Roody

What do you think our air and water would be like if there were no EPA? One problem with capitalism is that corporations maximize profits with no regard for the commons. The only effective way to stop this is with good public oversight.

Of course, pollution regulation is only one of many reasons that manufacturing took some production overseas. Off the top of my head, other reasons for off-shoring were labor costs, taxes, high property values, cheap overseas shipping, trade agreements, and a desire to be closer to expanding overseas markets. Many analysts say more American jobs were lost to greater efficiencies (computers and robots) rather than foreign competition and outsourcing.

Smallwheels

Corporations had a choice to be good stewards of the environment or not. They chose not. The regulations were probably too lax compared to what is actually needed to keep our environment from being destroyed fully.

I have ridden my bicycle behind an older car that didn't have any emission controls. Just one car passing me slowly was enough to make me not want to breathe the air. I can't imagine how bad it would be with millions of vehicles like that still on the roads. Since this happened last year I'm certain that car was using unleaded fuel. So it could have been even worse if leaded fuel were still being sold.

Corporations are like psychotic people. They have no empathy for others and only care about the consequences of their actions when such will affect them negatively. Otherwise they will do only what will benefit them.

I believe businesses should do all they can to minimize damage to the environment. This could actually be done if the US Government would impose tariffs on imported goods to give the American factories enough profit to implement environmental safeguards. This way foreign goods couldn't undercut the prices of environmentally friendly factories.

wahoonc

EPA didn't shut the plants down, the greed of the owners did. Here in NC we have a power providing monopoly that has coal ash ponds that don't meet the EPA requirements, they just dumped a several thousand tons of toxic waste into a river that provides water for drinking as well as agricultural use. The dump was caused by a non-compliant storage pond, turns out they have quite a few more. Their reaction? We want to raise rates and make the consumers pay for it, funny thing is they made over $2.7 billion in profits last year... say what?

Aaron

Dave Cutter

And the WHOLE story is: The EPA refused permission to upgrade and maintain the ponds.... in effect actually causing the spill. Working and providing a service to the public... isn't called "greed"... it's called work, service, commence, business.

Dave Cutter

I am sorry... you seem to have come in late to the conversation. I have no idea what your posting about.

tandempower

And how often do 'bad loans' trade before they go bad, and at what percentage of the value? My point is that by trading the paper away, a seller can get the money for their product without waiting for the buyer to actually pay off the loan. Money is made and reinvested economically before it is actually made. We try to force certainty on the future by borrowing against future earnings and then pumping that money into the economy to generate those earnings. Don't you see the dishonesty and usury in that?

Lol. Disallowing baited-indenturement by requiring people to work first and spend only the wages that they actually have to spend is "crippling regulation?" It seems the part of the republican party that wants to liberate exploitation by greed has edged out the part that wants people to live within their means.

This is only a superficially simple solution. What had really been going on through industrialization was massive up-scaling of industry and refinement of industrial processes to higher levels of efficiency. Growing efficiency necessarily has a deflationary effect within competitive free markets. However, because industrialists were smart at averting price-competition, they prevented natural deflation from occurring by maintaining price floors, which effectively fixed costs for everyone else. The deflationary pressure continued, however, (as it continues to do today) and so there was a great depression and eventually a war to institute socialist banking practices designed to maintain net positive inflation with the hope that a rising tide of inflation would raise all boats better than a free market of deflation. Still today the economy suffers due to this tension between the natural ability of economic actors to increase their efficiency, save money, reinvest, and accumulate wealth and the opposing ability of central banks and other institutions to reinvest and redistribute money in ways that flood markets with irrational and semi-rational spending that water-down the economy and prevent deflation from occurring, which would effectively make everyone's savings grow that much more in value while plunging those in debt ever deeper.

We are not "shown exactly how a good life should be." We are shown materialistic fantasies of whitewashed greed and gluttonous consumerism that are practically the opposite of what the founding fathers and early Americans understood as prosperity. The idea that people are entitled to a certain level of consumption because they are "in the greatest nation on Earth" is an ideology brought by later European immigrants to America, not pilgrims and early settlers who came for religious freedom and independence from European colonial economies. Yes, many people came to the new world for the sake of trading with European colonial powers, and later immigrants came with the idea that they could capitalize on corporate growth in the colonies by going there directly. But the real American dream of freedom from colonial rule and colonial economic subjugation was what drove the struggle for independence and republic. This has been perverted by corporate consumerists who came up with the brilliant ideological twist of re-defining "the American dream" in terms of access to material consumption rather than freedom and independence.

The US has always been about allowing people to join the republic and thereby unlearn the brainwashing of colonialist capitalism but the ideological power of consumerism is incredibly strong and obstinate against anything that would seem to obstruct the unimpeded pursuit of greed through exploitation. Still free markets by their nature pit the greedy against themselves and so eventually they begin to develop higher ethics that eschew exploitation because they don't like it when someone else is doing it to them. It takes people a while, though, because their minds have been trained to think in terms of asymmetries where they hate 1) people who criticize exploitation in favor of freedom as obstructing the path to wealth, and 2) those who exploit them as a path to wealth. Once people get it that they don't want to be exploited therefore they should not exploit others, the ethic of responsible self-governance dawns and there is hope for a while until greed devises a new ad campaign to re-colonize the popular mind in favor of more whitewashed exploitation.

Dave Cutter

Government over-regulation and oversight of problematic capitalism.... is also called Socialism. Yes I am fully aware that some see the EPA as a means to back-door a progressive agenda into law. And in the process... steal the democratic system from the public. Yes the EPA serves a multi-million dollar service.... butDO NOT provide for the public with 100 BILLION dollar budget they spend.That is the cost of an on-going war against the American public... NOT oversight.

If like [maybe] the OP suggests somehow we depose citizens of basic human rights... that would be a wonderfully great step towards ridding the free world of... freedom. And much closer the ideal central figure one man president/king of the world. Sorry... not an ideal I share with you.

Yes all true... in part. High American taxes has driven away jobs. Why work or invest with no opportunity to profit? No one is so stupid to throw money and effort away. And of course high taxes DO create high labor costs, high (inflated) property values, and increases shipping costs.

But greater efficiencies create greater prosperity and more jobs. It always has... always will. I'd ask to see qualification's from any "analysts" that would say otherwise. That flies in the face of good reason.

Machka 

What does any of this have to do with living car free or car light?

Dave Cutter

So... you think this thread should be moved to the Politics Only area....huh???? Some people just can't allow for open polite conversation and debate... or other democratic principles.

no1mad 

Thread has gone way too far into P & R territory.

/thread.