Editor, The News:
Re: Look at what you have (Letters, No. 16).
I’m not sure why Dan Banov feels it’s necessary to discuss the fairness or otherwise of doctors making more than clerks, and hockey players making more than a million a year, and owners of companies paying themselves more than their employees since nobody is complaining about these things, at least not in the Occupy camps.
What people in the Occupy camps are protesting, among other things, is the growing gap between rich and poor, about banks being bailed out with taxpayers’ money, about the environmental destruction that is condoned in the name of profit.
Our current devil-take-the-hindmost brand of capitalism only started to take on its shape in the Reagan/Thatcher years, but Mr. Banov seems to suggest that it’s somehow intrinsic to democracy and our only alternative to communism. To suggest that my pointing out that income distribution in the ’50s and ’60s was fairer indicates a desire for communism, come on. Surely, even you don’t believe that.
Stuart de Jong
Maple Ridge