As the readers can see, Steve and I have had a rather interesting dialogue on the subject. Steve and I began our conversations back when Steve joined the staff of MyMac this past summer. Steve writes with a definitive air of conviction based upon a God given gift of deep, intellectual thought. Many of his points and themes are based upon abstract ideas that have not faced real world testing. I believe that it was my duty as occasional thinker to challenge Steve. So that’s where it began.
Steve want s to radically alter to current system of our economy. His views include a contract between owners and employees on the sharing of wealth; borrowing of money without interest because interest is the root of all of the world’s ills, to name a few. Much of his solutions requires massive government intervention, at least in the short term. No interest loans would never work as who would pay the salary to the workers who process the loans? An up front fee is just a euphamism for front-loaded interest. So, I assume it would be the government’s duty. As history has proven, once the government gets involved it’s like Pandora’s Box, once unleashed there is no way to put it back.
Steve believes the Marketplace needs a radical change. I say instead of the Marketplace, try government over-regulation. The first step in starting a business shouldn’t be spending thousands of dollars on a lawyer for regulatory advice. A friend of mine would be great independent businessman in his area as he see the entire field so clearly. However, he refuses. Why, because the overlapping and cross regulations counteract one another. He told me one night over beers that he would love to run his company under the model of Anderson Windows which has a great profit-sharing program. Unfortunately, a fourth of his operating budget would go just into finding a path through the bureacratic minefield. Is it any wonder that even high-tech jobs are now going overseas.
To put it in a nutshell, Steve thinks a revolution is needed, I say that a tuneup and regular maintenance will do the trick. I am teacher, I listen to students ideas and dreams and direct them into a realistic game plan to meet those goals. Martin Luther King had a dream, but he knew a revolution would backfire. Instead, he took it step by step and society did change. It’s still not where he wanted it to be, but its much nicer than where it was when he started.
“It is astonishing to see how many philosophical disputes collapse into insignificance the moment you subject them to this simple test of tracing a concrete consequence.”-William James, Pragmatism, Lecture II
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