HOBSON'S CHOICE OR MORTON'S FORK

 

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

A 'HOBSON'S CHOICE': PRIVATE VERSUS PUBLIC ENTERPRISE

Actually a 'Morton's Fork', but who understands the fine distinctions? (See the famous Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs litigation, for a judicial example.)

Americans have often been told, usually by politicians, who need to pay back private corporate political supporters, that a good way to handle such and such a problem is to return it to the private sector, or to give a tax break, incentive, or credit, etc., to the private sector, which is more efficient and virtuous than government.

On the other hand, Americans have been told by other politicians, who are catering to a different but equally deluded patronage, that a certain initiative needs to be undertaken by government, that a new government agency, department, or blue ribbon committee, is necessary or merely very beneficial in this case.

Americans need to be advised that American, federal, state, and local, publicly administered programs are generally matched in ineffeciency, ineptitude, and corruption, by American private sector business enterprises, small, medium, and MNC sized, regardless of the private industry or sector. There are well founded reasons for this, based on the history of the structures and relations between the public and private sectors. Aug 17, 2010."

fn May 1, 2019 "A Hobson's Choice versus a Morton's Fork"....... 

Rumpole, an Old Bailey trial lawyer barrister hack, would disparage such a distinction, and the erudite judges who make them,  as a "fine point of law".