[fintstone]

Originally posted by Superman
This discussion is hilarious. None of you conservative guys would enjoy reading the new authorized biogrphy of John Kenneth Galbraith, nor would you enjoy the writings of Keynes, the two heavyweight champions of economics in the past century. Fact is, notwithstanding your apparent opinion that capitalism does not have some troubling systemic problems for which regulation is necessary, the rest of the world disagrees with you. From your perspective, I guess, you are smarter than 90% of the world's polulation. Tell me again about liberal elitism.

I'm not going to poke fun at the details of what I see as a pathetic defense of the current system that has appeared in this thread, but I quoted Fint above because this is the heart of the the Halliburton problem and you conservative guys have to argue against your own beloved in order to defend. Supply and demand are not in play for large corporations in general. Market forces essentially only apply to small and medium sized companies since large corporations essentially run our nation. I know you're okay with that and your defenses are, again, pathetic.

If you favor supply and demand, then how can you support no-bid contracts? Supply and demand is one aspect of capitalism I appreciate very much. I am not a soviet communist. I love supply and demand. But unfortunately, Big Business does everthing it can to avoid those constraints. And they do not apply to Halliburton's multi-billion dollar Iraqi contract.

Give me a break Supe! You are being quite misleading by pulling that out of context. Obviously I was not referring to the Haliburton contract. The supply and demand statement clearly referred to the salaries required to get foreigners to serve in Iraq. The salaries of the KBR food service workers are certainly a result of supply and demand. Obviously the contract referred to by the article is an award-fee type which pretty much makes any profit by the company contingent upon their exceeding certain set performance levels. This type contract is typically used to prevent the graft and mismanagement. If they received the award fee, Maj Howard's superiors in the Army must have determined that KBR met the performance goals set for them when the contract was written.