Ya, right these people aren't rich they are wealthy. Like the guy who owns say a few cereal companies and a few drug companies is going to say that. Spoil inheritance for his family and the billion dollar empire.

You are blind, because this don't fit neatly into your view of the multiverse then it don't exist. Same logic goes for UFOs. Always some astronomer who thinks they are more important than they really are says "Since UFO haven't landed in my backyard and I never saw them, they don't exist or they could contact all important me".

That's known as debunking out of ingorance. "I do not know, there for I do not believe"

The same companies advertising Vioxx, Prozac and all the wonderful pill on Tv are the same guys fattening you up with biggie sizing your chosteral, then sell you the fix. These people want to do mental tests on kids and have a prozac nation of zombie dumber than the parents who let this happen.

The president has little control over oil, economy, stopping the war machines. If you want to keep reading Coulter and believing your neighbors are really the enemies and the reason behind all the problems you have. Then take the red pill and live in your all blaming world of hate.

But in the better reality we are just pawns from the people that fund the federal reserve and live and die as they choose. They greated these puppets on radio and TV to divide our nation, blame each other, in a race to get fat and stupid, while they loot the nation of its middle class, it's intellect, and its original values, they tear this country apart to make yet another dollar.

You are pointing your finger at generalizations of libs and basically the poor when the wizards of Oz who pull the strings are never questioned by the sheeple they govern.

It's all spin. You can call some action "conservative" and another "liberal", and you pick and choose the one that fits your assertion. Conservatives would argue that less restriction on business is a good thing, leading to economic growth and a higher standard of living. They would claim that "liberals" want to choke the life out of business with legislation and other burdens.

A liberal would counter that business running unchecked would lead to exploitation of people and the environment, and in the end, *that* would result in a lower standard of living for most people.

The problem is that generalizations don't apply anymore (if they ever did). Big money has infiltrated both parties. Neither represents the "average Joe/Josephine". To me the minor difference between the two is that conservatives tend to think that the individual can solve their own problems, while liberals tend to think that the group (government) can better solve problems.

Both approaches have positives and negatives. There is no one single "right" answer. There never has been. That's why we're in a multi-party system (alledgedly). What's sad is that we are at the most devisive point in our countries history (at least since the civil war), yet our two parties are almost indistinguishable. A "conservative" president spending government money like its going out of style, and a "liberal" defeated candidate yammering about fighting terror, etc.

You use this business/welfare NIMBY-ness, but what about the wind-farms off the coast blocked by such liberals as Walter Cronkite and Ted Kennedy?

http://election.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/06/26/sunday/main560595.shtml

It's a vicious cycle...

Good thread, but I have to ask; when a party abandons fiscal conservatism why do the real conservatives stay on board?

Fear of losing one's identity I can only guess.

Red,

You really think one guy could pull all of it off? I mean all it takes is one chemist that works at these places to say say "hmm, why are we putting X in our pills when we know it causes Y?" Like I said, just too many people involved.

Hell, over the last several decades someone would have stumbled onto one of these "evil plans". It's not realistic, sorry.

Someone would have slipped up or coughed it up by now.

There's fiscal conservatism, which waved bye-bye to Bush a long time ago, becuase it's an expensive thing to buy the entire democrat agenda, and there's constitutional conservatism. I think most conservatives are a blend of both... I know I'd like to see more responsible spending, but I also want to see an end to all of this judicial activism.

No it's because it's the best we got right now and we hope to real them back in. We admit our own problems. If Bush spends in his second term like he did in the first I will be both pissed and surprised.

Dude, the people at Vioxx new this was causing heart attacks yet they swept it under the rug as long as they could.

Then you have Sacrin, Asprathine which were pulled only have a number of people died. Alot of kids are on anti-depressants and they're suicide rate is higher on these drugs. Your saying these CEO 'care' and aren't looking out for the bottomline?

Then you have the tobacco industry and all the CEOs lying under oathe before Congress. So your saying that maybe some CEO plunder a company like say, Tico or Enron, World Com, Global Cross but if its a drug company or food company. Then its nothing but honest Abe running them?

Incorrect. In fact, the "people" at Merck agonized over their own in-house studies indicating problems with Vioxx and pulled it from the market at a huge loss before any FDA or government action. My niece works as an administrator of pharmaceutical manufacturing at Merck and was quite proud of her company's principled conduct in addressing the Vioxx problem. It represents a standard of the industry, along the lines of Johnson & Johnson's conduct after the cyanide-Tylenol scare some years ago.

The problems with conspiracy theories and anti-corporatist rants have been well-stated here. I would add that they are not extremes of cynicism but rather of naivete. No one but a theorist with no experience in the marketplace would suggest that corporations, a priori, solely and unconscientiously concern themselves with the bottomline -- at the cost of any notion of common good. It is not impossible that some do, but impossible all could and still sustain our system. The beauty of our system is the push-pull tension between self-interest and common interest, and how the efforts of both "liberal" and "conservative" forces have shaped this fairly transparent, basically accountable, and appreciably competitive free enterprise model. No system is perfect or even perfectible, and the conceit that some are is equally naive.

