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I need to 2nd tehranchiks's thoughts. Despite being accused of not being a capitalist...I firmly believe in private ownership and capital as incentive. This to my mind does not allow for monopoly, bad citizenship on the part of corporations (yes I know some do charitable things as well). A corporation's only incentive is profit. A human being generally wants profits too but has consideration for other things that ultimately harm his or her self, family, or community. Corporations should not have the same rights (or in modern times more rights) as human beings. This came about when an underhanded clerk working for railroad interests (remember the robber barons...now they hide behind corporate logos) stuck it in a supreme court document. Unmitigated greed need not be tauted as freemarket capitalism, which incidentally can thrive without profiting on human necessity. Providing for the general welfare of citizens could include energy (in the N.E. we have old people freeze to death every winter when their utilities are cut off because they can't pay...in today's world this does not need to happen simply for a profit), Medicine...why on earth should insurance conglomerates dictate to Dr.s what treatments they are permitted to use or not? Why do we need them involved at all? Any look at big Pharma profits shows a ratio that makes no sense to anyone but the evil characters in Dicken's stories. Their excuse is research is expensive, but they don't sink much of a percentage of these profits into research, they did spend quite a bit on lobbying for a tax rate of 5-6% though...successfully. I'm of the mind, and I'm not poor (at least haven't been, this year may prove differently) that no one needs to make more than 250,000 a year in personal income, if they can, great! But you can afford to pick up more of the tab too.
Anyway there are some things that probably should be run as public trusts not for profit, we probably would agree...at least the less obtuse among us, that police depts and fire departments...schools, etc. run pretty well this way (when fire depts were private, and they were in NYC at one time, they fought over who would be looting the burning house...the type of capitalism we don't want...Vulture Capitalism.)
Most developed countries have proven that medicine can be done this way too, we are so brainwashed by the slogans of the vultures that we resist the idea that not everything needs make a profit for speculators. That some services deemed as necessities should simply be publicly funded without need for profit being added to the cost. We should return to licensing Corporations state by state with their charters revocable should they not be good neighbors.

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