Monopolies

4 Pages 1065 Words

You are driving on the highway when suddenly a limousine cuts you off. You look around to see if anything had caused this action. Nothing looks amiss, just a couple of cars a truck or two and a jeep on the highway. Little do you realize that the jeep is a Ford Explorer, and the person in the limousine is a Ford executive who knows how dangerous the jeep can be. Numerous people over the years have been injured and killed, when their Ford Explorer flipped over while driving. From its inception it was known that it performed poorly in rollover tests. That didn’t stop Ford from putting it on the market, because they knew it was going to be a huge moneymaker. The questions are why wasn’t anything done to stop this product from being allowed on the street? Who should have been responsible? What can be done in the future to make sure this doesn’t happen again?
Would it be so shocking to say that that big business, huge corporations have taken over? Are they the one’s deciding what is right and wrong? Lets be reasonable what can be so wrong with a jeep if it’s the best selling jeep in America. All anyone cares about these days is market price, what does Wall Street think of us. This is the same company who in the 1970’s actually had the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) put a value on a human life (about $200,000). They then used this number against the cost of modifying the Ford Pinto that was known to have a faulty gas tank, to decide whether it was worth fixing it or not. Finally, a recall was ordered, but only after being on the market for 7 years and 28 lives lost. The government has deregulated the market to the point where there really is no one watching over the auto industry. In Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign he declared,” the US auto industry is being regulated to death”. This took place right after the Pinto incident. Instead of harsher regulations for messing up, the government decided t...