Competition Is Good For Business, Good For The Consumer, Good For The Economy, Good For The Country
Abel
it's good for them, it forces them to produce better products and to
provide better services at a lower cost. This is not only good for
business, but it's also good for the consumers. Ultimately, it's good
for the entire country.
Competition also takes place on an international level. For example,
in the 1960's, we hurried up and sent a man to the moon, because we
thought we were competing with the Soviet Union, we thought that they
had the ability to send one up there before us, so we beat them to the
punch. But as it turned out, they didn't have the ability, they just
fooled us, and it's a good thing that they did, otherwise we would
have been content to stay here on earth and leave outer space to the
aliens. As another example, America produced nothing but gas guzzling
cars, until the oil shock of the 1970's. We had no idea that gas
efficient cars can be produced, until the Japanese showed it to us.
All of a sudden, with oil prices skyrocketing, American car
manufacturers started realizing that they too will have to start
producing gas efficient cars, or else the Japanese will end up
dominating the car market. The Japanese have since ended up
dominating the car market anyways, but it's still not too late to turn
that around, and by all indications, it is starting to turn around, at
any rate, American cars are far more gas efficient now than they used
to be, and we can thank competition for that.
Since competition is such a good thing, then it should be encouraged
by our government, and it is, except when we have Conservatives in
power here. Republicans are ideologically married to the concept of
helping big business get even bigger. But let's not forget what the
big corrupt, failing banks told us, before we bailed them out to the
tune of hundreds of billions of our hard earned tax dollars, that they
are "too big to fail".
Truth of the matter is that Republicans tend to discourage
competition, they do this by ignoring anti-trust laws that are
designed to break up the monopolies that perpetuate the big business
chokehold on our economy. For example, Democratic President Bill
Clinton sued Microsoft's chairman Bill Gates in order to break up his
internet monopoly. But by the time Republican President George Bush
came to power, he reversed that lawsuit and allowed Bill Gates to
operate carte blanche.
We would today be having much better internet service if Bill Gates
were forced to compete with others on a more even keel, but like I
said, Republicans do not believe in competition.
Competition is a good thing, and Democrats believe more in competition
than do Republicans. This is also one other reason why businesses do
better and the overall economy is much better under Democratic
administrations.
Let me give you another example, one which everyone can understand.
Let's say you started a business of your own, and now you own a little
'Mom & Pop' gas station, but you're paying a huge amount of rent, on a
busy intersection, and life is good, because you sell lots of gas,
give good personable service, and you also repair cars there. And
then later on, someone noticed your success, a multinational company,
such as EXXON MOBILE, so they decide to open up a gas station right
across the street from you, they don't repair cars, they're don't give
personable service, but they sell junk food, and they sell gas at half
the price that you sell it, and they can sell it at that price
indefinitely, because they are a multi-billion dollar company, they
can afford to operate at a loss and they can outlast you. In a very
short time, they can drive you out of business. You have a huge rent
bill to pay for your prime location, and lots of equipment and
personell costs, e.t.c., and your financial resources are limited,
very limited, you are basically re-investing from the meager profits
of your business. But EXXON MOBILE, on the other hand, has bottomless
pockets, and they will outlast you, their bank account is in the
billion$, without a doubt, they WILL outlast you, and they can for all
practical purposes give away their gas at a loss, forever, and still
survive, forever, or until you're bankrupt. So this will go on, for
just a few months, and people will get gas at half price, right across
the street from you, until you go out of business. Then, when you're
gone, right after you're gone, EXXON will double, even triple the
price of gas, and they can get away with it completely.
The consumer loses, and everyone eventually pays more for gas, much,
much more. And no car repairs. In this scenario, the small business
man does not even stand a chance.
But not so fast, what EXXON did was illegal. It clearly violated anti-
monopoly rules, and the small business man who was buried by EXXON had
the ability to file a complaint with the government and have the
situation rectified. Yet one more reason why you should never vote
for a Republican, any Republican. Because Republicans are less likely
to enforce these anti-monopoly laws, and ultimately, the consumer
loses, business loses, and the country loses too. These legal
battles take place every day, in our court rooms, but few people know
about it.
