[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
<<< Why? I’ve stated my position over and over about why I think the government is necessary. If there’s one thing I trust less than government, it’s Big Business. >>>[/quote]
You may be surprised to learn that if there’s one thing I trust less than big business it’s government.
Here’s how it is.
Without the pervasive morality I quoted from Franklin in the other thread you get:
1- Free markets populated with businesses that will gladly lie, cheat, steal, kill and sell their own mother for money.
or
2- Markets regulated by politicians that will gladly lie, cheat, steal, kill and sell their own mother for power.
or inevitably
What we have at the moment which is both.
The people who designed this government TOLD US it would crumble under our feet as soon as we abandoned what they recognized as a Judeo/Christian morality. Even when they didn’t explicitly call it that, though they often did, that’s what they were describing nonetheless. Even the ones who weren’t overtly religious. That is why I told you that the principle set forth there by Ben Franklin absolutely and unequivocally deals with every single discussion concerning any possible issue this nation is facing. The United States would remain free, prosperous and strong as long as the preponderance of it’s citizens voluntarily conducted themselves according to that morality.
To deduce from Franklin (and just about every other founding father) the citizens would begin to require masters in proportion to the degree with which they fell away from that social consensus. The double whammy in the case of the representative republic they left us is, like I said in the other thread, the politicians will of necessary consequence reflect the people who put them in power. That’s how it was designed. Hence we spiral downward as the public and private sectors compete for the “who can destroy the country first” prize.
Forced to choose today, and this is an admitted oversimplification for the sake of this post. I still say the private sector will destroy us more slowly. The profit motive is still more reliable than than the power motive, but not by a whole lot.