Cartoon 731: Abstaining

Laissez-faire capitalism is like letting a four year old lose in a candy factory. Without supervision the child will consume well beyond what is good for it. In our case the unrestrained pursuit of profits by business and industry is not in the interests of the nation.

The role of government is to supervise activities conducted. For over 70 years American government has increasingly stepped back from this role. The public was successfully sold that the market is the best decider and providers of solutions. However, it is not profitable for business and industry to come together and provide things that facilitate national advancement. This would mean funding things that are not profitable, especially in the short term, and giving up competitive advantages achieved through proprietary positions. What is being referred to is “enablers”. Things that are foundations for other areas of advancement. The individual electric companies are not going to come together to rebuild the electric grid. The individual States are not going to have more school days, more changing curriculums is science, math, and foreign language. It too often files in the face of tenets of the Religious Right. A nation needs a healthy population to be productive. There will never be a coming together of State regulators to address diet and obesity. This would affect business profits, State and local taxes, and campaign contributions. Nor do they have the power or desire to truly address the lack of healthcare. Only government has the power to fight legions of business and industry lobbyist, campaign contributions, and obfuscation.

Today we celebrate American technologically prowess. But most of the technological advancement is either consumer focused, such as the iPad or iPhone, and military armament. Neither are enablers of the nation.

We stopped decades ago building the vanguard transportation systems. Today China has the most miles of “bullet trains”. We have not built any new subway systems. The largest and greatest spanning bridges are all Asian build in the last decade. These are enablers of the profitable movement of goods, services and people. The largest new dams are Asian, and South American. These are enablers of water management and the creation of electricity. The most advanced fundamental physics research facility is in CERN, Switzerland. This enables insights that lead to all sorts of advancements. NASA now relies on Russian heavy lift vehicles for space missions and their astronaut training facility is the best in the world.

Scientific exploratory satellites are being launched by nations all over the world. It is no longer largely an American monopoly. America would not have four unique wireless cell phone standards that are not inter-operable.

Government does not have the will today to take firm control over seeing the needs of the nation are met. It runs into the brick wall of special interests and political ideology.

It is said today America is not falling backward, the rest of the world is catching up [and in some cases passing].