This exchange over at Rabid Sanity just keeps getting better. Last night Dave Budge chimed in, and said as he exited that he was “not returning to this”. In other words, he was doing a hit and run.
That’s cool. Dave’s a busy guy – far too busy to blog. But pardon me for a minute while I bloviate – I only have a fleeting image of what Budge looks like. He used to post his picture on his web site. But as I imparted my closing words on Budge, it occurred to me that he wanted to do a hit and run because he likes pulpits more than forums. And an image from the 1990’s struck me – one, like the man-against tank in Tiananmen Square that day – is frozen in time. It was this:
It was Boris Yeltsin preaching from atop a tank as the Russian military surrounded parliament. Later on, Yeltsin needed tanks to enforce his philosophy.
I shall forever think of Budge now as a man who preaches from atop a tank, because tanks and rifles, ala Pinochet and Yeltsin, are what it takes for his philosophy to take hold.
I won’t be returning to this.
Piece of Mindful 
Nice exchange over there! You really did a swell job of explaining the problems of capitalism, government, etc & co. I would have never seen it had you not written this post. (I rarely go to sites like the Hammond Report or Rabid Sanity.)
Now, it seems to me the big problem with capitalism is the rise of economic oligarchies — as Budge called ’em — or corporate entities. I think Budge sees the same problem we do — massive, centralized, anti-democratic entities thwarting the public will — only his solution is to unleash them and force them to compete in the “market.”
Now I’m not so naive to think that unleased corporations won’t do anything but consolodate their market power and hold on government. I think we often make the mistake of looking at the economic system as a monolithic, homogenous entity; but the market doesn’t work the same way for massive corporations as it does, say, for the marketplace for economies companies of smaller, more innovative and artistic companies, like those software companies found in Silicon Valley, say, or South of Market in SF.
I think we need a way to control the massive corporations, to keep them from thwarting the public will. But that doesn’t mean we need to clamp down on all the markets. Maybe what we need is to reform the legal basis of what a corporation is and how it works instead of trying to put locks and obstacles on the market as a whole.
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