Something to think about. And something more for you to think about,
as our fine, lovely, wonderful President, Barack H. Obama drums up the
courage to go about trying to enforce the anti-monopoly laws that the
Health Insurance Industry has been exempted from for so long.
Abel Malcolm
_____________________________
From The New York Times
October 18, 2009
Obama Threatens Insurers’ Anti-Trust Exemption
By PETER BAKER
WASHINGTON — President Obama mounted a frontal assault on the
insurance industry on Saturday, accusing it of using “deceptive and
dishonest ads” to derail his health care legislation and threatening
to strip the industry of its longstanding exemption from federal
antitrust laws.
In unusually harsh terms, Mr. Obama cast insurance companies as
obstacles to change interested only in preserving their own “profits
and bonuses” and willing to “bend the truth or break it” to stop his
drive to remake the nation’s health care system. The president used
his weekly radio and Internet address to challenge industry
assertions
that legislation will drive up premiums.
“It’s smoke and mirrors,” Mr. Obama said. “It’s bogus. And it’s all
too familiar. Every time we get close to passing reform, the
insurance
companies produce these phony studies as a prescription and say, ‘Take
one of these, and call us in a decade.’ Well, not this time.”
Rather than trying to curb costs and help patients, he said, the
industry is busy “figuring out how to avoid covering people.”
“And they’re earning these profits and bonuses while enjoying a
privileged exemption from our antitrust laws,” he said, “a matter
that
Congress is rightfully reviewing.”
The president’s attack underscores the sharp break between the White
House and the insurance industry as the health care debate moves
closer to a climax. When Mr. Obama took office, he and his advisers
had hoped to keep insurers at the table to forge a consensus. But as
the months passed, the strains grew — until this past week, when
industry-financed studies attacking the Democratic plan signaled an
open rupture.
The White House is concerned that the insurance industry may undermine
public support for changing the health care system, much as it did
when it helped doom President Bill Clinton’s overhaul efforts in the
1990s. The new industry studies are fueling broader criticism that the
plans advanced by Democrats will cost too much, raise consumer
expenses and insert the government more deeply into the health care
sector.
The report, issued by America’s Health Insurance Plans, concluded that
premiums would rise 18 percent more under provisions of a Senate bill
than they would otherwise in the next decade, to an average of nearly
$26,000 for families and $9,700 for individuals in 2019. The White
House dismissed the study as “deeply flawed” and noted that it did not
account for subsidies in the bill to help people who could not afford
insurance.
Insurance representatives rejected Mr. Obama’s assertions, saying they
favor bipartisan overhaul but believe that the current versions would
in some ways make things worse.
“Reform needs to work and deliver on the promise made to the American
people that everyone will have quality, affordable coverage,” Karen
Ignagni, president of America’s Health Insurance Plans, said in a
statement. Citing the studies warning of price increases, she added,
“We believe these issues can and must be resolved.”
Jeff Smokler, a spokesman for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield
Association, said his group was most concerned with provisions that he
said would allow people to wait to buy coverage until they are sick.
“The result of such a system would be higher costs for everyone,” Mr.
Smokler said. “This is counterproductive to the goals of health care
reform.”
In the official Republican response to Mr. Obama’s address,
Representative Kevin Brady of Texas said the Democratic plans would
create a “one-size-fits-all plan” that would reduce competition and
increase costs.
Mr. Obama on Saturday praised the Senate bill passed by the Finance
Committee last week as “a reform proposal that has both Democratic and
Republican support.” Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine is the only
Republican in either house of Congress to support any of the five
Democratic health care bills.
The president complained bitterly about the insurers’ attack on the
legislation. “The insurance industry is rolling out the big guns and
breaking open their massive war chest to marshal their forces for one
last fight to save the status quo,” he said.
His signal of support for reviewing the industry’s antitrust
exemption
put him in league with Democratic leaders in Congress pushing for
repeal or revision of the McCarran-Ferguson Act, which was passed in
1945 to keep regulation of insurers in the hands of the states.
Although he did not explicitly endorse overturning it, a spokesman
said it was the first time he had raised the matter publicly as
president.
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Democratic leader, testified at a
Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday in favor of getting rid of
the exemption. A day later, Representative Nancy Pelosi of
California,
the House speaker, said, “There is tremendous interest in our caucus”
in such a move.
