An Unreasonable Man

Well, the summer is just about over so I thought I would make another post that isn’t just lovely pictures that I took while on vacation or strolling around the Windy City. I’m sitting on the train while I write this and the girl in front of me has a background picture on her computer that is the same as the ocean cliffs picture I took while in Australia and is hanging in my kitchen. It is along the Great Ocean Road south of Melbourne. I wonder if she took it herself. Anyway, back to the topic. I have always thought Ralph Nader was a bit of a kook because he looked frumpy and he was a presidential candidate that never really had a chance to win. It turns out that my position is exactly the position the two parties want me to have because they hate his guts. The Republicans because he cost them profits over many decades and Democrats because they feel his votes in 2000 prevented Gore from winning. Both are reasonable reasons for hating him (although in hindsight I happen to think he did Gore a favor). However, after watching a biography about him the other day I found out that in his heyday, the 60s through 80s, he was virtually single handily responsible for implementing nearly all the safety features that exist in automobiles today. And it wasn’t just cars. He advocated for many consumer protections, hence the hatred by Republicans. He and his “Raiders” performed full body cavity searches on just about every government agency back in the day and wrote detailed reports and books about what they deemed were inadequacies. Now I’m sure they went overboard once in a while but as any honest person who has ever worked in the government can tell you first hand, there are a lot of inadequacies to be found. I think they liked to focus on conflicts of interests between agency executives and industry groups. Now, I guess they weren’t completely effective because there are still plenty of government execs who selectively enforce rules in order to brighten their future job prospects when they decide to rejoin private industry. However, ole Ralph seemed to be the most effective protector of consumer interests perhaps in the history of the country. That is pretty admirable. What is also admirable is that as a young man taking on GM he was tempted by women paid by GM to hook up with him while he was shopping at the supermarket and didn’t take them up on it. GM was going to use it to discredit his character and somehow that was going to make the Corvair not dangerous. They didn’t know what kind of nerd they were dealing with. Too bad he hasn’t been successful in breaking up the two-party system we have been stuck with for so long. Anyway, it was a very informational film and I recommended it. Ralph Nader: An Unreasonable Man.


I also want to comment on something funny I saw on CNBC today. A guy who works for the Heritage Foundation (rich persons lobby) trying to make the argument that although less than 3% of people in the US make over $250k a year, those people are not rich. I guess you have to make over $500k to really be something special nowadays. This discussion was in regard to Obama’s proposal to raise taxes for couples over $250k. That dude must also work for all those top government executives who always cite the high cost of their kids’ college as the reason they have to quit $200k/yr jobs to go make real money in the private sector.