[Terry Oxandale]

I can agree to most of what was quoted, but as is always the case, with wisdom, comes some degree of ignorance.

Originally Posted by Scott Calabro

The black market was a way of getting around government controls. It was a way of enabling the free market to work. It was a way of opening up, enabling people.

True, provide everybody is engaged in the black market. Those that don't, compensate for those that do.

Originally Posted by Scott Calabro

The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.

Or more acurately, the impression that both parties benefit. But both parties benefiting each other at the detriment of the much larger non-participanting sector is not the attribute this tries to portray.

Originally Posted by Scott Calabro

The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes.

More and more folks in the service industry seem to be paying less taxes simply because the paper trail is easier to hide. Those of us who work for a paycheck cannot hide or distort that trail, forcing us take on the burden of that consequence.

Originally Posted by Scott Calabro

The only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that's why it's so essential to preserving individual freedom.

Greed in any free or non-free market will get a 'lot of people' to cooperate. I don't know that a free market has a hold on that concept.

Originally Posted by Scott Calabro

The problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm, capitalism is that kind of a system.

This is probably the one I disagree with most. The last three years demonstrates the kind of system that promotes unrestricted or unchecked greed, and its harmful consequences. In the old world when ethics was preached in business courses, I could agree to some degree. But today, the bottom line is all that matters, that the end justifies the means, and common sense about right and wrong is so blurred, one cannot distinguish between the two. In that kind of world, free-world capitalism no longer holds a luster, and instead looks tarnished and dilapidated. That is when we risk losing everything for the sake of the few that abused it.