The will to survive driven by convention. The lack of intellect culled by fear. The rearing of nation states reached its nadir. Welcome to your Dollar Dictatorship.
Ok. I’ve been having some correspondence problems of late. A dear old friend of mine–who is an advocate of the lie that is capitalism–and I have a general disagreement on what this nonsense is all about. He seems to think that capitalism is about free markets and the exchange of goods and services. To a certain point I agree with him. But what happens when that point has long been circumvented or surpassed? According to some (intellectuals) capitalism has only one direction that it can go. If that’s true, ultimately that direction leads to where we are today. The only question remaining is: where can it go from here?
Below is my response to an email sent by my old friend who thinks, perhaps, he might have one-upped me regarding my dilettante and hap-hazard defeatism that has made me worst-writer about anything pseudo capitalist. My old friend’s original email follows toot-suite.
Dear Old Friend:
Thanks much for your correspondence. Looks like you’ve really hit a (my) button with this one. So let’s go there, shall we?
Dear Tommy aka worst-writer,
I was reading an article that had some valid points with respect to “capitalism” and the attitudes of those who trounce just about every aspect of it, finding nothing but fault without understanding the complexity of the system and how it works (which is nearly impossible for any individual by the way).
- “The peculiarity of successful free market capitalism is that it has generated enough prosperity that it enables to be sustained an entire segment of the population who are able to devote themselves simply to the pursuit and propagating of ideas. They include schoolteachers, college and university professors, authors of “serious” and “popular” journals, magazines and newspapers, books and Tommy’s.
- “When a writer of a newspaper or magazine article or editorial piece, says at some point that “critics” or “experts” say, invariably among them are “the Tommy’s” whose role in the division of labor is to interpret, analyze, and challenge the ways things are and how they might otherwise be for the better. Most such Tommy’s, if one is frank and direct, have lived in “ivory towers” of academia and the general informational media a good part or even all of their lives. They know little or nothing about the actual day-by-day working of a business, meeting a bottom line to meet an enterprise’s employee payroll, or the need to focus on the consumer satisfactions of others to avoid a loss and maybe earn a profit.
- “Their knowledge of “capitalism” is usually derived, and sometimes exclusively, from reading the earlier and other contemporary critics of the market economy. Businessmen are “exploiters” of workers, “plunderers” of the planet, the greedy “cutthroats” who would sell their own mother for an extra margin of profit, and who reduce all of human life to a financial bottom line. They care nothing for “society,” and make their employment decisions based on racist and misogynist prejudices and biases.
- “This cultivates an arrogance and hubris in many such Tommy’s, the “social critics” of the human condition, that if only they were in charge or if their advice was followed by those holding the reins of political power and decision-making, how much better could the world be made.
- And, third, de Jouvenel, said, there is the implicit resentment by many Tommy’s that the market economy places them at a disadvantage. What is that disadvantage? That the market rewards people for catering to the everyday, “lower” wants of the uninformed and manipulated consumers, rather than they, the Tommy’s, who devote their lives to the “big ideas” – the beautiful, the just, the good, the better – but who have little or none of the recognition or income of the billionaire businessmen who has made his fortune by persuading easily manipulated homeowners that they really needed his “designer” bathroom sink faucet. How morally depraved that the man who could have been the world’s next great music composer has to lower himself to earn a living in the market economy writing catchy television commercial jingle songs.
- “Do not want to own your fortune, they want you to lose it; they do not want to succeed, they want you to fail; they do not want to live, they want you to die; they desire nothing, they hate existence.”
-end-
worstwriter 