Re: dbts: Privacy Fetishes, Perfect Competition, and the Foregone (fwd)

[Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>]

At 12:18 PM 11/11/98 -0500, Petro or other people wrote:
>	Sub-contracting can often lead to cost savings. For instance,
>instead of each insurer having their own fire station network, they could
>all share one, and only pay a certain cost-per-subscriber.

Government subcontracting can be yet another excuse for graft and kickbacks
or it can be an opportunity for the private sector to seriously compete 
for government business, or at least an opportunity to compete for graft :-)
Sometimes this can save money for the public, though seldom as much
as letting services be provided by the private sector.

>>> 	Looking different is not illegal.
What's that, white boy?
>>> 	Thinking different is not illegal.
Always has been, anywhere, any time....


>	Listen Fuckwad:
>	(1) there are paved roads from one coast to the other, as well as
>railways.
>	(3) Most of the roads being built with federal funds are for
>"congestion  relief", not roads to new places so troops can move.

Of course they are, and everybody's pretty much known it all along,
but "defense" was the excuse used for having the Feds get into the
road-building business on a much more massive scale than ever before.
Much of it corresponded nicely with "urban renewal", the 60s policy
of making cities more beautiful by replacing black peoples' houses with
freeways.  Once (white) people got used to freeways, they mostly
stopped complaining about expenditures, and started complaining that
they didn't have _their_ freeway yet.

>	The Army. Marines, and National Guard are fully capable of getting
>whereever they need to go with our without the current highway system, if
>they weren't they'd be worthless.

No, but the industrial base that keeps the military functioning
does benefit from the highway system.  

>	(2) There hasn't been a war fought on CONUS since we attacked Mexico.

Excuse me?  Are you talking about some recent attack on Mexico,
or are you referring to the Mexican War of 1846?
Or are you contending that the Confederate States weren't part of the
Contiguous United States, and therefore the Union's ReConquest 
of the South wasn't in CONUS?  Or that the Indian wars in the west
weren't wars, just Police Actions, or that the various ex-Mexican
territories weren't States yet, and thus not CONUS?



				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
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