And thus we find it extremely difficult under profit motive even to
stop the advertisement of deadly cancer-causing drugs (aka cigarettes)
Come on, only a child can believe that the profit motive intends to
solve most of the social problems caused by industrializtion.
wcm


>
> on 2/15/00 10:51 AM, William Meecham at [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> > That there is pollution under communism (see below) is of course true.
> > But the great difference is the rich corps. control most of the govt.
> > here, and make correction extremely difficult.  Whereas under socialism
> > there is no such super rich class promoting profit at the expense
> > of the health and life of the population as a whole.  That is socialists
> > can correct the evils of industrialization, whereas in the US we
> > see it is almost impossible.
> Untrue. All it takes is the profit motive. We see that happening everywhere
> now. Between government regulation, lawsuits and the profit motive, there is
> no shortage of incentives to conserve resources and reduce pollution. Plenty
> of companies are in business solely to meet the demand for environmental
> cleanup. Sure, a company will try to socialize what costs it can--corps are
> amoral--but those costs that it can't, it will conserve in the interests of
> keeping costs down. The kind of environmental regulation that many on the
> Left despise (and which I am ambivalent about), the trading of pollution
> credits, operate on exactly that principle, namely, forcing companies to
> incorporate extrinsic costs into their balance sheets.
>
> Meanwhile, in the USSR, we saw the wasteland created by a system that had no
> discipline imposed by the market. It squandered nearly all its oil reserves
> in much less time than it took us to, and its use of coal was also extremely
> wasteful. To cite one example, the USSR used something like 3 times the coal
> to produce one ton of steel, compared to Western capitalist countries.
>
> To say this doesn't mean I like it that way, only that what's true is true,
> regardless of one's ideology. If you have an idea how the next socialist
> revolution can solve that problem, let's hear it.
>