Who do you trust more, the government or big business?
 

That is the question.

Sure, there is a third option, but not enough people vote for small local businesses, individual responsibility, and conservation. And the modern economy/goernment programs would fail if this caught on, which would impact millions of people who would get upset.

So, we get two options. One wants to let business do whatever they want, and then bail them out because they might bring down the entire economy. The businesses will do whatever is cheaper (and can get away with it), and their value is based on the stock price and people's perception of their ability to make money. They seem to not care about people's health or the environment as long as they can make more money. There is a lot of waste in spending and inequality in the pay structure.

The other option trys to help people that didn't do anything to deserve it, they can access anything you own, and can make laws that will punish people that don't follow them. They can make money out of thin air, with the promise that we will be able to pay it back sometime in the future. They promote equality, but might not employ the most qualified person. And there is a lot of waste in spending and pet projects.

Anything else you would like to add? What would your ideal situation be? How would you help people, or should they be helped? How do you make things work and get things done?

Sure you can trust the government, just ask any Indian.

Ack! What a question.

Better to rephrase that, to: Who do you dis-trust more, the government or big business? And my answer would be, "Big business... but not by much more."

Anyway, the government and big business have become so intertwined.

I must insist on a 3rd choice. I don't trust either of them. And as Cynosure pointed out, I'm not sure that you can separate the two. Our country has pretty much been run by big business interests the last 20 years at least.

I don't find either to be particularly trustworthy, but I think corporations are more trustworthy and less dangerous. And a badly run corporation stands a pretty good chance of going out of business. Not so much for a badly run government.

I never trust anyone whose motivation is money. Love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.

Ayn Rand would disagree. And keep in mind that the government is motivated by both money and power.

ayn rand? why not mention sparky the wonder turnip? seriously.

Unlike Rand, Sparky The Wonder Turnip can't write a rational defense for his/her opinion on why money (or the love of it) *isn't* the root of all evil.

This is a trick question. The Iron Rule of Oligarchy proves that the two are one in the same. Poll fail.

I tend to trust government more than corporations because government is held accountable in a more logical sense. (At least here in Canada.)

Corporations tend to be accountable only after gauging a cost-benefit analysis of having to pay fines for breaking laws meant to protect people, or what it would mean for the company's "goodwill" or bottom line.

(That's just the tip of the iceberg.)

We empower governments by voting, applying pressure, and lobbying. We empower corporations through relatively unseen market forces.


* * * * *

And as an aside, I'd trust several corporations before I'd trust Ayn Rand.

We empower corporations by buying their stuff. Don't like the company, don't buy the stuff. It's not so easy to dump a bad government, though, and it's not unheard of for bad governments to do bad things to dissidents.

Hey, brilliant!

Don't like stuff made in China? Don't buy stuff!

Don't like the electric company? Don't buy electricity! Don't like the gas company? Don't buy gas! Your ISP/telco sucks? Get another one that sucks just as bad!

Ayn Rand? Rational? I vote for the turnip. Ayn Rand isn't really a vegetable. A turnip is a vegetable. Makes it alright.

That's what I meant by relatively unseen market forces. Corporations can convince us quite eloquently to keep buying their stuff (and many make it all to easy to do so), all the while doing a good job at hiding the bad things they do. Government works quite differently.

It is in Canada. It's happened often enough.

No. But when the government is accountable in a reasonable sense, they have little power to do so.

Maybe America has a lot of work to do....but I still generally trust government more than corporations. I trust government with the power to keep the corporations honest.

Yikes, this is a loaded question. Anyone paying attention knows that there are elements of both that absolutely cannot and should not be trusted, and that there are elements that can.

