Word: argumentive
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...course, governments in developing countries have to do a lot to foster capitalism themselves. They must pass laws and make regulations that let markets flourish, bringing the benefits of economic growth to more people. In fact, that's another argument I've heard against creative capitalism: "We don't need to make capitalism more creative. We just need governments to stop interfering with it." There is something to this. Many countries could spark more business investment - both within their borders and from the outside - if they did more to guarantee property rights, cut red tape and so on. But these...
Every memoir is in one sense an argument--a writer's version of his or her past. But, as readers who cashed in their debunked copies of A Million Little Pieces know, recent memoirs have been just as notable for the arguments they raise about the intersection of fact, truth and memory...
There are some, of course, who find anything Gates does or says nefarious. Last year the Los Angeles Times reported indignantly that while the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was busy saving lives from malaria, Africans continued to die of other causes. A more serious left-wing argument is that important social goals shouldn't have to rely on the charity of some corporation. While Gates sees what he calls "recognition"--credit for doing good--as a healthy incentive for corporations to behave well, others see the same phenomenon as propaganda and are not impressed. There is something deeply wrong with...
...always give their profits away to worthy causes if they want. But the choice should be theirs. It was argued in reply back then that social responsibility benefits the bottom line because it makes the corporation look good, thereby attracting more customers and better employees. Gates makes a similar argument. But this reasoning is a bit circular: if creative capitalism makes good business sense, then corporations deserve no special praise for practicing it. If it carries a real cost to stockholders, then Friedman has a point...
...crowd but still more a part of the past than of the future. They had cleaned up the Reagan-era mess. They had actually balanced the budget and created a surplus. They had - contra voodoo - raised taxes and yet produced an economic boom. There was a fair amount of argument behind closed doors, I'm told, between the two groups that sparred at the dawn of the Clinton era, the deficit hawks and the populists. In the end, though, there was a general agreement on the need for more government activism. Obama isn't even pretending to balance the budget...