They Are All Whores

A profit making business has to make money, or it goes out of business, unless, of course, they can get the government to bail them out. So yes, the primary focus of corporate executives should be on making money for the corporation. However, the way a corporation makes money is by providing goods or services to their customers. If the company does not provide quality goods or services at a competitive price, they won't stay in business for long, unless, of course, they can persuade the government to pass protectionist laws that give them an unfair advantage over the competition.

The government also provides services, but they don't have to make money doing it. They can operate at a loss as long as somebody is willing to loan them money. Government debt is not exactly the same thing as personal or corporate debt. They can keep refinancing their debt indefinitely as long as somebody is willing to buy their new paper. What they are essentially doing is "borrowing from Peter to pay Paul". A corporation or individual can only get away with that for so long, but the government seems to be able to sustain it forever. At least they have so far. Some people are concerned about that, and it is to those people that the businessmen who want to become politicians play. Businessmen do so brag about the quality of their products, it's called "advertising". When they are running for office, though, they focus on their ability to balance a budget because that's what they believe their target audience cares about. Our current Michigan governor ran a successful campaign based on just that. He did indeed balance the budget, but he pissed off so many people in the process that I will be surprised if he gets re-elected. Although governments don't have to make money, they do have to persuade people to vote for them so, in a manner of speaking, politicians are whores for votes, the same way that businessmen are whores for money. Nobody is giving anything away here, they are all selling it.

Up until about a hundred years ago, a lot of people believed that, if somebody was poor, it was his own damn fault. I don't think most people believe that nowadays. I think a lot of people care about the poor, they just can't seem to agree on what to do about it. Is it fair that some people are poor while others are rich? Of course not. Is it fair to take money away from rich people and give it to poor people? Maybe, to a  certain extent but, if you carry that to extremes, all it does is reduce everybody to the lowest common denominator. When everybody is poor, who are you going to take the money from then? I can see why the Democrats would want to do that, since poor people traditionally vote for Democrats. Logically, then, the Republicans should want to make everybody rich, since rich people traditionally vote Republican. For some reason, the Republicans don't seem to understand that, or at least they aren't doing a good job of publicizing it if they do.

Jesus said that a good tree cannot bear evil fruit, and an evil tree cannot bear good fruit. That must have been a metaphor or something because any fruit farmer will tell you that most trees have good years and bad years periodically. Sometimes the whole orchard has a good or bad year, but individual trees also do that, even if the rest of the orchard does the opposite. I think people are like that to some degree. There is some bad in the best of us and some good in the worst of us. Even if you take morality out of it, a smart person can occasionally come up with a really stupid idea, and a stupid person can occasionally come up with a really smart idea. That's why I believe in judging an idea on its own merits rather than by who it was who came up with it.

Wiki has several other articles about populism, and I plan to read some of them this weekend. Have a good one.