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Re: OT: Politics and other non-Debian ramblings



Paul Johnson wrote:
Curt Howland wrote:

Paul Johnson wrote:
So the Standard Oil Trust was a good thing, and we should welcome
it's return?
During the time Standard Oil was in operation, the price of kerosine
dropped some 90%.

They're still in operation, though IIRC they call themselves Imperial Oil
now.  You can identify their gas stations because they're Exxon in the
states and Esso everywhere else.

There may very well have been some nasty, reprehensible things done,
which deserve both wide publicity and boycott. A company, no matter
how large their market share, cannot force you to buy their product.

Try not eating.  :o)

Condemnation merely because they were big is envy. I see the same
vitriol thrown at Microsoft,

I'm not condemning them because they're big, I'm condemning them because
they
because of the same lack of awareness of how an unregulated market works.

Laissez-faire economics is an impossible pipe dream and Germany proved it. Taken to it's natural end, you get Germany's pre-WWII out-of-control rapid
inflation where soon it takes millions of dollars just to make a basic
grocery run.




Uh.. Nope. Germany's between-the-wars economy was so bad because the Socialist European governments on the winning side of WWI created a huge financial crisis in post war Germany by not listening to Woodrow Wilson and demanding huge reparation payments from Germany. France, Great Britain, etc... put such an onerous burden on Germany it went bankrupt. It is impossible for any economic strategy/system to work when the payments demanded of the system is more than the system can pay and stay solvent. That's why they had runaway inflation. They had to just keep on printing money even though they had nothing to back it with.


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