When corporations became solely investment vehicles and ceased to consider, as their primary business, the function or product they were formed to produce, the ethics of ‘business’ changed.

Should I start a business, I would endeavour to produce the very best product I could and sell it at a fair price until I discovered that I could sell any trash I wanted as a viable product and set my own rules if my congressional representatives got a large enough share. In fact, I could write my own rules and make them the law of the land. If anyone complained I would simply hire lawyers and lobbyists and squash them or buy newspapers and TV stations and have my employees call them commies or conservatives or whatever name was unappealing that week and the public simply wouldn’t notice that I had gamed the system.

Ed Gutteling is a friend of free enterprise and I believe he thinks the less government meddling the better. I agree, but with a caveat. If the government is going to butt out of things in which they have no business or should have no say, they must get out across the board. Just get the hell out completely; but that’s not what we observe. What we see is that the people with the deepest pockets get the biggest taxpayer subsidies and the largest tax breaks. They are called “Too Big To Fail”. The rest of us are not too big to fail and we are failing, faster every day.

This story has already been chronicled numerous times. Look it up: “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity: Exploring the French Revolution”.

We have had private schools and colleges for centuries.

Would Dr. Gutteling suggest that law enforcement, road maintenance, or public education, among other public health and safety concerns, also be run as private businesses?

The problem with privatizing the public commons is that “money devalues what it can’t measure”, to quote Ivan Illich. Cooperative and equitable access to these things is not in the nature of the capitalist beast, if you will. Communities’ interests, monetary profit minimized, become a threat to those seeking market force profit.

For example, why distribute clean drinking water when you could run it for profit? Non-profit education? ..You could really pay teachers a lot more if we’d just run it as a private enterprise.. Can’t afford it? Screw you. This is survival of the greediest..

I ain’t buyin’ it.

Health care costs should not include profit because it is impossible and inappropriate to value the value in dollar terms a healthy human being.

Remove profit from health care costs and you have sufficient funds to pay for the medical care of all Americans.

Imagine what life would be like without the worry of medical bills, co-pays, and cost of health insurance.

Doctors are not economists or accountants. They know how to provide health care, not the economics of health care.

Huge amount so of money are spent promoting foods that are unhealthy. Huge amounts of money are spent promoting prescriptions drugs whose benefits and side effects are generally beyond the understanding of the average person.

The current reality is that private business is thriving by promoting unhealthy products and bandaid fixes for the consequences of promoting these products.

Basic common sense has been forgotten because it has not been taught within the family, in schools, on television for some time now.

For instance, Dr. Dean Ornish created a program to reverse heart disease. Over ten years ago, my own diabetic mother followed this program after being told that her heart function was not sufficient to survive open heart surgery.

After one year of following Dr. Ornish’s program, her heart function had improved to the point where she had the surgery. Yet she almost died because of the lack of communication among her various specialists.

We fired the doctors who refused to agree to a single point-person doctor and obtained doctors who were willing to co-operate. And so she is still with us today.

1 in every 7 Americans have no access to health care, regardless of quality.

Given that our nation spends more per person than any other nation on Earth, this is quite simply unacceptalbe.

Take private profit out of healthcare and healthcare becomes an asset to this nation, rather than a liability.