| | Certainly, today's General Motors is not a market entity. They just established a new data center here in Austin and their vice president for technology was here to kick that off last fall. He bragged to a convention that GM has had something like 10 or 15 consecutive quarters of profitable bottom lines. Since the federal bail out in 2009, for the last 2 or 3 years, they showed a profit on the books. So, what about the previous 100 years?
As Objectivists, we are radicals for capitalism, which means that we are concerned not with range-of-the-moment appearances, but with the roots of truth. America had two nominally private super roads: the Dixie Highway and the Lincoln Highway in the 1920s. Then, the federal government got into the highway business, going great guns in the 1950s. You have to wonder what cars would be like - if we would have cars at all - but for that.
We might have surface-effect vehicles, floating on cushions of air, not needing paved roads, only cleared rights-of-way.
Or, perhaps, given what radio and telephone technology were in the 1930s, we might have had an Internet in 1949. (Newspapers had "wire photos" since the 1890s. Our shift, alt and ctls keys are just old Teletype shifts to extend the 5-bit codes. They were based on one inch of paper, just as the 80-column punched card of 1890 was based on the "horse blanket" paper money of the time.)
Anyway... GM is a dinosaur. The brontosaurus had two brains, the larger of which was in its tail.
(Edited by Michael E. Marotta on 6/26, 6:52pm)
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