Letter: Some intervention may be needed to protect trust
Ms. de Rugy's article last week pertained to price controls. She opposes them and asserts that inflation is not the result of corporate greed or pervasive monopolies. However, she fails ever to mention the huge profits now being recorded by our national companies.
She claims that "Inflation isn't caused by corporate greed." Meanwhile earnings of CEOs vs median workers have risen from 51:1 in 1989, to 278:1 in 2018, to over 300:1 most recently. (Data per The Economic Policy Institute) No greed in those numbers?
True, price controls are likely a wrong solution. To dis-incentivize gouging (that may contribute to inflation) a much better solution would be to tax profits fairly and in particular to target excess profits.
The other article, by Ms. Saunders, wades into some very mushy territory, so-called "misinformation." She is rightly concerned about the possible suppression of free speech that can result from banning certain kinds of information. Such information might be regarded as inaccurate, grossly exaggerated, potentially harmful or simply incorrect, for example. There exists such a wide range of gradations that any policy for weeding out the unacceptable from the rest soon begins to look like trying to define propaganda or pornography.
What further complicates this task is that so many of the topics under scrutiny are not only controversial, but also are dynamic and may exist at the moment as incomplete or inconclusive issues for which fair judgment must be deferred.
What particularly brings attention to this subject is suspicion of the motives behind so much of the public conversation we have heard during the past few years - talk intended to divert, subvert, deceive, etc. When such talk from the same source is coupled with the continuous repetition of outright lies, there does seem a reasonable public interest basis for intervention in the name of insuring the necessary trust and unity sufficient to function as a viable society.
Jim Kinney
Vernon Hills