Thus, please consider the broader implications and timeliness of all this while reading and reflecting on what Mr. Sowell had to say in Notable & Quotable:
"Thomas Sowell on J.C. Penney as an exemplar of the rags-to-riches success story that capitalism makes possible.
From Thomas Sowell's "Basic Economics" (2000):
James Cash Penney did not start with a lot of money. He was in fact raised in poverty and began his retail career as just a one-third partner in a store in a little town in Wyoming, at a time when Sears and Montgomery Ward were unchallenged giants of nationwide retailing. Yet his insights into the changing conditions of retailing eventually forced these giants into doing things his way, on pain of extinction. . . . In a later era, a clerk in a J.C. Penney store named Sam Walton would learn retailing from the ground up and then put his knowledge and insights to work in his own store, which would eventually expand to become the Wal-Mart chain, with sales larger than those of Sears and J.C. Penney combined.
One of the great handicaps of economies run by political authorities, whether under medieval mercantilism or modern communism, is that insights which arise among the masses have no such powerful leverage as to force those in authority to change the way they do things."
Summing Up
A -- And in the private sector, today we have Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Netflix and other success stories based on the internet and other new ways of doing old things.
B -- Meanwhile, in the public sector we still have the same old top down K-12 educational model, the post office and the government protected power of public sector unions. And now we're adding ObamaCare to the mix.
Guess which model -- A or B -- in the end will save the 'middle class' and the American way.
Thanks. Bob.
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