Michael Harmon
Aug 31, 2018 · 3 min read

I didn’t say “tyranny”; I simply pointed out that there will always be people who grab a higher level of control than others, regardless of the system.

That was just what I could recall off the top of my head.

Well, now Bezos is doing exactly the same thing to moms and pops AND WalMart — — and he’s doing it with the approval of the same people who hated WMT. There’s simply no way that any government action gets in the way of that freight train, or any other similar endeavor.

There was a time (40s-70s) that govt. could indeed stop that shit on a dime. Even without tailoring new laws to the Internet. Anti-monopoly rulings were very stringent, back in the day. The conservatives squealed something fierce when Ma-Belle was broken up, but broken she was.

Theses day, lobbyists for the industry write their own laws. There is no particular govt at the federal level. It’s a chamber of commerce for mutinational virtual monopolies like Walmart and Amazon. But most folks have no clue.

It all rotates around a corporate media that controls the flow of information, actually crafts a false mirror of what society is. A free market requires that all the players are equally apprised of all the forces that manipulate and otherwise drive the market. All that is gone from the consumer’s perspective. No independent news rooms, no FCC ownership rules, no fairness doctrine, just advertising and fake ideological debate.

Walmat could be broken up. The same for Amazon. Or taxed or whatever better solution for fairness sake and the well being of the most people could be devised. We went though this stupidity at the turn of the last century as well. It’s not a matter of natural, inevitable market forces. It’s a natter of the largest players in the market taking over all aspects of human activity to maximize and concentrate power in fewer and fewer people.

A lack of regulation was definitely the problem. I just enjoy pointing out that this slate of de-regulation was driven by Democrats. :-)

Preaching to the choir over here. Although, from my perspective, it was driven by the big Money through acquiring the media to distract the electorate while acquiring the election process by court rulings that it was a matter of freedom of speech for big money to be able to assert financial control over an ever expanding campaign process. Thus the two party charade evolved.

I find it painfully ironic that the government had to orchestrate a bailout that was caused by securities that wouldn’t have existed if they had not (a) legalized them and (b) invented them.

I hazard to say that the 1968 lawmakers would have had trouble recognizing the derivatives of today as the bundled mortgages they envisioned back in the day. But the irony is not lost on me.

I have no quarrel with that as a general philosophy. I just want the package to be as minimalistic as possible, and when possible, avoid governmental controls because you’re using price competition when possible (Example being our prior discussion regarding health care systems. You can control costs by limiting payments to providers, or you can control costs by making individual shop for better prices. I like the latter.

The Dutch like them both.

Whatever your philosophy, you don’t change the rules on people while they’re in-flight. If you want to ADD to a program, that’s fine, but don’t CUT that program without giving people plenty of time to respond accordingly.

I got no problem with that.

    Michael Harmon

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