Assistant Attorney General Christine A. Varney, the head of the
antitrust division at the Justice Department, testified at the Senate
hearing that repealing McCarran-Ferguson would create more
competition, which could help reform industry practices.
johnny@.
> Competition is a good thing. Businesses do not like competition, but
> it's good for them, it forces them to produce better products and to
> provide better services at a lower cost. This is not only good for
> business, but it's also good for the consumers. Ultimately, it's good
> for the entire country.
>
> Competition also takes place on an international level.
What do you think about Levi Strauss moving its factories to Haiti, and
paying the people two dollars a day to make their clothing?
Do you call that competition?
Abel
No, that's not called competition, it's called a bad trade policy, of
which China is the biggest culprit, by far. Haiti represents less
than .00001% of the problem, China represents about 90% of the
problem. The brainchild of this bad trade policy--and when we really
started to embark on it was when Republican President Richard Nixon
shamelessly visited China in 1972 and "opened the door".
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Nixon_visit_to_China
To oppose that disasterous Nixonian trade policy would create a
hundred times more commotion and a far more fierce resistance from the
Republicans than we've seen recently with their very ugly resistance
to health care reform. In other words, it would be impossible to
reverse course on that horrible trade policy. I liked candidate John
Kerry's idea, when he was running for President in 2004, to put a
heavy tax on the companies that ship jobs overseas. Can you imagine,
we would raise billions of dollars every year from all the companies
that are profitting from our trade with China? And then John Kerry
wanted to use that very tax revenue to re-train and re-educate the
American worker, so that we can succeed in the jobs of the future,
which will require a technologically savvy workforce. See:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x807426#
Below is an article by Thomas Friedman, the Nobel prize winning
Economist. He comes up with the best solution yet. I think that
college education should be free for everyone, regardless of income,
just as High School is. Some European countries have tried that, and
the extra spending on education has not damaged their economy, it has,
in fact, improved their economy, by graduating people who have had the
intelligence and creativity to create even more jobs, for themselves
and for others.
Abel Malcolm
__________
October 21, 2009
The New Untouchables
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Last summer I attended a talk by Michelle Rhee, the dynamic chancellor
of public schools in Washington. Just before the session began, a man
came up, introduced himself as Todd Martin and whispered to me that
what Rhee was about to speak about — our struggling public schools —
was actually a critical, but unspoken, reason for the Great
Recession.
There’s something to that. While the subprime mortgage mess involved a
huge ethical breakdown on Wall Street, it coincided with an education
breakdown on Main Street — precisely when technology and open borders
were enabling so many more people to compete with Americans for middle-
class jobs.
In our subprime era, we thought we could have the American dream — a
house and yard — with nothing down. This version of the American dream
was delivered not by improving education, productivity and savings,
but by Wall Street alchemy and borrowed money from Asia.
A year ago, it all exploded. Now that we are picking up the pieces, we
need to understand that it is not only our financial system that needs
a reboot and an upgrade, but also our public school system. Otherwise,
the jobless recovery won’t be just a passing phase, but our future.
“Our education failure is the largest contributing factor to the
decline of the American worker’s global competitiveness, particularly
at the middle and bottom ranges,” argued Martin, a former global
executive with PepsiCo and Kraft Europe and now an international
investor. “This loss of competitiveness has weakened the American
worker’s production of wealth, precisely when technology brought
global competition much closer to home. So over a decade, American
workers have maintained their standard of living by borrowing and
overconsuming vis-à-vis their real income. When the Great Recession
wiped out all the credit and asset bubbles that made that
overconsumption possible, it left too many American workers not only
deeper in debt than ever, but out of a job and lacking the skills to
compete globally.”
This problem will be reversed only when the decline in worker
competitiveness reverses — when we create enough new jobs and educated
workers that are worth, say, $40-an-hour compared with the global
alternatives. If we don’t, there’s no telling how “jobless” this
recovery will be.
A Washington lawyer friend recently told me about layoffs at his firm.
I asked him who was getting axed. He said it was interesting: lawyers
who were used to just showing up and having work handed to them were
the first to go because with the bursting of the credit bubble, that
flow of work just isn’t there. But those who have the ability to
imagine new services, new opportunities and new ways to recruit work
were being retained. They are the new untouchables.