It is increasingly clear that Obama, his team, and Congress are clueless in terms of what is needed to fix the economy. The continued bailouts are starting to become a joke. Sure, an insolvent corporation will ask for a bailout, that is predictable, but smart money does not throw good money after bad money. Clearly there is no "smart money" people in Washington these days. If they had simply let the bad banks, bad hedge funds, bad Auto companies, bad homeowners, etc, fail and file bankruptcy these companies/people would be well on the road to recovery by now. but they are not and they are a continued drag on the economy.

why ace, i heard the reactionary talking heads on cnbc's financial programming making exactly those arguments last night. they were talking about the Tragedy, the Tragedy i say, that will result from tightening up tax rates on the wealthy and capping salaries for wall street executives. the Outrage! the Horror! and then that manic guy kramer said almost exactly the same thing. and here we are, you saying exactly the same thing. it's like clockwork.

remember, ace, that it's "smart money" people who created this fucking disaster.
why should anyone listen to you or them now?

o yeah, and on the op: bad question.

I don't trust either.

Though I agree whole heartedly that smart people do not throw good money after bad, there are two MAJOR things wrong with what you are saying:
1) Singling out the Obama team implies that the Repubs would have done anything different
Bear in mind they initiated the bailout
It's standard Repub protocol to prop up and support big businesses, regardless how detrimental it is to the common man
2)Absolving debt where it was rightfully placed places a strain on the economy in the exact same manner that keeping these failing business afloat does. You're essentially saying that chair is better than chair, when chair is, in fact, still chair.

"Smart money" is the money that will survive this crisis and emerge stronger. The folks at AIG may have been the smartest guys on Wall St., but they got caught up in greed. These smart people exploited il conceived rules and regulations. People put false trust in the governments ability to regulate. We know there is greed in the market. But when government gives the illusion of being able to protect people, people let their guard down, hence you get the AIG's, Madoff's, Enron's, Worldcom's etc.

The folks at companies like GM, had management teams that gave away the future of the company to the unions for short -term profits. If you look at GM financial statements since the 1980's the company has been slowly dieing every year. Anyone can clearly see the company can not survive, unless it is reorganized and restructured. The people who made the decisions leading to GM's death are long gone. Not many companies survive 100 years plus, like JNJ, PG or GE. GM has already beat the averages, but it is time for them to die or re-invent themselves.

---------- Post added at 10:04 PM ---------- Previous post was at 09:53 PM ----------

I include Congress and even the TARP legislation signed by Bush was wrong in my view. However, I am in the moment. Obama is making things worse in my view. Obama, rode in on a promise to tax the "rich" and fairly distribute America's wealth, well some "rich" people are a lot poorer, unfortunately so is everyone else.

In some cases a failing company could be purchased by a stronger company. That won't happen until all the "bailouts" end.

I didn't answer the poll because I felt it was a poor question. However I say what's the difference between big business and big government when the government is essentially running these business through regulations and financing. The businesses have in essence just become another government agency.

this is the kind of statement that simply vaporizes any credibility you might have had.

Big Business Hands Down.

Not because I really trust them to do the right thing, but because I can always take my money elsewhere, and capitalist business tend to be somewhat self-policing.

There is no escaping a bad government.

Why is it a bad question? The voters in the US are divided up into Democrats and Republicans. If you vote for someone else, there is a slim chance that they will get anywhere near the votes eded to be in the race. A Ron Paul-esque type who preaches small government, individual responsibility, government fiscal responsibility but also smart regulations and laws doesn't usually gain the popularity needed.

Maybe I've been listening to Rush too much, but the Republicans may be supporting fiscal control after 8 years of increasing the size of the budget. Rush is braning Obama as a socialist, and big government demcrat, even though it may not be the truth. We don't know what will happen yet. But, if the Republicans don't go into attack mode, they might not be around in 2 years. But at the same time, there are a bunch of social issues that I don't agree with the republicans on. And there are a bunch of health and environmental concerns I have with an anything goes free market.

The democrats have spent 1 Trillion dollars already, and are trying to control the market. Certain people and cororations are getting bailed out that should be punished for the bad investments they made. A lot of programs th government run are effective. The TSA was a good decision instead of the privately run local security at each airport. Now, I would think that the TSA could be spun off into a post office type agency. There won't be any competition and a uniform set of rules, but they could charge people flying or crossing the border a fee instead of getting tax money.

