You seem to have missed my point on Boeing, or similar companies. But to start a boycott, you need to organize large numbers of people. To start a recall, you need to file papers with a judge.And it only takes one person to start the Twinkies are Evil Boycott 2004.
No, but you can file recall paperwork against them as easily as I could.A politician may or may not represent my area; Washington's senators don't /ever/ answer to me.
Ok. We could debate what the "common good" is for years and not get anywhere. And you can try to justify anything as being in the common good. The "common will" is a bit easier to define, subjectively, so a politicial who follows the common will is probably doing as much "common good" as is reasonably possible.Let's not ignore the important point being made here just so we can point out that I'm a nihilist.
And this is what I meant by saying you constantly advocate for grass-roots organizing. Individuals never have much power, so the only way to get support for a cause is to organize a large number of people, to do whatever needs to be done. You seem to be saying that responsible people will begin an organizatonal campaign from scratch each and every time a pothole needs to be filled-- after all, anything else would be "relying on the government", right?Removing a CEO from power would be pretty silly, anyhow, when it's a corporate policy to which you're objecting.
Cain, the fact of the matter is, both commerical and governmental enterprises are so vastly much more powerful than individuals that action taken at the individual level will have next-to-no effect. Sure, I can petition to recall Bush, but how effective do you think that'll be? Probably about as effective as me trying to force the CEO of Sony to step down.
My response to this is to put more power in the hands of the people in the first place, so we don't have as large a difference between personal right and governmental right.
Because then your local news could be restricted to just one source. Given the nature of the internet, one company that dominated information services in that area couldpush its way into dominating other aspects of the information infrastructure fairly readily.Well, more than likely, given the scale of organizations we're talking about, these companies are /already/ on the internet. Who cares? So Franko, Inc., owns the Des Moines Times, Des Moines TV-8, and www.desmoinesmedia.com. It doesn't matter; since there's no "given area" for the internet, I fail to see how that changes anything.
Ok. It was more to illustrate how if a company corners or monopolizes one section of the market, how they can use that influence to push into and take over other sections of the market as well. I'll take that point as conceded....yes. That's true, and I don't dispute it. What I dispute is that America would automatically be a better place to live if Microsoft held 20% of the OS market and not 80% [or whatever they have].
I'm not going to get into another silly debate about browser wars or OS dominance, particularly since it wouldn't be about monopolies at all by the third post. If we're going to discuss a given example, let's use another one, please? I think Microsoft is a great example of the pros of single-corporation market-dominance, but I'd rather cede that advantage than talk about "the open source community" and Sun's superiority for the 30th time. I hope you don't mind.
Now, since we've demonstrated that a monopoly can (and likely will) expand its dominance into other areas, and will use it's existing dominance to force its way in, we can see that unregulated monopolies are bad for the economy. Bad for the economy = bad for the state.