Laissez-faire ha! Only now subverted by multi-national corporations that place no allegiance whatsoever to the people or places from where these institutions sprung! The present day variant of "laissez-faire" is being spun around your head like a hypnotic potion from ages long past.
For those who complain about Apple's profits, the oil companies ripping us off, or other such illogical musings, they ought to ask themselves who really owns these companies and supports them: The answer is that private individuals own them through the stock market and actually force public companies to do whatever it takes to increase profits.
These companies will do precisely what they choose to do, and they don't need dime-a-dozen stockholders budding in. The only thing that drives them is an insatiable lust to line their pockets. If they crash and burn through mismanagement or outright crookedness, like all those Wall Street fronts-for-thievery, tough luck to the Joe Blow stockholders and gullible retirees. The gladbags at the top walk away with millions just the same, with but a tiny percentage ever facing legal retribution.
Jobs or Gates, et al, do not need the cash. (Jobs makes a $1 a year, I believe, and Gates is giving away 90% of his earnings and savings.)
Of course not! Now that these favored benevolents have morphed into latter-day philanthropists and humanitarians! How much loot can one realistically shovel away? Is there a vault big enough to even hold it? One has to wonder with the billions upon billions they've raked into their private accounts, enough to buy many countries piecemeal!
It's been a good ol' gorging fest unlike any other seen around the world, where the disparity between top execs and low line workers has grown to insanely disparate margins, far exceeding that of only a few generations back here in the country. There's your capitalism without bounds heroes! What was once lauded as "free enterprise" in America has been usurped and displaced by capitalistic greed and usury.
So, when you complain about APPL or MSFT, it's the investors that should be held accountable.
Ah yes, a novel approach I must say, and a perfect circumvent for the boys at the top. Let's blame, then bend over, Joe and Jane America, and slap their butts good for buying into the capitalists' con games. Only take a inside tip: the biggest investors get to play by separate rules.
It is fortunate, however, that making an HONEST profit is not yet against the law.
If the kinds of personal profits that corporate American and multi-national execs make these days hasn't reached the level of obscene, I don't know what that word was allowed into the language for. If that's "honesty" to you, I got a creaky, vermin ridden bridge I'd love to sell ya.
You know, if all these lootmeisters spun just a TINY portion of their over-inflated wealth back into company-sponsored training centers or vocational alliances, or even paid experienced hands what they're worth [*gasp*] considering what the big shots at the top rake in, there wouldn't be the "need" to turn to dirt cheap labor in foreign places to do so much of their non-elitist work.
Nor the "need" to ship every promising enterprise and industry off our own shores, to and for the profit of others! Since when does this country owe the rest of the world favors over its own, and how long can it go own skewing things like this? Few others are playing by such rules, not to the insane extent we do. As it stands, only the rich are getting richer; the pipes that supposed to trickle it down are all leaking or busted.
Don't like Apple's methods of doing business? Don't buy its products. It is a fact that somebody likes Apple, a company with gross revenues of more than $240 billion annually. And its stock continues to ascend.
You got one thing right. Congrats smarty.
