DavidBrown-731687 (2/26/2013)
I'm fully aware of the world I'm living in, thank you.What disgusts me is the way that corporate America gets away with this deception, and tries to thwart any attempt to bring ethical behavior into their business dealings. Marching under the banner of "Less regulation is good for America" they are trying to remove or restrict any oversight on their activities.
If the financial crisis of the last four years hasn't taught us anything, it should have taught us that 'laissez-faire' is a recipe for disaster, that corporations will NOT self-regulate, and we cannot (and should not) trust them to act in our interest as consumers.
Take this simple test. Try to think of the last time a corporation actually did something for you that didn't involve extracting more money from your wallet. OK, time's up! You couldn't think of anything, could you? More than likely, you could find plenty of examples of where they either upped your bill without giving you anything, or kept your bill the same and reduced your service. Either way, they lined their pockets at your expense.
If you say, "Well that's just the way things are," then they have won. I'm not ready to give up that fight quite yet. And neither should you.
I'll take your challenge and respond with the Grocery Store (NOT a small town store, this is a regional/national chain). Yep, last night I mentioned to the guy at the check out that I thought we had forgotten a bag of groceries the previous week that included a simple plug-in air freshener, but I really wasn't sure. He gave me one for free.
The Free Market is not what you've defined at all. The Free Market is simply that providers can bring goods or services to market for prices that they decide to charge. The other side of the equation is that you can either choose to buy or not buy based on the price and the perceived quality of said good or service. That's all the Free Market is.
Take a short test yourself, when was the last time that something happened on Wall Street or to a store that the first response of people in government was NOT "We need more government!" (aka "We need more regulations!")... bingo, NEVER, it's not about fixing a problem, it's about adding more to government JUST to have an excuse to add more to government.