Sorry, hope you don't mind my using English as I have only an atrocious Chinese input software on my PC. If it’s not acceptable, please delete my entry. I remember reading a few years ago that the Patriot Act became a free-for-all seized on by conglomerates as a vehicle to advance their own agenda, no matter how irrelevant to combating terrorism. As a result, for example you have articles in it severely limiting one’s ability to sue pharmaceutical companies, which had nothing to do with anti-terrorism. I am sure I am suffering from another feature of the Patriot Act that prohibited credit unions from handling overseas transactions, a consequence of the war not on terror, but between banks and credit unions. It used to be such a triviality to wire money into and out of US credit unions from overseas, at a negligible fee. Now one can only go through banks after getting ripped off in the process. I’m sure you know the inside scoop of this well. Thanks for the excellent article!
I lost out on my main business 12 years ago exactly because Goldman Sachs got SEC to ban its competitors, so I know very well what you mean.
US is not the country it was, and certainly not the country it advertises to be.
Another example in the U.S is the Medicare Part D, the so called Medicare prescription drug benefit. It costs the government over 70 billion dollars a year, and the government is prohibited from negotiating drug prices with the drug companies. The fact that it was enacted under a conservative Republican president is one more evidence of the power of the drug companies in the U.S.
It is nothing more or less than pumping tax-payers' money into the pockets of drug companies, pure and simple.
整个中华文化在基础上缺乏法治概念才是主因，而非所谓自由过度。华人的统治阶级刻意把西方法治概念的法(rule of law)曲解成法家的法(rule by law)，如此的法只是统治阶级的工具而非保障人民的利器。中国太自由的是统治阶级，广大的人民因此不自由。台湾在言论自由这一步走的比中国快，但法律依旧是统治阶级的玩物，香港则是在法治上走了回头路。