wrote.

In fact the main villains in -Atlas Shrugged- were corporations and businessmen who were profiting from government favors and subsidies. Here heroes were the businessmen who prospered purely on the quality and usefulness of their output.

You might want to read what Rand had to say rather than blather your anti-business bigotry.

ruveyn

No. The problem is people like you blather your dogma that business and the "free market" are infallible. That the "free-market" system, left to it's own devices without any checks or balances from a government of the people, would not lead to an intolerably oppressive state of affairs where the wealthy few, through their accumulation of ownership power, ultimately have unlimited power. Corporations don't need to have guns to yield power when the government agrees to use guns to protect their unfair hoarding and gobbling up of all available resources. Some kind of anti-trust laws are needed at the very least to prevent the end result of monopolistic corporate tyranny. Just face it, your absolutists views on the supremacy of private property are dogmatic.

Nothing humans do or make is infallible. However something closely approximating a free market is far better than the incompetence of corruption of government. The U.S. government does not have the competence to run a proper lemonade stand.

ruveyn

Creating a more efficient and less corrupt government requires hard work by an informed, educated, and politically participatory public. Government will always be imperfect but using this as an excuse to do away with all regulation and leave everything to the "invisible hand of the free market" is a dangerous cop out. If your refrigerator isn't working properly do you decide to throw it into the dump and just do without anything to keep your food from perishing? Or do you invest into properly fixing/replacing it?

There is no doubt that many government operations are inefficient and bad for the nation. There is no doubt that business in general is mostly concerned with making profits with no eye to the frequently disastrous results of their operations. There is also no doubt that, in general, powerful business has infiltrated government to a huge extent to extract public funds for their own profit and to no benefit to the nation. The recent mortgage scams by the banking industry has caused huge repercussions on the entire world economy and donated huge profits to the banking industry. That is unquestionable.

Ruveyn, of course, should argue from his point of view, that government money should not have been granted to the banking sector to save it from its own foolish and greedy operations and the whole banking sector then would have come crashing down. It would have been an interesting catastrophe but I wonder if anyone would have benefited if the government would, by necessity, have taken over the banking operations to permit financial operations to continue.

There is, no doubt, bad government and bad business and both have to be overseen and regulated. Neither can be dispensed with.

When business and government get together the results are almost always bad.

Subsidies corrupt the producers and bribes corrupt the governors.

ruveyn

There has never in human history been a separation of business and government. The two have worked together hand in glove ever since people have joined to work together. That is an absolute fact.

Do you believe that the current state of capitalism is a Randian Objectivist "utopian" free market?

It most certainly is not. Much like how communist states are not examples of a Marxist "utopian" society.

"Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Indeed.
People, plain and simple, make these "utopias" impossible.

I get annoyed with people who bash Rand for things like... oh, I dunno, the current state of the economy. Rand surely would not have approved of the events leading up to the mortgage collapse. And I am not talking about de-regulation. I am talking about the behaviour of those who took advantage of the system for their own short-term gains - knowing full well that it was unsustainable. De-regulation is good if everyone is willing to think about the sustainability of the business they are building - but given that most people care only about lining their pockets in the here and now, it's not workable.

Ruveyn is correct - one needs to take a close look at the villains in Atlas Shrugged.

Rand's novel -Atlas Shrugged- was a prophecy and a warning which foresaw the kind of economic ruin we are going through.

ruveyn

The concept that there is an altruistic central motive to business operations is about is idiotic as most theological philosophy. Even the most casual glance at business operations reveals they will act in any way possible to make a profit whatever the consequences to the social life of the nation, the environment, even to the operation of decent business practices. There is an old saying that the only crime is getting caught and business practice in general always takes that to heart. Businesses in general are designed to make a profit and that is their only objective. If they can do so by making a superior product they will do so. If it can be done by making an inferior product they will do so. They must do so for that is the inherent design of a business and they will behave or misbehave whenever it increases their profit. They should not be condemned for that but they must be watched and regulated and motivated by exterior means to make them behave.

I am not sure if that was aimed at me or not. But I agree that the concept that there is an altruistic central motive behind all business is inaccurate; as is the concept that the central motive behind all business is immediate financial gains irrespective of the impact it will have on the business in the future.

It's a spectrum - not all can be lumped at one end or the other.

Yes? I apologize - I'm not sure where you were going with that.

EDIT - Sorry, I apparently still have baby brain. I understand what you were saying now. Just a bit of cognitive delay on my part.

Last edited by cave_canem on 23 Apr 2011, 7:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Not aimed at but an extension and an elaboration of your comment. Not all businessmen are crooks but looking at the operations of the health insurance companies in which they deny help to dying people and the credit card operations with hidden charges that are monstrously usurious and the pharmaceutical companies that spend huge sums to create drugs no more useful than the ones now used but since they are patentable they are far more profitable one can only conclude that business operations are not particularly oriented for social good.

One thing about business should be pointed out. There are at least two general sides to business. One side is the designers, the engineers, the artists and the whole technical end of creating and manufacturing a product whether it be a household item, a jet plane, a song or novel, a genetic engineer, a chemist etc. These people are excited and enthused at what can be done and work hard to make interesting and useful things. The other side is the marketing, production, and accounting end that has little to do with creativity but merely devoted to maximizing the profits. That second side is incessantly involved with fighting the creative people and frequently cheats them and also the public in the production of useful and fascinating goods and these latter people are frequently where the problems arise. They are not useless since a business cannot exist without profits but they are most likely to edge into anti-social activities.