Discussion on:

New role for public libraries: small business incubators

Our governments, their social programs and middle class economy are drowning in the toilets of private gain. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and ultimately health care costs are the result of an insatiable corporate marketing, lobbying and profit-taking of toxic agribusiness and products like high fructose corn syrup. Politicians selected by billionaires like the Koch brothers and Michael Bloomberg are afraid to eliminate the private subsidies and tax loopholes of corporations and wealthy owners who keep them in office. States and local governments are going bankrupt, awash in unfunded mandates. Why would we fund start-ups with public funds to enrich the owner and the larger fish who gobbles them up? Governments and taxes should have a limited role - this is not it.

While it helps stem the carnage of the GOP, many progressive politicians, celebrities and business moguls are not getting the story out to the people that will really help change the world. The TRUE COST of goods and services are hidden by SUBSIDIES (Pharmaceutical, Oil, Agriculture) and CORPORATE WELFARE (built into the tax code and exhorbitant profits of the Military Industrial Complex) that have the unintended consequences of making things that are harmful cheap, while things that we need (fruits veggies education health care) expensive.

We feed subsidized corn to cows and chickens so we have cheap hamburgers, and even though foreign labor and cheap oil for transporting South American vegetables keep the cost down some...a $1.00 hamburger costs more in long term health care, while a $1.00 tomato would reduce health care costs. Pharmaceutical companies pay more for marketing than for research and development of CURES (really they research for long term addictive DRUGS instead of solutions.) and most of the development costs for the drugs come from state supported universities.

In a properly MARKET DRIVEN ECONOMY, the banana pickers would receive a living wage, and the oil for transporting crops would not be subsidized by the feds. The cost of driving to and from work would ELIMINATE COMMUTING altogether and any job that could be done from home would be done from home. Meat consumption would be drastically reduced and the meat consumed would be GRASS FED and FREE RANGE while any subsidies for food would be for GREENS and FRUITS and FISH. No company could pay less than a LIVING WAGE, and all citizens would receive WELLNESS CARE and EDUCATION that included computer programming, civics, economics and ETHICS as the core curriculum. Solar/Renewable energy would make oil a product that was never burned, but rather used in manufacturing items to reuse and recycle. PATENT and COPYRIGHT mandatory licensing laws would encourage COLLABORATION to produce the BEST products, not the short term profitable ones.

I am sure I have missed a few, but I think you see the problem: We cannot make decisions about the future when we aren't given the FACTS/COSTS and CONSEQUENCES of our choices.