The government is sectional I think we forget that and end up blaming the entire beast so to speak for the teeth and ass hole. (Pardon my language) I agree, the government, even Obama (and I am not a fan) has, have and will continue to do good things. Those things will continue to go unnoticed though because they do so many utterly retarded things to outweigh them. lol

I have a hard time noticing that they are trying to save my precious trees in Michigan (?)(I see um mowin' um down here still :( ) when I can openly see them raping the Constitution on a daily basis.

I think you're right, corporations, government and individuals do a lot for which they never receive credit for. Anybody that wishes to have a world totally free of private enterprise, of government, or even worse of individual thought and expression is plain wrong.

All 3, the individual, the corporation and the government can be a strong tool for improvement of the human condition as long as they all remember where each gets its authority from. The individual is the centerpiece of both corporations and governments. As long as both government and corporations remember that, more importantly as long as individuals remember that those 2 types of entities work for them, good should come from them and gratitude easier to give and receive.

Well, actually, I think government doesn't get enough credit, and corporations are inflated too much.

I've worked for both, and frankly, the agencies I worked for hustled a lot harder, and were way more productive than the corps I dealt with, where they got pretty lax during good times, when all they really cared about was "reasonable rate of return".

One evening I found myself talking about this to an efficiency expert over beers, and he told me something interesting.

He said that actually, in north America, in large corporations, it's really only about one person out of ten who's really working at capacity, with the other nine out of ten surfing along on the coat tails, whereas in a well organized government agency, it's closer to one person out of five working to capacity.

He also said that that's one of the metrics used by Japanese national financial policy planners to establish regulations for how to govern and tax Japanese corporations.

Specifically, they know that in north America it's one person in ten who's really working, so their target was to have it be that Japanese corporations should have a productivity level of one person in five actually being productive to capacity, and that if they could maintain that, then they'd always be able to maintain a positive balance of trade with the US, and it worked until the US started buying from China instead of Japan.

Now Japanese are trying to gear up their productivity level to match China, but it's hard, because China has an advantage in natural resources, plus Japanese had started to get accustomed to having wealth and some time to enjoy it, whereas Chinese are still in a state of being willing to work like dogs.

In any case, I know from personal experience that for some government agencies, they are way more productive than what would be called for if it was a corporate venture, plus... those initiatives for stable timber harvests are *not* coming from the corporations, are they?

Not that the corporations *couldn't* if they had to, but who's going to make them, and how *can* they what with that liability to shareholders?

That sword of Damocles that US corps live under wherein they are expected to always maximize shareholder dividends each quarter actually stresses things out so that in the long run they're not being as productive as they could if allowed to catch some breath and do some real planning.

I'm reminded of the time when the US decided to enter WWII. The president called in the auto manufacturing executives and told them they needed to convert from cars and trucks to jeeps and tanks, and the execs *all* said it was *impossible* because there was no way they could retool the assembly lines as fast as needed to happen without being liable to the shareholders, whereupon the President declared that he would order the shareholders to back off, which he did, and in *four* days the plant managers had the factories retooled for jeeps and tanks.

I feel that way quite often. Everybody sure complains alot but I'd like to see them do better or try to live without them. They carry the rest of us. I recommend everyone read "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.