Good for Each, Bad for All

Ernest Partridge has a good article over at the Underground about the key difference between the progressive and regressive elements of our political landscape.

"Every complex game requires a referee, beholden to no 'side' but rather functioning to regulate the activity and enforce the rules, to the advantage all players in general, and none in particular. In the game of commerce, the referee is the government. For history has shown, time and again, that an unregulated free market leads to monopoly. In other words, it contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. The remedy, of course, is anti-trust legislation, which is to say, government. (See my 'The New Alchemy').

'Good for each, bad for all.' 'Bad for each, good for all.' The 'referee function' of democratic government - these are not original ideas. Quite the contrary, throughout the civilized and industrialized world, they are commonplace and virtually axiomatic, like gravity and the multiplication tables.

But not here in the United States. The free-market absolutism plus libertarian anarchism proclaimed here by the right wing and accepted with scant criticism by the corporate media, is regarded abroad as somewhat insane. Unfortunately for us all, most Americans are immersed in this insanity."