Liberal Forum

shintao » 04 May 2014 12:19 pm » wrote:I used to have a manufacturing business, and when I set it up in this two story warehouse, the city thought it would be a good idea to have a sprinkler system. So I have an uncle with a general contracting license and hired him to install it, and that way I could do the labor. Nope the city said, you have to have one of these two local fire extinguisher company's install the system. So I did a little investigation and found out both companies were owned by the same guy.

Now, magnify that to the federal level, which is a thousand times less answerable. You could conceivably have hired a lawyer and filed suit, gotten discovery and successfully sued the city. Or, conceivably, you could have gotten the feds to go after these guys - with that much money on the table, other interests are at stake. After all, there are just a few crooks involved in what you described. Even if they are well connected at the state level, if they go down, the world keeps turning with no serious bruising.

That does not make local corruption a GOOD thing, but it makes it a tad less insurmountable than entrenched interests on Wall Street protected by the Underwriters Laboratory as a first ring of defense. The type of corruption you are pointing to is with us, has always been, will always be. People, like water, take the path of least resistance - that's why we have crooked rivers and crooked people. The type I am trying to expose in this thread was overthrown in 1776, and did not creep back in until the railroads needed building.

Capitalism is straight up KILLING free enterprise - making it against the law.