Why do people considered politicians to be the most crooked people on the planet yet,

  • News
  • Thread starter pentazoid
  • Start date
  • Tags
    Planet
In summary: However, businessmen, who provide far more for society than politicians, do not receive the same level of appreciation despite their contributions. While some argue that paying for goods from businessmen is a form of appreciation, politicians also receive payment yet fail to fulfill their promises. Businessmen also tend to provide quality products that satisfy consumers, which should warrant greater appreciation. Additionally, their impact on society, such as the development of the assembly line and personal computers, should be recognized and celebrated like rock musicians. Despite some shady businessmen, it cannot be assumed that all politicians are corrupt. In fact, businessmen and politicians are both susceptible
  • #1
pentazoid
146
0
You will find people making endless donations to their campaigns and you find endless bumper stickers of politicians attached on the bumpers of cars, people becoming emotional at political rallies at the mere presence of a politician, even though the politician will not fullfill all of there campaign promises. You would even find posters of politicians on peoples walls, Obama being a recent example. Why won't you ever find posters of businessmen and bumper stickers of businessmen like we find bumperstickers of politicians? Businessmen provide far more for society than politicians , so I would think there would be greater appreciation for businessmen because they produced things we need and things we take for granted. Some may say that we do show appreciation for businessmen by paying thems for the goods that they produced. But we also pay the politicans we elect and they don't fullfill half of their promises once they are elected. However, typically most businesspeople provide quality products and therefore there consumers are satisfied most of the time. Businesspeople should be appreciated like Rock musicians are appreciated, since they both fullfill our desires. There should be of Bill Gates and Larry page bumperstickers everywhere!
 
Physics news on Phys.org
  • #2


You mean like Ramalinga Raju bumper stickers?
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601091&sid=aW.kZBjQwPTs&refer=india [Broken]

Or Bernie Madeoff?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
  • #3


LowlyPion said:
You mean like Ramalinga Raju bumper stickers?
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601091&sid=aW.kZBjQwPTs&refer=india [Broken]

Or Bernie Madeoff?

Wherever you find a shady businessmen , you will probably find a crooked politiician . Politicians enabled shady businesses to thrive unfairly because of the corporate subsidies they are given by politicians because of endless lobbying in Congress. I Didn't say businesspeople are all saints, I only said businesspeople offer a lot more to society , than politicians, and without businesspeople , products like cars would be only affordable to the superwealthy had Henry Ford not developed the assembly line that would make the production of cars cheap , and therefore affordable to the masses. Were it not for Bill gates, who envisioned personal computers in every home, computers probably would not have been in everyone's home.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
  • #4


pentazoid said:
Wherever you find a shady businessmen , you will probably find a crooked politiician .

I certainly don't think that's true. Human nature is fallible. And businessmen and politicians succumb to their fallibilities likely in equal measure. But one doesn't necessarily enable the other.

Were it not for Bill gates, who envisioned personal computers in every home, computers probably would not have been in everyone's home.
That is just plain not true. Bill Gates took commercial advantage to create a monopoly and has profited handsomely as a result. The personal computer wasn't his vision. Printing money was however.

Don't tell me you think Al Gore invented the Internet too.
 
  • #5


LP, you make Bill Gates out to be a crook. He is simply an entreprenuer that had a good, aggressive business plan. "Printing money" was not his vision it was a result of his marketing and business savy.
 
  • #6


drankin said:
LP, you make Bill Gates out to be a crook. He is simply an entreprenuer that had a good, aggressive business plan. "Printing money" was not his vision it was a result of his marketing and business savy.

I'm not suggesting that he was a crook. But neither was he the visionary that invented the PC when more than anything it would seem that his vision was more about how to make himself rich by creating, maintaining and extending his monopoly advantage. There's nothing wrong with being successful. Just in purloining this idea that people should be grateful for his vision, when his vision was clearly to enrich himself.
 
  • #7


LowlyPion said:
I'm not suggesting that he was a crook. But neither was he the visionary that invented the PC when more than anything it would seem that his vision was more about how to make himself rich by creating, maintaining and extending his monopoly advantage. There's nothing wrong with being successful. Just in purloining this idea that people should be grateful for his vision, when his vision was clearly to enrich himself.

I think his initial vision was to create a software interface to make the PC more user-friendly, and he certainly did that (and yes, I believe that was rather visionary).

