Revisiting ‘Look Both Ways’ May Help Car-Pedestrian Issues

To The Reader’s Forum:

Recently there has been discussions regarding car/pedestrian accidents.

It has been suggested that a reduction in speed limits would solve the problem. However, I would like to know how many of these types of incidents were caused by vehicles traveling faster than 20 miles per hour. If more than zero, then reducing speed limits might help.

However, this does not really address the underlying issue. I believe the main problem is that parents don’t properly teach their children to look both ways before crossing a street. I don’t have enough fingers and toes to tally up the number of instances where people darted out in front of my car, obviously not looking both ways. The majority of these instances have been at or near the intersection of Crescent and Winsor. In none of these instances was I doing more than 20 MPH.

And, it is not just pedestrians. A couple days ago I was driving towards Falconer on Willard Street Extension and a lady with children in her car approached the intersection of Willard and Buffalo. She slowed for the stop sign, but never looked my way. She did a rolling stop and drove ahead right in front of me. There, I was doing 35 MPH and it was just my attention that avoided a collision.

Yes, I’ve had my own failures in not looking before proceeding. I had good training in my childhood, but it pays to rehearse the “Look Both Ways” warnings even if you are in your 80s.

Roger Galbraith

Jamestown

Is Our Economy Really Driven By Capitalism?

To The Reader’s Forum:

If Adam Smith, the “father” of capitalism, were alive today, he would agree that our economy should work for our mutual self-interest, not for some of us but for all of us.

There has been a growing trend in our politics, however, that replaces Smith’s philosophy of capitalism — self-interest guided by the “invisible hand” of “moral sentiments” — with exclusionary selfishness.

For decades, our politicians, especially so-called “conservative” politicians, have embraced socioeconomic policies based, in large part, on supply-side economic theory, which ultimately rewards the accumulation of wealth from wealth and not from labor. Since most Americans labor in some way for a living, the gap between rich and poor in America has grown exponentially over the years.

The upper 10% of our population own 68% percent of the wealth in the United States today. The remaining 32% of our country’s wealth has “trickled down” to the rest of us. The bottom 50% of our population own a mere 2.5% of the wealth in the United States.

Smith foresaw this kind of corrupt capitalism when he wrote, “The disposition to admire, and almost to Worship, the Rich and the Powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition … is … the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.”

What is promoted as ‘capitalism’ in America today fails Smith’s “moral sentiments” test [Period].

Maurice F. Baggiano, J.D.,

Jamestown

published legal author, member of the Bar of the U.S. Supreme Court