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To: Question_Assumptions
"Yes, much better to sympathize with Microsoft and their lawyers rather than small business owners who can't afford to defend themselves in court. Much better to assume that Microsoft is right and everyone else is wrong. Guilty until proven innocent and all that, right? "

Yup. It's that evil big business. We had better break them up and regulate them out of business. /sarcasm
203 posted on 08/21/2003 8:49:53 PM PDT by Poser
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To: Poser
Yup. It's that evil big business. We had better break them up and regulate them out of business.

No. It's a big business with the potential for evil just as the United States has a big government with a potential for evil but I would not say that all governments are inherently evil or should be broken up. The concentration of wealth and power can occur within a government, individual, or corporation. The concentration of wealth is not, itself, a problem. The concentration of power, however, can be.

Why do we have checks and balances in government? Because it holds great power and can easily abuse it to the detriment of citizens and their rights. Why does the government regulate large businesses? Because they hold great power and can easily abuse it to the detriment of the citizens and their rights. While liberals are guilty of ignoring abuse through the power of government, I think that many conservatives turn an equally blind eye to abuse through the power of corporations. I honestly don't care where the abuse comes from because the net effect is the same. I believe that the abuse of power is the problem regardless of the source of the abuse.

The excuses that people are making for the BSA sound almost identical to the excuses I've heard from tax collection agencies and other government entities to justify bullying citizens into giving them money. And if people find government abuses of power disturbing, I find it difficult to understand how people don't find abuses of power that they would not accept from a government to be unacceptable for big businesses, as well.

If, for example, the government required defendants in criminal to pay the government's legal costs and used the threat of tens of thousands of dollars of legal fees as a way to bully people into accepting fines that they did not feel they deserved without contest, would you find that acceptable? That is exactly what the BSA is being accused of here.

311 posted on 08/22/2003 7:31:07 AM PDT by Question_Assumptions
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