Nelson Otto
Jefferson City
Dear Editor:
Over the years, I am continually surprised by the letters to the editor that seem shocked at the thought of corporations seeking profit. It doesn’t seem to matter what product they are selling, it is made out as an immoral concept that they are making profits. I often wonder what they thought corporations actually did. The whole purpose of creating a business is to make money and one makes a corporation to protect their personal assets by limiting their financial liability to only that which they invested in the business. A successful business does so by providing you, the consumer, with a quality product or service that you value more than your money or the alternative. Members of our society have gotten it in their heads that the products and services provided by corporations and businesses should be provided free of charge or with little or no profit. That would be a not for profit, not a business.
The biggest problem with our economy today isn’t capitalism, it is crony capitalism. A free market capitalist system is self regulating and benefits both the consumer as well as the producer. One of the latest discoveries with the “dark” web is how companies, selling illicit items such as drugs, and consumers have created their own self-regulating system that works. The Ted video “How the mysterious dark net is going mainstream by Jamie Bartlett” explains how the unregulated dark web free market system did what economists said it would, “lower prices, improve the quality of products and create innovated consumer services.”
What is happening outside the dark web is being caused by government regulations. Companies become lazy and petition the government for regulations that benefit them and stifle competitors and startup companies. These government-supported companies grow and become government-supported monopolies that eventually become “too large to fail.” So even if miss managed they stay in operation and reward poor business leaders. Some of our politicians are starting to stand up and remove many of these regulations like those limiting and stifling new businesses. We need to move forward with the reduction of these regulations and begin to cut corporate welfare and bailouts, which will force companies to evolve or fail. Time to return to true capitalism and leave out the cronies.