Not a teacher wrote:

---

Part of the reason: A very bright girl graduates from college in 1939. What occupations are open to her? A very bright girl graduates from college in 1999. What occupations are open to her? Not to disparage the many excellent public school teachers still out there, but overall . . .

---

I guess you get to be labeled "girl" for your entire career.

Amy Young (not a girl)

Lest we forget wrote:

---

Thanks, Patriot.  Perhaps some of the solutions to the problems you outline will involve the development of alternative fuels.  I suspect that these fuels will be developed as technology improves and as it becomes profitable to make and sell them.  I'm guessing that the market will dictate these changes more efficiently than government action, but I could be wrong. 

---

Lest we forget wrote:

---

Thanks, Patriot.  Perhaps some of the solutions to the problems you outline will involve the development of alternative fuels.  I suspect that these fuels will be developed as technology improves and as it becomes profitable to make and sell them.  I'm guessing that the market will dictate these changes more efficiently than government action, but I could be wrong. 

---

LWF, I appreciate your disclaimer ("I could be wrong") but again, capitalism's "imperfections" are so widespread as to make any rational person question the extent to which the supposed exceptions are in fact the rule. In other words, "the market" has a horrible record of dictating humane social reform and you guys know it: 

the market did not dictate the abolition of slavery; nor did it dictate the end of child labor; 

it wasn't market forces that did away with legal segregation in the USA;

the market did not end South African apartheid;

the market was perfectly OK with heroes of capital such as Henry Ford, Prescott Bush and IBM getting chummy with the Nazis and staying that way all through WWII;

the market did not dictate the introduction of industrial safety equipment in coal mining--to prevent black lung--and textile production--to prevent grey lung, both of which killed tens of thousands in the hey day of laissez faire. 

The market did not abolish the use of asbestos in industrial applications and construction where it could get into people's bodies causing agonizing, lingering death;

The market did not make it unprofitable to spray DDT on everything under creation because high cancer and stillbirth rates and the near-extiction of entire species of birds and fish cut into the corporate bottom line.

Nor did the market dictate the removal of lead out of paint and auto fuel because fetal brain damage caused a slump in stock prices;

and right now "the market" is doing nothing to help the 20-30 thousand Chinese coal miners who die on the job every year, nor the 1-3 million slave laborers in the Chinese prison industrial complex, where the near zero cost of maintaining their labor power is funding the rise of the Chinese middle class, and fattening the bottom line of American retailers ( starts with a "W") who buy prison-produced wholesale goods without making anything even vaguely like an earnest attempt to find out why those goods are so danged cheap

et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, from the mud to the stars, dot dot dot

The Market didn't help with these those things; social activists and activism did, and can; common sense applications of state power did, and can.

Capitalism is enormously creative and enormously destructive, don't you agree? So I'm not going to defend socialist welfare states like Denmark, the Netherlands (sane drug policy, though) and Sweden, certainly not to identify them as "ideal systems" or some such juvenille claptrap. It wasn't I who introduced the use of the term "utopia" in these conversations; that was projection by our board's exhausted apologists for neo-liberalism, who still need, 15 years after the collapse of the USSR, to knock down a straw man to make the excesses of world capitalism seem less egregious.

off the plantation wrote:

---

So I'm not going to defend socialist welfare states like Denmark, the Netherlands (sane drug policy, though) and Sweden, certainly not to identify them as "ideal systems" or some such juvenille claptrap. It wasn't I who introduced the use of the term "utopia" in these conversations; that was projection by our board's exhausted apologists for neo-liberalism, who still need, 15 years after the collapse of the USSR, to knock down a straw man to make the excesses of world capitalism seem less egregious.  

---

Of COURSE you're not going to defend any actual system; you'll just attack the one that exists.  It's so much easier to do that. 

Your arguments would be so much more persuasive if you could just point to a system that you consider a viable alternative to neo-liberalism.  But apparently you're not able to do that.  That's why I consider you a Utopian, and I don't regret introducing the term.

Actually, the reading I've done about the Scandinavian economies makes them sound somewhat attractive, and I was hoping that someone might actually try to explain how and why they may be superior to the US model.  But you're not into defending, merely attacking.

I suspect that you read only to reinforce your preconceptions, never to question them, which is one reason I find it hard to take you seriously.  You never responded to my much-earlier request to list the conservative periodicals you read on a regular basis, because (I suspect) you rarely read anything that takes you outside your comfort zone.

By the way, I find it amusing that you are suddenly concerned about the Chinese.  I recall having debates with folks like you in the early 70s who were apologists for Mao and even for the Soviet Union, not to mention Castro.  US capitalism was always evil, but excuses could always be made for totalitarian regimes on the far left.  Now, fortunately for you, there are fewer and fewer repugnant regimes you have to defend, because most of them have been swept (as Reagan predicted would happen - I suspect that makes you want to gag) into the dustbin of history.  This historical development gives you the luxury of only needing to attack, never to defend or explain.