That is the key to understanding our full education challenge today.
Those who are waiting for this recession to end so someone can again
hand them work could have a long wait. Those with the imagination to
make themselves untouchables — to invent smarter ways to do old jobs,
energy-saving ways to provide new services, new ways to attract old
customers or new ways to combine existing technologies — will thrive.
Therefore, we not only need a higher percentage of our kids graduating
from high school and college — more education — but we need more of
them with the right education.
As the Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz explains it: “If
you think about the labor market today, the top half of the college
market, those with the high-end analytical and problem-solving skills
who can compete on the world market or game the financial system or
deal with new government regulations, have done great. But the bottom
half of the top, those engineers and programmers working on more
routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or
recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers
want, have done poorly. They’ve been much more exposed to global
competitors that make them easily substitutable.”
Those at the high end of the bottom half — high school grads in
construction or manufacturing — have been clobbered by global
competition and immigration, added Katz. “But those who have some
interpersonal skills — the salesperson who can deal with customers
face to face or the home contractor who can help you redesign your
kitchen without going to an architect — have done well.”
Just being an average accountant, lawyer, contractor or assembly-line
worker is not the ticket it used to be. As Daniel Pink, the author of
“A Whole New Mind,” puts it: In a world in which more and more average
work can be done by a computer, robot or talented foreigner faster,
cheaper “and just as well,” vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore. It’s all
about what chocolate sauce, whipped cream and cherry you can put on
top. So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving
reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and
creativity.
Bottom line: We’re not going back to the good old days without fixing
our schools as well as our banks.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/21/opinion/21friedman.html?pagewanted=print
johnny@.
> On Oct 19, 7:47 pm, " johnny@." <joh...@invalid.invalid> wrote:
>> Abel wrote:
>>> Competition is a good thing. Businesses do not like competition, but
>>> it's good for them, it forces them to produce better products and to
>>> provide better services at a lower cost. This is not only good for
>>> business, but it's also good for the consumers. Ultimately, it's good
>>> for the entire country.
>>> Competition also takes place on an international level.
>> What do you think about Levi Strauss moving its factories to Haiti, and
>> paying the people two dollars a day to make their clothing?
>>
>> Do you call that competition?
>
> No, that's not called competition, it's called a bad trade policy, of
> which China is the biggest culprit, by far. Haiti represents less
> than .00001% of the problem, China represents about 90% of the
> problem. The brainchild of this bad trade policy--and when we really
> started to embark on it was when Republican President Richard Nixon
> shamelessly visited China in 1972 and "opened the door".
> See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Nixon_visit_to_China
Obama made a campaign promise to renegotiate NAFTA or end it. He lied.
He is now trying to reinstate the pilot program for Mexican trucks.
By the way, Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law, so I don't want to hear
about what republicans have done in the past.
>
> To oppose that disasterous Nixonian trade policy would create a
> hundred times more commotion and a far more fierce resistance from the
> Republicans than we've seen recently with their very ugly resistance
> to health care reform. In other words, it would be impossible to
> reverse course on that horrible trade policy. I liked candidate John
> Kerry's idea, when he was running for President in 2004, to put a
> heavy tax on the companies that ship jobs overseas. Can you imagine,
> we would raise billions of dollars every year from all the companies
> that are profitting from our trade with China? And then John Kerry
> wanted to use that very tax revenue to re-train and re-educate the
> American worker, so that we can succeed in the jobs of the future,
> which will require a technologically savvy workforce. See:
>
> http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x807426#
>
The American worker doesn't need to be retrained or reeducated. What
the American worker needs is to have 30 million illegal aliens deported.
These illegal aliens are working in factory and construction jobs that
once paid good wages, and had good benefits. The illegal aliens have
lowered the wages, and done away with the benefits.
Abel
> By the way, Bill Clinton signed NAFTA into law, so I don't want to hear
> about what republicans have done in the past.
>
I've had this argument before. If you want to know what I think,
check out this link:
johnny@.
I followed that thread in news:alt.politics.obama, and no one agreed
with you.
You are right, the democrats opposed NAFTA, and they all voted for him
again.