You know, it doesn't seem to make much difference if we discuss government, labor unions, or a bloated non-profit, like I work for. There appears to be an underlying problem. Bureaucracy. Bureaurcacies have a habit of getting fat and sluggish until they begin to rot in their own stench. Static rather than dynamic. It's like the military. The command structure in the field is dynamic and it works pretty damned well, even fast and furious once a mission is undertaken. The Pentagon is another matter completely. Entrenched bureaucracy. Fat and bloated. There seems to be a problem with how bureaucracies are structured, or even the very nature of bureaucracies themselves, because so many of them don't seem to work very well at all.
If they did, you could have basically any form of government you wanted. There'd be no reason socialism or communism couldn't work as well as a free market economy. Labor unions could be lean and mean, just like the companies whose workers they represent, government would be just as efficient as we demanded it to be, and public education would truly be the magic bullet it was meant to be. If you could figure out what's wrong with bureaucracies.
So, how about some of you social scientists putting your thinking caps on and fixing this little problem so the social systems we choose to solve our problems with might actually work for a change.
In the meantime, I'll continue with my pointless gestures of buying products which are made in the country I live in by people who live here too and supporting organized labor even though mentioning the fact I belong to a union would immediately get me fired at work....yes, some unions will accept single members just for the added support. I'll continue thinking that helping our neighbors overseas is just as important as helping our own citizens and that we need to do more of both.
Oh, and the fact that China recently had elections is about as important to the general scheme of things as the elections the USSR used to have.
I was pretty much still sitting on the fence about whose computer to buy when I do my next upgrade until I listened to the news last night. 30,000 GM employees are about to lose their jobs and China just announced an SUV they plan to sell in the US for less than $10,000. Suddenly, that "made in China" mac looks far less attractive to me than it did yesterday, but that's just me.
Thanks again for the imput.