Michael Lissack in case this happens to them. So too with tobacco, asbestos, prescription drugs, hospitals.... The list goes on and on. At our expense. These valuable goods and services are entirely unrelated to the suit of clothes, car, or steak that we are consciously purchasing. If we were given the choice, we might make different decisions. If faced with a choice between funding medical tragedies like auto accident victims and funding behavior caused problems, such as a pregnant fourteen-year-old, in our world of lim- ited resources might not there be a difference in which we choose to pay for and how much? And if the opposite choice is made for us, is this not a form of theft? Many of our most costly government programs are designed to subsi- dize business, either through direct grants and services, as in agriculture, or indirectly through lucrative contracts, as in the defense industry. The private world profitability feeds from the public trough. In cities throughout the nation, working-class neighborhoods have been razed to make way for shopping malls, industrial parks, sports arenas, and convention centers, all built with public funds. While business benefits from such ventures, the public monies invested are seldom recovered, and the projects often become continual drains on municipal budgets. When the New York Yankees threat- ened to leave town unless their stadium was refurbished, the city expended $28 million on the job and granted the Yankees a lease on very favorable terms. More than two decades later the city is still servicing a multi-million dollar debt and the Yankees were enjoying handsome profits. Since then nearly every city with a major league sports franchise has be exhorted to fund new stadiums. These kinds of arrangements are at the heart of both the urban fiscal crisis in America and the distrust of the political system by the average citizen. Our transportation system provides another example of how private profit has been allowed to take precedence over public need. Earlier in this century the transporting of passengers and goods was done mostly by elec- tric ear and railroad. One mass-transit railway ear can do the work of fifty au- tomobiles, and railroads consume one-sixth the energy of trucks to transport goods. But these very efficiencies are what make railroads so undesirable to
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