Let's not forget how much Bill Gates invests into charitable causes (probably more than anyone else on Earth).

To paint him as some sort of money grubbing greedy bastard who is only interested in lining his own pockets is a little unfair.
 
  • #8


LowlyPion said:
I'm not suggesting that he was a crook. But neither was he the visionary that invented the PC when more than anything it would seem that his vision was more about how to make himself rich by creating, maintaining and extending his monopoly advantage. There's nothing wrong with being successful. Just in purloining this idea that people should be grateful for his vision, when his vision was clearly to enrich himself.

If you knew him now, then you might take that back. Bill Gates is all about having humanitarian visions now days. He has one of the most successful charitable foundations in the world. When asked by a reporter if he would have to cut back on the charity because of the economy, he said that, though he would be making less, he would be donating more because more people are going to suffer.
 
  • #9


LowlyPion said:
I'm not suggesting that he was a crook. But neither was he the visionary that invented the PC when more than anything it would seem that his vision was more about how to make himself rich by creating, maintaining and extending his monopoly advantage. There's nothing wrong with being successful. Just in purloining this idea that people should be grateful for his vision, when his vision was clearly to enrich himself.

Whats wrong with enriching yourself. Everybody on this Earth is enriching themselves. Why would you put somebody else's desires above your own?
 
  • #10


LowlyPion said:
I certainly don't think that's true. Human nature is fallible. And businessmen and politicians succumb to their fallibilities likely in equal measure. But one doesn't necessarily enable the other.

Politicians are worse than businesspeopl because they steal your earnings to invest in projects and programs that might have absolutely nothing to do with you such as the US taking 600 million dollars worth of taxpayer money and investing in projects like the Large Hadron collider. Granted , I am this fabulous accelerator will take us back 3 minutes into the big bang, but I am sure many people who are not interested in the LHC and therefore should not be forced to financed this projects. Whereas businesspeople don't coerce you into buying there product.People like Bill gates used persuasion rather than coercion to get people to buy his software.
 
  • #11


pentazoid said:
Whereas businesspeople don't coerce you into buying there product.People like Bill gates used persuasion rather than coercion to get people to buy his software.

The majority of programs out there are geared for (if not exclusively for) use with Windows and aside from Macs just about any laptop or home computer you buy will automatically come with Windows on it. Whether or not this is Gates' fault I do not know. I'm sure his investors want to make money and there are probably hundreds of people working on marketing whom Gates has never even spoken to. But to say that we are not coerced into using Windows is rather silly considering the circumstances.
 
  • #12


TheStatutoryApe said:
The majority of programs out there are geared for (if not exclusively for) use with Windows and aside from Macs just about any laptop or home computer you buy will automatically come with Windows on it. Whether or not this is Gates' fault I do not know. I'm sure his investors want to make money and there are probably hundreds of people working on marketing whom Gates has never even spoken to. But to say that we are not coerced into using Windows is rather silly considering the circumstances.

Nobody is coerced into Windows. It's basically the only consumer operating system that works with everything (for the most part). There are plenty of free open source operating systems one could choose but that comes with a lot effort in order to get it to work with all your other hardware, peripherals, and the software you want to run. Microsoft did the work up front and created a platform that anyone can create software or a hardware product on. It is a "killer app". What people don't like is that there really isn't another choice.
 
  • #13


pentazoid said:
People like Bill gates used persuasion rather than coercion to get people to buy his software.

The value of scientific knowledge, I will leave to others to determine for themselves. It's true the low hanging fruit that can be worked out with common materials from a lab workbench have likely already been plucked. The value of the LHC ...? Manned trips to Mars ... ? Certainly the paybacks are less identifiable in monetary terms.

But as to Bill Gates, I'd say you are vastly mischaracterizing Microsoft's so called "persuasion" as they have leveraged their monopoly in operating systems to applications.
 
  • #14


drankin said:
Nobody is coerced into Windows. It's basically the only consumer operating system that works with everything (for the most part). There are plenty of free open source operating systems one could choose but that comes with a lot effort in order to get it to work with all your other hardware, peripherals, and the software you want to run. Microsoft did the work up front and created a platform that anyone can create software or a hardware product on. It is a "killer app". What people don't like is that there really isn't another choice.

