They don’t. If the only business is a single mom & pop, then they are a monopoly as much as a big business is. But, if you had a half-dozen, or so, mom & pops, then you’d have price competition. Furthermore, these mom & pops also have to compete in the area of product selection and customer service- things that are sorely lacking in a big business like Wal-Mart.
There are not many people who would give up being a lowly employee of a mom & pop in order to become a store manager and work 60 hours a week for a company like Wal-Mart.
Wouldn’t it be better to own 1/10 of a mom & pop rather than 1/1000000000 of Wal-Mart? You’d have more say in how the mom & pop is run and there’d be less chance that a corporate decision will cost you in the long run. Just consider how bad things are for Wal-Mart right now. That company has spent so much money building supercenters that it can no longer keep its shelves stocked. Wal-Mart will likely be the next Kmart and how many investors will go down with it?
How do you achieve both? Human nature being what it is few people will sacrifice profits now for the sake of profits for their grandchildren.
How much profit would have been available from such thinning? Do you mean to cut trees that are 100+ years old or would you just remove the underbrush- that you may not be able to sell?
I’m almost 40 so I have vague memories of the environmentalist scare mongering from the 1970s. But, I also remember how conservation efforts were encouraged. Our economy was larger in the late 1980s than it had been in the late 1970s, but we used less energy because of conservation efforts and we were less polluting (in terms of economic output) because of government regulation.
God. No moral absolutes are part and parcel of liberalism.
Give some examples. Where should we be intervening in the world now and where should we not be?
To some extent Social Security. Due to the tendency of business and industry to consolidate (in the absence of antitrust regulations) investment companies could easily get to be too large to want to deal with people that don’t have thousands upon thousands of dollars to invest.
Education is another area. Granted public schools are not a good deal considering the results to cost ratio, but they are far better than your average private school is here in Florida.
Only to the extent that individuals agree to not be greedy and are willing to be civic minded.
Most historian and scholars trace modern Anglo-American conservative thought to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, in which he declared, “I should, therefore, suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with the solidity of property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too, and without them liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long.”
Conservatives don’t expect tradition to be able to accomplish everything, and tradition without force has no effect.
If conservatives do not fear class warfare, why did the Founding Fathers create the U.S. as a republic rather than a democracy? Why do you think they put checks on political power- especially checking the power of the (poor) majority?
Maybe now, but not historically, at least in the U.S. Both the Homestead Act and anti-trust laws were bulwarks against the concentration of wealth and the power that comes from wealth.
Then you need to do some research into what conservatism is and how it originated.
Live and let live is what you just said is the aim of “modern liberal philosophy that is destroying individualism.” Are you sure you know what a conservative is?
