the best way to do any kind of business online is to subscibe to a financial site like billeo.com which provides what it calls an online shopping assistant that not only keeps a check on all your online activities, but also keeps a list of all bills that need to be paid. it also has an auto fill option which will fill up the form on a shopping site automatically, thus eliminating the pop up window completely.thus just looking through your detials on the site will give you an idea about all serives that have been signed up, leaving no room for nasty surprises for when the mail comes in!!
Greg,
I have to disagree with you. While your Friedman-esque arguments would have been effective in a pre-New Deal America, we can no longer boast ourselves as a completely free market, so it’s impractical to behave like we are one.
If we don’t give any aid to GM and Ford, if they’re forced into bankruptcy (or worse) it doesn’t only hurt GM and Ford. It hurts companies like yours, it hurts Financial Services providers, it hurts third party manufacturers like Goodyear, it devastates the dealership level. Think of towns like Union City, TN whose economies are mostly supported by a Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant. What happens to the families who depend on industries which may wind up not being viable in an American economy that no longer boasts an auto industry?
Adam Smith never could have envisioned 21st century America when he was writing Wealth of Nations. Should we really hold onto his ideals, to our own detriment, just out of principle? Technology, globalization and short sighted corporate greed have made that ideal obsolete.
As Michael Douglass said when asked by a reporter if greed was not good anymore: “My name is not Gordon. It’s a character I played 20 years ago.”