Business wrong model
The writer of “Curb government appetite” (Letters, Sept. 6) wants government to behave more like business. Which business? BP, Exxon, Enron, Lehman Brothers, General Motors, or the 17 percent of small businesses that repeatedly default on multiple SBA loans?
We don’t need government to emulate those businesses. That’s what it’s been doing since the Reagan “revolution” of 1980.
Big business took over our government in the ’80s and ’90s. Milton Friedman’s cynically titled “Free to Choose” defined the strategy for market dominance and concentration of wealth that has been executed expertly over the last 30 years. Instead of regulating the marketplace, our government has become the stereotypical “cop on the take.”
This “business-friendly” environment has resulted in the export of our manufacturing sector and millions of family-wage blue-collar jobs that had served as the ladder up to the middle class. All that is gone now, thanks to governments that “acted more like a business.”
As the letter writer suggests, we need grown-ups to take over. Maybe that’s not the current crop of incumbents; but it’s certainly not the neocon artists who got us here in the first place. We need Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party, not Dick Armey’s tea party.
Jim Wavada
Spokane