I have worked for several corporations that voluntarily acted against their own short-term interest in the "bottomline" in the support of employees or their common culture. No, corporations are not charitable enterprises, and many behave badly. But in general, those who do pay for it. And, true, many were only prodded into acted correctly by activists and liberal "radicals." But this again points to the beauty of our system.

I heard somewhere that Liberals measure their compassion by how many they get on welfare, Conservatives measure compassion by how many they get off welfare.

Re: My theory, Conservative vs Liberal.
 

BY GAWD, I THINK YOU'VE GOT IT!

Re: Re: My theory, Conservative vs Liberal.
 

Yeah, but the people who are marginalised in this plan are not something I can live with --> I'd rather pay more and run the risk of having a dependency cycle than see a bottom couple of percent of the population in truely (rather than slightly) dire situation.

Apart from that, I've seen some statistics that suggest that ongoing and intergenerational welfare is statistically small (I'm not arguing it doesn't exist - just that they are the cases which people focus on ---> the same as the concept of the vocal minority).

Lendaddy quote:

"Pretty much, yep. I have never said companies have morals, they don't. They aren't designed that way. They are money making machines, nothing else. We can make it easy for them or hard to make money. We can make it easy or hard for them to cheat the people. They are very predictable

I am saying we can refine the system to have it both ways."

Again, very well said. I agree that business should get plenty of our support in creating an environment where it can be prosperous. I also agree that its behavior should be boxed (I avoided using the "r" word) so that competition is fair and free, and people and other animals are not endangered by their decisions. I think Len is suggesting that we all really want about the same things, and we probably also agree on where the problems are, and if we'd just lay the cards on the table and cooperate toward solutions, then those solutions are probably well within reach. I'd agree, with some reservation. (Bear in mind this is a liberal talking) Right now it looks like "business" interest are thought to trump those of citizens. I disagree with every nerve and fiber of my being. I think it's all about people. I think industry is simply a tool. A complex tool, but nothing more than a social tool.

rrpjr: Respectfully, I'd assert you are the naive one. Not trying to insult you. If a drug company acted to remove a drug before FDA intervention, it was because this was the best move for the company. Financially, in the long run. Verily I say unto you, that if a large multi-national company's CEO took action that reduced the value of a share of common stock (or failed to increase that value) where the action was clearly not necessary to protect the company (like from bad press, or increased regulatory scrutiny), that CEO will be removed at the next shareholders' meeting. Probably an emergency shareholder session. The CEO might have been making a correct ethical or moral decisions. His dismissal would be certain.

My narrow industrial experience has been essentially limited to construction contractors building public facilities. Highways and bridges, schools, etc. The one certain thing I know from these years in this industry is that when contracts have eight or more figures, people lose their scruples. It's a simple as that. If you are unaware of this, then don't be calling the rest of us "naive."

Superman -- the assertion of naivete is no insult. Nor is the assumption of it a weakness. To paraphrase Will Rogers, we’re all naïve on one thing or another. I may very well be the naive one.

There is no disputing the self-interest of the corporation. Merck’s actions were not gratuitously noble. They were both proper and self-interested. The coincidence of these two motives is more common than we think. The burden of the morally responsible CEO is to convince his Board and shareholders that his “right” but costly decision in fact accrues to its advantage in the long term, that is to say, it is also the right and profitable one. What Jim Burke did at Johnson & Johnson during the Tylenol crisis, or more to the point perhaps, what Bob Pauley at ABC did by running the AC Nielsen ratings service out of radio. Not easy decisions, with short-term injury to the company.

I suppose I would agree that CEO’s who make random moral decisions that either injure or do not improve the company’s financial standing would come under criticism, and probably be fired. But why would such a CEO exist in the first place? He makes no sense. A CEO who takes it upon himself to make moral decisions in some sort of quixotic and irrelevant moral fashion would not last. Nor should he. It doesn’t take Ayn Rand to figure out that he is in the wrong line of work. A CEO acts, wisely or poorly, within the context of his business, and only prospers if his company does. But, in a larger sense, he only can prosper if his culture does as well. The great ones know this.

My intention really was to point out that while there is no shortage of stories of bad CEOs contriving self-interested schemes against the public interest, there are many but less well known stories of CEOs who act properly and bravely, though often unpopularly within their corporation, to do the correct thing. Their actions seem at first foolish but in time prove correct and even visionary. The Harvard Business School teaches many case studies of such CEOs. To your final point, with all due respect, sometimes something else happens when the contracts grow many figures: people discover their scruples. I have seen it happen. The greater obligation they feel weighs on them. They are good CEOs because they are not only smart but are morally conscious. This is something you rarely see represented in popular culture, but it happens. Life in the corporate world is “not as simple as that” (but is it anywhere?)