Reply #8: Rossi, Nethercutt and business talk.

[ArthurRuger]

Talk is cheap. With the election of 2000 and a sitting Republican president, conservatives finally got their chance to put their less-tax/less-government corporate-lobbied theories to the test. The results are in and they reflect the shallowness of intellectualizing economic theory without factoring in human factors of greed, ambition and selfishness.

Rossi tosses out a vague cloud of "business-talk" implying that state government has failed to run like Halliburton and that he's the man to make it so.

The American Dream is still only a dream - an idea from which one can set goals and create a program for personal progress. The American Dream was never a concrete formula based on an economic foundation of unfettered free-market capitalism.

What Corporate Republican "conservatives" have demonstrated is an ability to ignore the reality of human nature and how that reality impacts some of the fundamental elements of society. That all citizens are not born with equal opportunities is only a minor point. A much larger point is that aspect of an unfettered capitalism (and no, I'm not against capitalism) that tempts business to seek greater and greater profits at the expense of labor and sound business practice.

When events affect the market, unfettered capitalism does not possess within itself the necessary resources to insure much more than survival of the fittest. That's why we have corporate welfare into which more American dollars are poured every year by far than what is spent on human social services.

Rossi and Nethercutt must address this as part and parcel of their political and philosophical positions.

Talk is cheap.

Criticism spiced with promises couched in conservative-sounding generalities is not something upon which we can vote our endorsement. We hear this demand for specifics in our national election and state candidates are not exempt from that same demand.

Honest campaigning is hard to find these days. The real objective of a campaign is to differentiate one's self from your opponent. Negative ads - attack ads - are not the same thing as ads intended to accentuate differences.

Candidates still need to demonstrate a personal integrity that implies that there are points of dignity beneath which they will not stoop in order to win a victory for which too much has been sacrificed.

Arthur Ruger
The American Choice
http://swandeer.com/