Coerce may seem a rather strong word, I agree, but that is generally what we consider a monopoly to be: coersing the consumer. And its not that Microsoft puts so much hard work into making an OS that is friendly to all hardware and software but rather that the near monopoly of the market that Microsoft enjoys means hardware and software companies must make their products Windows friendly above all else if they wish to be competetive and remain viable.
 
  • #15


I don't really want this thread to focus on Bill Gates, but I want to addressed the person who said Microsoft is a monopoly and that Microsoft software is the only software on the market right now. I didn't think Linux and Macintosh utilized Microsoft software on their computers, so they must be using software that is not microsoft.

Anyway, Politicians or more powerful than businesspeople because otherwise businesspeople wouldn't ask for subsidies from the government if they wanted to wield power . They would be able to wield power all on their own.
 
  • #16


You would do well then not to lionize business people as humanitarians, when in the final analysis they are motivated by self interest and actualizing their commercial interests.
 
  • #17


pentazoid said:
I don't really want this thread to focus on Bill Gates, but I want to addressed the person who said Microsoft is a monopoly and that Microsoft software is the only software on the market right now. I didn't think Linux and Macintosh utilized Microsoft software on their computers, so they must be using software that is not microsoft.

Anyway, Politicians or more powerful than businesspeople because otherwise businesspeople wouldn't ask for subsidies from the government if they wanted to wield power . They would be able to wield power all on their own.

Lol.. you don't have to be so subtle about it! ;-)
And I didn't exactly say monopoly but that is certainly the accusation which has been around for some time. I'm not sure what to think about it myself.

I see two contending differences between businessmen and politicians:
1) Businessmen are "voted" on by consumers on a day to day basis while politicians stay in office at least for their term.
2) A businessman who finds him[her]self in a good situation can not be impeached/overthrown/fired without significant harm done to their comapany and hence investors, workers, ect.
 
  • #18


LowlyPion said:
You would do well then not to lionize business people as humanitarians, when in the final analysis they are motivated by self interest and actualizing their commercial interests.

You're motivated by self-interest too. So you're no different.
 

1. Why do people consider politicians to be the most crooked people on the planet?

There are a few reasons why people may view politicians as being corrupt or dishonest. One reason is that politicians are often in positions of power and influence, which can lead to temptation and unethical behavior. Additionally, the media and public scrutiny often highlight cases of corruption or unethical behavior in politics, leading to a perception that all politicians are dishonest. It is also worth noting that some politicians may engage in unethical behavior in order to gain or maintain power, which can contribute to the negative perception of the profession.

2. Are all politicians corrupt?

No, not all politicians are corrupt. While there have been cases of corruption and unethical behavior in politics, it is unfair to label all politicians as being dishonest. Just like in any profession, there are individuals who act with integrity and others who engage in unethical practices. It is important to evaluate each politician individually rather than making sweeping generalizations.

3. How does corruption in politics affect society?

Corruption in politics can have a significant impact on society. It can erode trust in government and lead to a lack of faith in the political system. This can result in apathy and decreased engagement in the democratic process. Additionally, corruption can divert resources away from important societal issues and result in unfair advantages for certain individuals or groups. It can also create a culture of dishonesty and unethical behavior, which can have far-reaching consequences.

4. What measures are in place to prevent corruption in politics?

There are various measures in place to prevent corruption in politics. These include laws and regulations, such as campaign finance laws and conflict of interest regulations. There are also independent bodies and agencies responsible for overseeing and investigating cases of corruption. Additionally, public awareness and media scrutiny can act as deterrents to unethical behavior in politics.

5. Can corruption in politics ever be eliminated?

While it may be difficult to completely eliminate corruption in politics, there are steps that can be taken to reduce its prevalence. This includes implementing stricter regulations and enforcement mechanisms, promoting transparency and accountability, and fostering a culture of ethical behavior in politics. It also requires the commitment and cooperation of politicians, citizens, and institutions to work towards a more ethical and fair political system.

Similar threads

  • General Discussion
Replies
28
Views
9K
  • Sci-Fi Writing and World Building
2
Replies
56
Views
5K
  • STEM Academic Advising
Replies
9
Views
1K
  • General Discussion
3
Replies
73
Views
9K
Replies
17
Views
7K
  • General Discussion
2
Replies
43
Views
13K
Replies
11
Views
3K
Replies
133
Views
24K
  • General Discussion
Replies
2
Views
3K
Back
Top