[rant]I had a little extra time on my way to the airport in LA yesterday so I stopped by a Best Buy. I want to see the new T-Mobile Mytouch phone so I asked them about it.
Turns out they don't carry T-Mobile at this Best Buy. Talking to the sales person, he told me that their contract with Verizon states they can carry only two other brands of phones so they had AT&T and Sprint. Other stores might carry AT&T and T-Mobile. So this is the glorious free market which is supposed to benefit consumers. Corporations restricting their competition. Surprised they let ANY other competitors in the store while they were at it.
Another good example is the Bluray/HD-DVD battle. How many consumers voted by, you know, buying a player? Did the free market choose a winner? It did, if you consider the free market being Sony and Toshiba cutting deals with studios to make their discs exclusive to one format or the other. In the end, the more expensive, less efficient technology won out before the consumer had a choice.
And now we are hearing lots of people arguing for free market based solutions to health care. Again, the markets are lot more free for the corporations than the consumers which leads to higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.
[/rant]
Hale: You got it. I don't understand the problem with the public option? If a "reform only" bill is passed, us in the middle will "as usual" be screwed by Insurance Companies.
ReplyDeleteThe market might still be somewhat "free" for the little entrepreneur, like hot dog guy downtown, but look at the BS even he had to go through. On a grander scale, though, we are at the mercy of the corporations and banks. Was it a "free" market that recently nosedived and took a third of our money, or a market geared toward rewarding the greedy few at the expense of the many?
ReplyDeleteI didn't even see the movie but, Michael Douglas said it in "Wall Street" "GREED IS GREAT" I guess what you can see in the movies is sometimes true.
ReplyDeleteSometimes I wish I could be "The richest man in the world only so I could screw the OTHER filthy rich people.