I have no idea what Randy Ridgel”s idea of “broke” is, but I don”t think our country is. Biggest economy in the world, but dominated with too any non-economist, semi-paranoids who are pretty successful in inhibiting recovery from the (self enabled) continuing slump.
Good examples are that we are running a deficit that would be two-thirds less without the Bush tax cuts. We give priority to defense spending (more than twice the spending of the rest of the world) over infrastructure and education and we tend to be too cheap to buy U.S. made goods when others are less expensive.
We even buy our bridges and rail cars overseas and worry about unemployment and its cost.
When it comes to meritocracy, Randy tends to go his own way. The Constitution is a good one, but was written reflecting the knowledge and values of the 1 percent representing a population that was overwhelmingly rural and some 90 percent illiterate.
Corporations were virtually unknown. Venture capital (the kind that fosters jobs), was personal and there was at least as much separation into classes as now. And about as much regard for the average person as England had in Dickens” novels.
I find Randy”s views interesting coming from a man who spent the majority of his working years as a government employee, an employee of a successful socialist (yeah, do some definitional research) organization called the Navy. Funded by the government, autocratic, not guided by profit motivation, very class conscious, overwhelmingly ruled by an elite, who view officers and others without a “trade school” ring as a lesser class, authoritarian, non-democratic, and subject to the same type of corruption that leads to special treatment, overlooking errors and $600 toilet seats, and such. A meritocracy it isn”t!
But then, very few organizations are, because getting ahead by smarts and superior work offends and threatens too many people who can”t measure up, but have seniority.
Guthrie “Guff” Worth
Lakeport
