Thursday, August 12, 2004

Where are the "drafts" going when I save them?

I ran across an article at www.abclies.com ripping John Stossel while doing a Google search to see what he has to say about cab licensing.

Here's an interview of Walter Williams by FreeRepublic on that and other related topics.

I was going to give it a preliminary fisking, before checking the facts. Just to see if there might be some interesting changes in my attitude from the process. This paragraph uses snob-appeal, guilt-by-association and appeal-to-authority:
Stossel is actually an evangelist for 80's style greed. ["That's SO-O-O 1980s!" isn't an argument.] In fact in a program called just that, Greed, Stossel spent a full hour trying to reverse the verdict of the great muckrakers of the past like Ida Tarbell. [Who died and made her God?] He tried to say that the Robber Barons of the Gilded Age were actually doing us all a favor in their pursuit of monopolies and their thefts from the public and government. Stossel removed the horns from figures like John Rockefeller and Jay Gould and tried to plant haloes on their heads. Like Ivan Boesky's famous commencement speech (mimicked by Oliver Stone in his film Wall Street, Stossel concluded that "Greed is good."

Of course, the pursuit of monopolies is evil, because even a natural monopoly can't be maintained long by incompetent managers without employing agents of the government. A competent manager wouldn't need to look there for help. Ron Chernow seemed a little too sanguine with Rockefeller's corporatism, I'll check out Tarbell's book before I get too riled.

BTW I think the "Greed is good" speech in Wall Street is inspirational.

Oh, here's what FAIR has to say about Greed.

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