Hey Everyone!
I'm afraid today is a bit of a rant. So, I'll apologize in advance for being on my soapbox, and I hope you'll bear with me. Because even though I'm ranting, I'm also right...though perhaps a bit unbearable, to say so. ;-)
I have had it with the people who keep pointing to our tangerine study in moral turpitude's deregulation of industry as a good thing. It's an unmitigated disaster for our country that will result in untold death and destruction for decades. The only way society can benefit from industry is if reasonable limits and rules are enforced to control corporate excesses.
Don't believe me? Please direct your attention to the drug cartels. They are a perfect example of unregulated industry. Those MS-13 thugs 45 keeps railing against? They ain't nothin' but good, old-fashioned, unfettered, laissez-faire capitalists, baby. Oh, you think their product is dangerous and their business model is a detriment to society? Don't like the indiscriminate distribution of substances marketed for ingestion that contain unknown, potentially toxic ingredients? Or the production of possibly volatile substances in undisclosed locations and absent any safety protocols or emergency response plans? Huh. That's funny. I guess you see the value in regulation, after all.
And another lesson you might want to consider from the way those drug cartels operate is the way they settle disagreements. Because they're outside the law, they can't take disputes with business partners, suppliers, employees, or customers to court and have those differences arbitrated by a neutral third party with binding authority. So, what do they do? You know what they do. They do violence to get their way.
And since the people they're feuding with also can't seek satisfaction in court, and so also have only violence as a recourse to resolve their differences and promote their interests, it becomes an arms race to see which side can be the most violent. Because if you take the legal system out of the equation, the only threat anyone has to use against anyone else they might have a dispute with is the threat of hurting them and those they care about.
Also, since any good business person would want to prevent others who are angry with them from disrupting their business with violence, it only makes sense to make their retaliatory threat as dramatic and intimidating as possible so that no one thinks it's worth it to challenge them. And, absent the rule of law, the only way to do that is to terrorize their opponents into passivity with extreme and horrific acts of violence. Incidentally, we have a name for such a scramble for two business entities trying to outdo each other with over-the-top violence. It's called a gang war.
So, consider what happens when industry is deregulated. First, it makes the court system impotent because it's only through the application of laws in the form of regulations that anyone has the grounds to file a complaint against industry. Absent grounds, the courts can't consider a charge lobbied against a corporation, and so they can't provide any relief for grievances, either in the form of monetary recompense or cease and desist orders. Which makes it pointless for anyone who has a dispute with a corporation to take them to court.
But what's the alternative? When industry manipulates the political system so that the government stops regulating them, and regular people can no longer effectively seek redress of wrongs through the court system, what do angry people with no other recourse do? Why did society invent a system of justice devoted to civil disputes, in the first place? What happened before courts started mediating disagreements that made society create a system whereby differences people had with each other could be systematically adjudicated in a way that did not require violence? And what happens when that system breaks down and ceases to function? Think about it.
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