Now, there are good companies, and good government programs. I woud have no problem if the Wal-Marts were replaced by co-ops or REI type stores where the customers are shareholders. Or if more government agencies were turned into non-profits with smaller government assistance.

I'm not sure why this concept is so hard for some to grasp. Escaping bad government sometimes leads people to extreme, life-risking measures (like floating across the ocean in rafts and innertubes), but we think it's somehow impossible to avoid buying a Toyota, for example.

part of the problem is that folk retain an opposition between large-scale firms and the state.
a defense contractor, for example: is it really inside or outside the state?
if a supply chain integrates a series of formally independent firms into a single, continuous production system, what meaning does the formal independence functionally have? obviously it matters from an accounting viewpoint, in that formal independence enables an externalizing of costs--but i consider that a legal fiction, really.
the extends what i was saying before: if what matters is flows and interconnections created around/by flows and not discrete spaces, it follows that thinking in terms of a separation between corporate and state entities is naive.

the question is bad.

on the other hand, as a litmus test of the extent to which the surreal, useless ideology of neoliberalism/"free markets" etc continues to infect thinking, it's interesting.
it's simply about ideology and not about the world that ideology in this case does not describe.

I never specified who was motivated by money but the fact that you assumed I meant business is telling about how you think. Both the government and private industry are driven by money and power as those two things tend to come with each other.

Choose the form of the destructor.

If Atlas Shrugged is any indication, Ayn Rand also felt that rape is empowering to women.
To make this post 100% ad hominem attacks, Ron Paul also opposes the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

I distrust them when they work together.

On strictly idealist terms, I trust the government more, because it exists ostensibly to serve the people. I feel like there was once a time where business existed to serve people-- right now it exists to serve the shareholders. Since I don't own stock I don't have any reason to expect that big business has anything like my best interest at heart.

And I weep for the children of anyone who looks to Ayn Rand for moral guidance.

Big government has term limits and that makes them beholden to the people sooner or later.

Big businesses have no term limits and are beholden to nobody but the board of directors. Stockholders don't matter because the stock holders are usually retirement funds and 401(k)'s that most individuals have no control over.

except for the people making the actual laws

Have you investigated why?

No, it was the Fountainhead that had that wierd bit about rape.

---------- Post added at 12:45 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:42 AM ----------

You could do a little better. You could do a lot worse. Where government and morality intersect, you'd be hard-pressed to do better.

Save your tears for children who are more likely to end up impoverished. Besides, Ayn Rand hates children.

Because he doesn't care about race, justice, democracy, or really anything beyond his hair-shirt capitalist ideology. Because he lives in a comic book written by the patriarchs of a failed neoliberal ideology and coloured by Ayn Rand.

He would be a national embarrassment if he weren't so irrelevant.

That's very Fox News like of you, and not at all because it's ad hominem. It's so easy to do it like that because everyone who doesn't know of Ron will label him a racist after reading a statement like yours.

To say that property rights trump the right to be treated equal is effectively racist. Maybe he doesn't hate non-white people, but he might as well.

As we all know, the civil rights movement won and Ron Paul lost. The country has left him way behind on this score. The neoliberal movement came, conquered, and collapsed. Yet there he is, clinging to the flotsam of failed ideologies. At this point, he's not even useful to conservatism.

It's hard to be more irrelevant than Ron Paul.

I'm aware that you can make a lot of silly things sound plausible with the inclusion of 'effectively', but I think the qualifier just met its match here.

OP At this point, the government. At least they're trying. Big business may have the smarter people, but not the wiser. Just look at hedge funds...

Of course, neither side is smart or wise enough to make me comfortable. But hey, government is the lesser of two evils.

What does it say about the guy that he thinks outmoded dogma is more important than racial equality? At best, it says that he has poor judgement. Someone less charitable might say he's stupid or is hiding his real motivations. In the end, it doesn't matter, because Ron Paul doesn't matter.